by Calculated Risk on 8/17/2015 09:42:00 AM

Note: CR is on vacation, and I will return on Sunday, August 23rd.

In December 2006, my friend Doris "Tanta" Dungey started writing for Calculated Risk.

From December 2006, until she passed away from ovarian cancer on Nov 30, 2008, Tanta was my co-blogger. Tanta worked as a mortgage banker for 20 years, and we started chatting in early 2005 about the housing bubble and the changes in lending practices. In 2006, Tanta was diagnosed with late stage cancer, and she took an extended medical leave while undergoing treatment. While on medical leave she wrote for this blog, and her writings received widespread attention and acclaim.

If you want to understand the mortgage industry, read Tanta's posts (here is The Compleat UberNerd and a Compendium of Tanta's Posts).

As an example, here is a brief excerpt from Foreclosure Sales and REO For UberNerds

The following is not an exhaustive discussion of all of the issues involved in foreclosures and REO. It’s a start at unpacking some of the concepts and definitions. We have been seeing, and are going to continue to see, a lot of information presented on foreclosure sales, REO sales, and their impacts on existing home transaction volumes and prices in various market areas. As always with “UberNerd” posts, this is long and excruciating. Proceed with typical motivation as you may consider your own best interest in an open market in blog postings.

And an excerpts from Mortgage Servicing for UberNerds

StillLearning asked in the comments about mortgage servicing, and since y’all are nerds, not dummies, here’s my highly-selective occasionally-oversimplified summary for you that skips the boring parts like how your check gets out of the “lockbox” and that stuff. We can discuss extra-credit issues like “excess servicing” and “subservicing” and “SFAS 144 meets MSR” and “negative convexity” and other kinds of inside baseball in the comments. There is a lot that can be said about loan servicing, but let’s start with the basics:

Servicers have two major types of servicing portfolio: loans they service for themselves and loans they service for other investors. In accounting terms, the “compensation” is the same, meaning that even if you are the noteholder, you pay yourself to service the loans in the same way that an outside investor would pay you, and it shows on the books that way. The differences in compensation stem from the basic fact that one is generally more motivated to do a good job servicing (particularly collecting and efficiently liquidating REO) for one’s own investment than for someone else’s.

Also see In Memoriam: Doris "Tanta" Dungey for photos, links to obituaries in the NY Times, Washington Post and much more.