Searchlight Crusade – What you need to know about mortages and real estate. Plus more

Mortgage Loan Rate Locks

One of the most true sayings in the mortgage business is, “If you can’t lock it right now, it’s not real.”

But many mortgage providers will play a game of wait and hope. They tell you they have a certain loan when they in fact do not, hoping the rates go down to where they do. Or they’ll tell you about a rate they actually have, but wait to lock it hoping the rates will go down so they can make more money because when the rates go down, the rebate for a given rate goes up or the cost goes down, and they can make more money.

Sometimes the rate/cost trade-off does go down, and they can deliver. But sometimes the rates go up, too. When this happens, the mortgage provider playing the “wait and hope” game has three choices. They can make less money, charge more for the loan, or punt by playing for time. I shouldn’t have to draw adults a picture as their relative likelihoods.

Many times one side effect is a delayed loan. This is probably the number one reason for delayed loans, and one of the strongest reasons I keep telling you that if a provider can’t do it in thirty days, they probably can’t do it on the terms indicated. Many times they bet on rates going down, when rates actually go up, so they end up with a loan that they can’t make any money by doing, so they delay it day by day, week by week hoping the market will move. Note, please, that they usually have zero intention of finishing your loan if the market doesn’t move downwards enough. Whether it’s National Megabank with a million offices, or Joe Anonymous working out of their home, their motivation is to do what it takes so they make money, and they will keep sweet talking you as long as they possibly can. They’re certainly not going to work for free, and many of them will not do it at all rather than compromise their usual loan margin. If you allow them to play this game, when you finally give up in disgust, they still have several weeks after you apply with someone else where they’re the only ones that can possibly have the loan done, and if the market moves down during those weeks, they’re covered. If you could have gotten a better loan during that period, you likely would. But because you were quoted a price that didn’t exist and believed it, they’ve got what looks to a consumer to be a competitive advantage. And if they call after you’ve “canceled” their loan and say that they can close the loan now when the new provider you just contracted with isn’t ready yet, most people will go ahead and sign the papers because This Loan Is Ready Now.

There are honest mortgage providers who lock every loan at the time you tell them you want it. But there is no way for a consumer to verify that any given loan provider is among them. All of the paper I can put in front of you as regards a loan rate lock can be easily faked. Which brings us back to one of the standard refrains of the site: Apply for a back up loan.

At this update, there have been changes to the loan market. No loan officer can lock a loan quite so nonchalantly any longer. The penalties to the loan officer and all of their future clients for failing to deliver a locked loan to the lender have become too severe. As I said in Shopping For The Best Loan In The Changed Lending Environment, this is bad for consumers but it is a fact of life we have to deal with. If I lock a loan that doesn’t close, all of my future loans get hit with additional charges, making my loans less competitive and hurting those clients who want me to do their loans in the future. I would very much like to go back to the other way, but it’s not under my control.

Another change is that loans take longer now. This is due to regulatory changes and the need for CYA on the part of the lenders. Before the rules got changed in 2008, my average time between application and being ready to fund a loan was about 16 calendar days. Since then, that average has gone up to the low forties. Just a fact of life. There are a minimum of 3 weeks in new regulatory delays built into the new procedure. Oh, the government doesn’t call them regulatory delays but they penalize the hell out of anyone who doesn’t meet them and saddle that lender with large potential fines and unlimited liability for “misleading consumers”. Net result: 3 weeks in new regulatory delays.

There is another issue with regard to rate locks. They are all for a certain set period in calendar (not working!) days, usually measured from the time you say you want it to the time the loan actually funds (not until you sign documents). Assuming your loan is actually locked when you say you want it, this means that there is a DEADLINE. Due to regulatory changes, loans are taking about 30 days longer than they used to. Also a fact.

