explaining things in crayon. Retired Founder: Regent Street Cinema, Baker Street Bakery, Wigwam, GetAgent, Unmortgage.
Joined November 2017
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There is no growth without struggle
When Charlie Munger was in 30s
-his wife divorced him, took his house
-he went bankrupt
-his 9YO son died of lukemia in his arm
-he lost an eye, docs removed his eye w/o anesthesia
-he lived in a dingy apartment and drove a run down car.
Yet, he didn’t let hardship define his life and went to become one of the most successful investors ever.
No matter how deep we fall, we never fall far off from the hand of God. Never give up anon!
Hey @TripleH - would have loved to see Big @WWEJonathanfatu catch @DomMysterio35 so his feet didn’t touch the floor, allowing Dom to then eliminate @JoshFatu - rightly putting over Dirty Dom and setting up a banger storyline for the Uso twins
So the majority of a council’s spending is on social care?
Has anyone with a lean six sigma background looked at ‘how’ and ‘why’ this much money is spent on social care?
Is there the ability to have ‘AI Social Workers’ make light of the heavy lifting of social work admin @ZiaYusufUK?
Primed for a takeover.
For years L&G’s leadership has failed to capitalise on the multiple market opportunities: namely the growth in auto-enrolment pensions and private assets investing.
There’s a massive amount of bloat and quite the wonderful balance sheet that can be acquired on the cheap.
That 9% dividend yield should tell you everything about management’s inability to allocate capital effectively. Which by the way is their only job.
Energy security = national security.
The UK built the first nuclear power plant.
The UK government should buy a controlling stake in Rolls Royce and place an order for 100 small modular reactors at cost price.
If management can’t deliver quickly/cheaply enough, clear the decks of the board and execs and hire engineers who can get the job done.
Like our security depends on it.
Question: why does it still cost Better $6,000+ to originate a mortgage?
What’s still in there that’s fat/manual/yet-to-be-automated? And why?
In the UK the ‘old way’ costs c.£5,000 to originate, including acquisition costs.
What’s the blocker to get Better to move faster?
Hugely respect your perspective which is why I am tweeting back in response.
You are right @rabois . $BETR does have serious competitors - 90% of which use tech platforms (eg encompass) built in the 1990s which doesn’t allow more than one user at a time in the customer file (you have to literally check out the file like a library book). Which fundamentally limits the usage of AI agents. That is why it costs an average mortgage company over $12k to make a mortgage while better is able to do it for less than 50% of that leveraging its AI with those costs declining rapidly every quarter since we launched Betsy our AI loan officer. See page 18 of latest earnings deck here for our cost per loan.
This allows us to have the lowest rates, the fastest process, and the lowest error and delinquency rates in the entire industry. If the market and consumers were rational , price driven and efficient we would have 100% market share. But we know that is not true.
What better has traditionally lacked is distribution (because of my mistake to keep betting on DTC when it was working 2016-2021).
Now we are fixing that.
The second issue with Better was the reliance on refinance from 2016-2021 to grow 100x from $500 mm to $58 bln in originations. We didn’t realize the level to which our TAM could shrink if rates went up 450bps.
Now with the addition of one day purchase mortgage (commitment letters delivered within 8 hours of locking on average ) and instant home equity financing - we have the capacity to capture 100% of the TAM every year, significantly muting the reliance on low rates. Our fastest growing business segments (home equity and tinman platform) actually benefit from higher rate environments. So now our TAM is not restricted to $400bln per year of refis but captures full ~$2 trillion of originations currently and the $4 trillion that will come if and when rates normalize.
Here’s the deck I referenced earlier: page 18 is the one to use to compare against the MBA average cost to originate
investors.better.com/overvie…
mba.org/news-and-research/ne…
Thanks so much for the being a role model leader @CanadaKaz
And love that you’re looking at buyer products/magic. It’s definitely a big missing link in the mindshare of housing.
But worth mentioning when Zillow entered iBuying, there was an elegant kernel to their idea: seller intent.
Zillow is a lead generation business. Prior to Zillow (and Rightmove in the UK) real estate agents had to spend a lot on traditional media to generate buyer and seller leads. Today real estate agents just need Zillow/Rightmove to generate leads.
The holy grail is a seller with intent. That’s where the gold is.
Opendoor has - likely - earliest line of site of this intent.
I think it’s time to hand the reigns for booking everything WWE to @ShawnMichaels
@WWENXT is the best thing on Netflix (after K-pop Demon Hunters…)
#WWENXT was built on nights that leave a mark… and Halloween Havoc has become one of them.
October 25 we roll into Prescott Valley, AZ at the Findlay Toyota Center.
Tickets on sale Wednesday at 10am local. Presale begins Tuesday with code WWETIX.
ticketmaster.com/wwe-present…
This happened in 2018! Between now and then there’s a whole story on how the system is broken beyond repair. Surely?
Just thinking about corporate governance.
Obviously passive investing in index funds is the best choice for most:
- you generally can’t beat the market
- long term investing should attract the cheapest fees for investing
But the likes of blackrock ‘disempower’ people from taking interest in their holdings.
If they are truly passive, two things need to exist:
- the aggregator, like Blackrock, cannot act on behalf of investors. Can’t meet the company. Cannot vote or exert influence.
- every ultimate beneficiary shareholder needs to be presented with the option to vote on all the company matters, including an easy way to ask questions from *their* board and the board to respond within a set time limit (24-48 hours tops)
Obviously this would require legislative action. Might I recommend one additional item in the legislation:
- if the fees of a pension administrator are to change, they need to off-board the customer and the customer can then shop around rather than feeling ‘captured’ by the party attempting to extort higher fees.
