Tackled For A Loss
It’s been a tough year for Jeff Jagodzinski. After leading the Boston College Eagles football team to its second straight ACC Championship – and losing to Virginia Tech for the second straight year – Coach Jags found himself summarily dismissed from the city on Chestnut Hill in January for interviewing for a head coaching job with the NFL’s New York Jets.
BC was looking for a company man to build the program. Jagodzinski was looking to climb the coaching ladder. BC offered its best wishes, and a boot out the door.
Jagodzinski caught on with an NFL team eventually: he was hired as the offensive coordinator for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, to work with first time head coach Raheem Morris.
That gig didn’t last long. He was dismissed from his position Sept. 3 – just 10 days before the start of the regular season. (The Teller would say that this is an unusual move, but it happened on two other teams this season, so…)
That very same day, Jagodzinski sold his Natick home for $1,025,000, cutting his ties to New England. The sale of a house is usually a joyous occasion, but Jagodzinski bought the home in August 2007 – just two years ago – for $1,864,000. Coach Jags’ house at 3 Jenninson Circle lost 55 percent of its value in 25 months.
It seems to be a very nice house; it’s a five bedroom, 5,544 square-foot colonial built in 2005. (One interesting note; there are five bedrooms, and five full baths – does no one share anymore?) But with the exception of being able to coach NFL star quarterback Matt Ryan at Boston College, The Teller doubts Jagodzinski will look back on his foray into Massachusetts as a positive one. We don’t care who you are, losing more than $800,000 while unemployed has to hurt.
Lies, Damn Lies, and…
Contrary to popular belief, The Teller does like good news. We often congratulate our colleagues when they win in Keno (especially if they use money found in ski jacket pockets), or our editors forget to yell at them, or they catch the trains just right and get to work 10 minutes early.
But often times, we see a piece of "good" news disseminated across the usual channels, and our eyebrows start to creep skyward.
This week we learned from the Mortgage Bankers Association that the average mortgage banker’s profits "skyrocketed" 635 percent.
Our first thought: Whoa. Our second thought: Wait, really?
After a closer reading, that number was gleaned from the difference of profit per loan between the fourth quarter of 2008 and the first quarter of 2009.
Now that makes at least a little sense.
When the U.S. Federal Reserve cut rates to practically zero, mortgage rates found historic lows earlier this year. Many of you may remember this: the number of articles Banker & Tradesman wrote about the "refi boom" increased approximately 635 percent during the same period.
Profits went from $148 per loan to $1,088 per loan, Q4 to Q1; that must be… well almost 635 percent!
"It is clear the refinance boom in the first quarter of 2009 contributed greatly to an increase in overall production volumes, allowing production operating expenses per loan to finally drop," said Marina Walsh, MBA’s associate VP of industry analysis, in a news release.
Indeed. I’m sure costs per loan go down when you go from doing no business at all, with people just sitting around at their desks waiting for the phone to ring, to a deluge of refinance business that the industry could barely keep up with.