This means that once you tell someone you want the loan, give the loan provider every scrap of documentation they ask for right away, not a week later. The loan provider is not going to pay for the delay, you are. Many banks will not even look at an incomplete loan package, so it is crucial to have the paperwork organized quickly. If that loan goes beyond the initial lock period, you can pretty much count on paying an extension. Some banks charge one tenth of a point for up to five days, some a quarter of a point for up to fifteen days of extension, some even more, but it’s always charged in full from the first day of an extension. Occasionally the lender will give an extension for free if it was obviously their fault, but not very often. More likely, whether it was your fault, their fault or nobody’s fault, the extension will be charged. Lenders have no sympathy for going over the lock period, and neither do most brokers. The lenders have set a large sum of money aside for your use, and they aren’t earning interest on it. They want some kind of compensation, and when you think about it, this is not unreasonable.

Common rate locks are done for 15, 30, 45 and now 60 days, but they are available in 15 day increments for almost any length of time out to about nine months. However, there is a cost. The longer the lock period, the costlier the loan – as in the tradeoff between rate and cost gets shifted upwards. “Par rate” becomes higher with a longer lock period. You pay more in points, or get less in rebate for the same type of loan at the same rate. The reason for this is simple. The bank is setting all of this money aside for your use, and not getting any interest in compensation. They are doing you the favor, and they will charge you extension fees if you go past the lock period. I’m looking at a rate sheet right now that was valid a couple of days ago from a medium size lender. For a thirty year fixed rate loan, the discount points go up one eighth of a point between the fifteen and the thirty day lock, and another quarter of a point for a forty-five day lock.

The problem with 15 and (now) 30-day locks is that they are useless as an “upfront” lock, when the application is initially made. Especially with refinancing, where you lose a week by law between signing documents and funding the loan, there just is no way to reliably get it done within this time frame. Even purchases are chancy with the best of cooperation from everybody involved. 15-day locks are primarily a tool of those providers who play the “wait and hope” game mentioned above, and they lock just before printing final loan documents. The fact that they are planning a shorter lock period allows them the illusion of quoting something lower, but even if they tell you what the rates are today, they are quoting you a rate that may or may not exist when the loan is actually ready. On the other hand with regulatory changes that “helped” consumers changing things, I’ve become a lot more willing to wait to lock until just before I order final loan documents – provided the client agrees with my reasoning. I never did these while I had a realistic upfront lock option, but now that things have changed, they’ve become a lot more common for me. Unless there’s a preponderance of evidence that rates are likely to go up, there’s a lot less reason to pay for a longer lock. But since at least a week of the new regulatory delays happen after the loan is locked, everything has to be perfect for a 15 day lock to work without extensions.

A 30-day lock was most common lock period for those loan originators who lock the loan immediately. Until the regulatory changes “helping” consumers, if both you and the provider are organized, it was enough to reliably do all the paperwork and miscellaneous other projects, get final approval, and get the loan funded. It sounds like a lot of time, but it wasn’t. On refinances, you lose a week due to legal and system requirements. Let’s say you sign the final paperwork on a Monday. By federal law, you have three days to change your mind, and they’re not going to fund the loan before that period expires. Monday doesn’t count, so Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday go by before anything can be done. Good escrow officers don’t usually request funds on Friday, because when they request funding is when the new loan starts accruing interest. Monday they fund the loan, and the bank has up to two days to provide the funds, then the escrow officer has up to two days to pay off the old loan before the documents record and the transaction is essentially complete. This takes us to potentially to Thursday or Friday of the following week, and that’s just the time between you signing the actual Note and Trust Deed and actual consummation of the loan, when the Trust Deed is recorded. Now, with “helpful” regulations delaying loans, 30 days has become the standard “lock when you’re ready to draw final documents” period.

If you want an upfront lock now (assuming you can even get one, which has become increasingly unlikely) you need a minimum of 60 days thanks to a clueless Congress in 2008. The 30 day purchase escrow is not reliably doable if there’s a loan involved. A buyer’s agent should not allow less than a 45 day purchase escrow at an absolute minimum if there’s a loan involved, and 60 is much better.

On purchases, there is no three day Right of Rescission, but if the escrow officer begins funding a loan on Tuesday you are still talking about potentially hanging over until Monday of the next week. Funding doesn’t usually take this long, but it does happen.

