by Tanta on 11/13/2007 08:43:00 AM

Countrywide's October operations numbers are out. You can see the score here.

The financial press will report on the headline numbers (loan production down year over year, no kidding!). I confess that this little thing down in "Loan Closing Services" caught my eye: AVM (automated valuation of a mortgaged property) services for October: 5,793,171 units. For context purposes, CFC's entire $1.4 trillion servicing portfolio is 8,999,292 units. AVM volume for October 2006 was 539,126 units, and was only 6,743,360 units for the first three quarters of 2006. This is reported under "loan closing services," but quite obviously not all these AVMs are being run for newly closed or closing loans.

So, is CFC running AVMs on everything it owns and showing those as "production" of its loan closing services division? Or, is CFC selling AVM services to some other big portfolio?

Why should anyone care? I don't know . . . there's been some stuff in the news lately about lawsuits and inflated appraisals . . . I'd sure love to know whether somebody is busy getting a AVM on every loan it's exposed to . . .