75, 90 day and longer locks are primarily useful for purchases where there is something external holding the loan back. Only rarely do the market conditions become such that longer locks than 60 days become necessary on refinances. Otherwise, they are most often used only when the actual purchase contract says that the purchase can’t close until further out. There is a tradeoff here, and I may occasionally counsel people to wait if the construction on the house isn’t scheduled to be complete for ninety days or longer. This makes for a risk that rates may move in the meantime, but rates generally don’t go up in huge jumps, but rather incrementally higher from day to day, and past ninety days you may be risking less by waiting than by locking. There’s no reason to pay more for a lock than you have to.

Many things have changed in the mortgage business in the last few years, but this hasn’t: Even a legitimate and complete quote is fairy gold until it is actually locked. A bank can withdraw its loan pricing at any time. Sometimes this happens right when I’m in the middle of the locking process, and when this happens, the client gets the new pricing. Period. End of story (some banks will give you 30 minutes to complete locks already in process, but this is subject to limitations). Some lenders and loan providers attempt to hide this – and they call it “Consumer transparency.” You may hoot in derision if you so desire. A better name would be something like their “Consumer Ignorance is Bliss” policy. “Don’t you go worrying your poor little head about that, ma’am!”. Until the lock process is complete, you don’t have a right to those rates, and you won’t get them if the lender changes the rates first.

Caveat Emptor

Looking For Loans In All The Wrong Places

No, I’m not turning into a country western singer (nor is this a joke despite the publication date). Just got a search for “no closing costs no points loan cheapest rates loan”. The visit (to this article) lasted less than a full second. The obvious implication was that it wasn’t what that person was looking for.

One of the reasons consumers get mercilessly taken advantage of in mortgage and real estate is because they assume they know everything they need to. Unfortunately, the vast majority don’t know everything they need to. Most of the time there are gaps in their knowledge that the unscrupulous can sail the Queen Mary through – sideways. Hence the fundamental dishonesty of almost all mortgage advertising.

As I have said before on many occasions, lowest rates do not go with no points or no closing costs loans. Period. One of these things does not go with the others. Rate and total cost of the loan are always a tradeoff. Nobody is going to give you money, of all things, for less than the cost of money.

This is not to say that one loan with no closing costs may not be cheaper than another loan with no closing costs. The point is that there will be lower rates available with some closing costs, progressively more so as you get higher closing costs. Then if you start paying points, there will be still lower rates available. There is a reason why they are paying all of your closing costs – you’re choosing a loan with a higher rate than you otherwise could have gotten.

No cost loans can be and often are the smart thing to do (Unfortunately, the Congress of 2009-10 effectively outlawed the loans by requiring yield spread to be treated as a cost, which it isn’t (not to consumers), and said yield spread was the only funding mechanism for it) . Because they are the only loans where there are no costs to to be recovered, they are the only loan that can possibly put you ahead from day one. Consider the zero cost loan as a baseline, and compute what lower rates will cost you in closing costs. Consider: If the zero cost loan is 6.75 percent and you currently owe $270,000, your new balance should be $270,000. If you can get 6.5 at par with closing costs of $3500, your new balance is $273,500. Your monthly interest in the first instance is $1518.75 to start. Your interest charges in the second case are 1481.46. The lower rate cost you $3500, but saves you 37.29 per month. Divide the cost by the savings, and you break even in the ninety-fourth month – not quite eight years. So in this example, if you think you’re likely to refinance or sell within eight years (in other words, practically everyone), you’ll be ahead with the zero cost loan.

If the loan has a fixed period of less than the break even time (any loan that goes adjustable in less than 94 months in this example), you also know that the costs are not a good investment. If this loan were only fixed for five or seven years the rates go to precisely the same rate after adjustment, underlying index plus the same margin. If you haven’t broken even by then, you never will, even if you decide you want to keep the loan.

So whereas a true zero cost loan is often the best and smartest way to go, it will never be the lowest rate available. You need to choose carefully where on the spectrum you choose, because there’s no going back once the loan has funded. All of the up-front costs are sunk, and you don’t get your money back just because you don’t keep the loan long enough to break even.

Caveat Emptor

Should Negative Amortization Loans Be Banned?

Having written several articles on Negative Amortization Loans, telling of the details of what is wrong with them, and even destroying the myth of Option ARM cash flow, I sometimes get asked if I would like to see them banned completely.

Well, given the pandemically misleading marketing that surrounds these loans, and pandemically poor disclosure requirements, I am tempted. It only takes one person losing their life savings and having their financial future ruined to make a very compelling story, and I’ve seen more than one and read about many more.

However, when you ask if they should be banned outright, I have to answer no.

Part of this is my libertarian sympathies. Adults should be allowed to make their own mistakes. But there are economic and a realpolitik reasons as well.

The fact of the matter that just because Negative Amortization loans are oversold under all of the friendly-sounding marketing names such as Option ARM, Pick a Pay, and even 1 Percent Loan (which they are not), does not mean that there is no one for whom they are appropriate or beneficial. People for whom these are appropriate do exist. Consider someone with crushing consumer debt, and no significant usable equity on a home they’ve owned for a while. They sell the home, they end up with nothing and still have the consumer debt. They can’t refinance cash out. But if you put them into an Option ARM for a while, you remove from several hundred to over a thousand dollars per month from their cash flow requirements. In three years, they will pay off or pay down those consumer debts, and then you refinance to put them back on track, and the money that has accumulated means nothing compared to what they’ve paid off. It’s a very narrow niche, but it does exist.

Consider also someone starting a business. Cash flow insolvency is what kills most start-up businesses. Until the customer base builds, they don’t have enough money to pay the bills. Lower monthly cash flow requirements on their house can mean the difference between success and failure of their business, far outweighing the cost of the extra money in their balance that they accumulated. Furthermore, the fact is that when their cash flow gets tight, they’re not making the mortgage payment anyway. They are likely to lose both business (through insolvency) and property (through foreclosure) if the business fails anyway, and the lowered cash flow requirements of the Negative Amortization loan may give the business more of a chance to succeed, and once it is profitable it will pay back the investment many times over.

There’s still a need to really explain what’s going on, and all of the drawbacks of the loan, but people in these two circumstances really do have a valid possibility of it being in their best interest. Banning negative amortization loans completely takes away that option, thereby hurting those people.

Furthermore, in realpolitik, it is unlikely that any attempt to ban them will be successful, or permanent if it is successful. Let us presume some public spirited official in Congress or at the Fed decides to make the attempt. What do the scumbags who make their living selling these loans do? They won’t go back to selling real loans with real payments – if they could do that, they wouldn’t be selling negative amortization loans. Negative amortization loans are a way to sell property without the apparent up front costs of a higher payment that always will be indicative of the housing market. Given a choice between giving up screwing people and fighting back, they are going to fight back. Lobbyists, PAC, and grassroots deception en masse, and probably astroturfing as well. If the average voter gets a pamphlet saying Congress or the Fed is trying to ban these loans that “are the only way middle class people can afford a home!”, they are not going to do research in order to educate themselves about what is really going on. They are going to call their congress critter and voice the opinion the negative amortization industry gave them – and they’re likely to go so far as to go apply for one themselves, unless they already know what a bad deal that loan is. Chances of congress resisting: Basically nil. There is no organized group in opposition, no budget for groups that want to push a ban. Any ban would be politically dead on arrival.

There is an approach that will work, however: Disclosure requirements. If these people have to tell the prospective victims in easy to understand language and easy to read print about all of the problems they are letting themselves in for with these loans, very few people are going to sign on the dotted line. “Caution: If you accept this loan, the 1% is a nominal, or in name only, rate. You are really being charged a rate of X%, and this rate will vary every single month. If you make the minimum payment, your loan balance will increase by approximately $Y per month at current rates, or Z percent within five years. You will have to pay this money back in lump sum if you sell, or with higher payments at a later date. If you cannot afford full payments now, you will unlikely be able to afford them in the future after your balance has increased. There is a three year prepayment penalty on this loan, and if you sell the property or refinance within that time, you will pay a penalty of approximately $A in addition to whatever additional balance has accrued. It is currently under consideration that the mere fact that you have one of these loans will have significant derogatory effect upon your credit rating, even if you never make a late payment, due to financial difficulties encountered by borrowers with this kind of loans in the past.” I could go on in bullet points for a couple of pages, but I trust you get my point. You have all of this in writing from the federal government, the least an intelligent adult is going to do is find out what’s really going on here.

Furthermore, the only way disclosure requirements could be fought by the industry is behind closed doors. The only way it stays behind closed doors is if nobody raises a political stink, and it’s easy to raise a political stink about stuff like this. Newspapers and television reporters and bloggers all converge on the issue, and the industry is left in the awkward position of crying because they have to tell the truth. That doesn’t play well with the American public. The way this plays with the American public is the major reason for the successes of Porkbusters. Despite some very entrenched and very powerful enemies lining up against them, they’ve won on a couple of big issues because of the power of the idea that the American people have that the truth should be told. Take the tack that all you want is for the industry to tell the truth, and watch the political wind die out of their sails. David beats Goliath reliably in American politics when the issue is “Do I have to tell the truth?”

To summarize, it is tempting to try to ban negative amortization loans. But it is far better social and economic policy to go the disclosure route instead, and far more likely to be politically successful.

Caveat Emptor

Should I Buy A Home? Part 3: Consequences

Continued from Part 1: Preparation and Part 2: Process

This is about the long term consequences of the decision to buy or not to buy a home, and economic benefits analysis into whether you should want to buy. In order to answer the question of whether it’s better to buy or rent and invest the difference, you need to compare the costs and benefits of owning to the costs and benefits of renting over a comparable time frame. If you know you’re moving in three years or less, it can be hard to come out ahead, just due to transaction costs. On the other hand, if you’ve got the wherewithal to turn it into a rental property after any future move you already know you’re going to make, that can make the owning calculation move decisively in favor of owning. Be advised, all the headaches of being a landlord are greatly magnified if you’re not within easy commuting distance to keep an eye on the property yourself. Also, if you cannot achieve positive cash flow on a rental property, odds are good that you should sell it. This isn’t a blanket recommendation, just a rule of thumb.

Now it happens that I’ve programmed a spreadsheet to answer the “buy or rent” question in a time dependent manner, which is the only way it really can be answered. I keep using a $300,000 home and $270,000 loan as my default assumptions here. I’m going to pull a few more assumptions out of my hat, but I’m going to do my best to make them reasonable assumptions. 6.25 first trust deed, 10% second for any loan amount over 80 percent of value. Five percent annual property appreciation (perhaps a tad low in the long term), 1.2% yearly property tax (marginally above the basic assessment for most California properties), yearly tax increases of two percent (Prop 13’s legal maximum in California), non-deductible homeowner’s expenses of $200 per month, 4 percent inflation, $1500 in non-housing deductions on Schedule A of your federal taxes, marginal tax rate of twenty-eight percent, and a return net of taxes on any alternative investment with the same money of ten percent. I also assume you’re married (That makes a difference on how much your default deduction is).

Since state and local income taxes are different everywhere, I’m going to neglect those. They would functionally move the equation in favor of home ownership, but the effects are relatively minor in most cases. Furthermore, because investments are only worth your net proceeds after you actually sell them, I’m going to deduct seven percent of the theoretical market price of your home investment in any given year before I compare the net benefit of buying a home to renting and investing any money you didn’t spend on buying. This is questionable to be sure, as most people will just spend at least a certain percentage, but I’m in the mood to be generous. You’ll see why in a moment.

I’m also going to assume here, very unrealistically, that you never refinance, but that’s actually a middle of the road assumption, as far as net benefit goes. The actual spreadsheet works a couple of other assumptions, and refinancing every five years and making a minimum payment usually comes out better, while refinancing every five years and keeping a thirty year payoff goal usually comes out worse.

Here are the net results:

Year
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30

Value
$300,000.00
$315,000.00
$330,750.00
$347,287.50
$364,651.88
$382,884.47
$402,028.69
$422,130.13
$443,236.63
$465,398.46
$488,668.39
$513,101.81
$538,756.90
$565,694.74
$593,979.48
$623,678.45
$654,862.38
$687,605.50
$721,985.77
$758,085.06
$795,989.31
$835,788.78
$877,578.22
$921,457.13
$967,529.98
$1,015,906.48
$1,066,701.81
$1,120,036.90
$1,176,038.74
$1,234,840.68

Monthly Rent
$1,900.00
$1,976.00
$2,055.04
$2,137.24
$2,222.73
$2,311.64
$2,404.11
$2,500.27
$2,600.28
$2,704.29
$2,812.46
$2,924.96
$3,041.96
$3,163.64
$3,290.19
$3,421.79
$3,558.66
$3,701.01
$3,849.05
$4,003.01
$4,163.13
$4,329.66
$4,502.85
$4,682.96
$4,870.28
$5,065.09
$5,267.69
$5,478.40
$5,697.54
$5,925.44

Equity
30,000.00
47,979.07
66,906.50
86,833.25
107,813.09
129,902.79
153,162.25
177,654.70
203,446.90
230,609.35
259,216.47
289,346.90
321,083.67
354,514.53
389,732.17
426,834.57
465,925.28
507,113.76
550,515.76
596,253.68
644,456.99
695,262.65
748,815.58
805,269.15
864,785.74
927,537.24
993,705.71
1,063,483.99
1,137,076.39
1,214,699.45

Net Benefit
-21,000.00
-7,516.04
7,147.46
23,091.84
40,427.33
59,273.84
79,761.82
102,033.27
126,242.72
152,558.43
181,163.62
212,257.85
246,058.50
282,802.46
322,747.86
366,176.10
413,393.96
464,735.97
520,801.42
582,152.57
649,284.52
722,739.36
803,110.70
891,048.67
987,265.32
1,092,540.71
1,207,729.42
1,333,767.79
1,471,681.92
1,622,596.32

Yes, after 30 years you are $552,000 better off from having bought a $300,000 home, as opposed to continuing to rent for that whole period. Not to mention that you own it free and clear for the cost of maintenance plus property taxes, as opposed to paying over $4600 per month rent.

This is a fascinating study in leverage. If, on the other hand, taxes start out at 2 percent and rise by 4 percent per year, the peak year in absolute terms is year 22, at $101,964 net benefit. On the other hand, I’m running rent increases at exactly the general rate of inflation and they almost always go up faster. Back to the first hand, resetting variables in the last set of suppositions to default and changing the appreciation rate to approximately like the long term average – 7 percent – while making a net return of 8.5 percent on investments bumps the net benefits of buying that home to $1,630,195.38. Five and a half times the original purchase price!

One more scenario: Restore to default values. Say you lose $30,000 of value, or ten percent of purchase price, in the first year. It does take longer to be ahead of the game – more than 6 years – and the net benefit after 30 years (as opposed to investing the money at an assumed return of 10%) is “only” $437,223.05. For the mathematically challenged, this is still nearly one and a half times the original value of the property! Yes, the money will be worth less in thirty years. We all know about inflation. Would you turn me down if I offered to give you $437,000 in thirty years time?

I’ve been playing with this spreadsheet for quite a while now. Under the basic assumptions I’ve listed above, it’s kind of hard to be ahead of the game by buying a house instead of investing in the stock market after less than two years under any kind of reasonably average assumptions. On the other hand, it’s very difficult not to be ahead after five to seven, and way ahead after ten.

After thirty years, most sets of even vaguely reasonable assumptions have you so far ahead by buying the home that if you didn’t watch over my shoulder as I built the spreadsheet, a reasonable person would be skeptical. Heck, I knew which calculation the numbers favored, but I really never stopped to think how strongly they worked in favor of home ownership. It is difficult to come up with a reasonable set of assumptions and starting numbers where you aren’t ahead by significantly more than the original purchase price of the home. Yes, we’re all aware of the issues with inflation, and the ratio illustrated here, with a 4 percent rate of inflation, is a little more than three to one (which remembering the rule of 115, seems reasonable, so the first approximation check validates this). So what this means is that by purchasing a $300,000 house that you’re going to live in for the rest of your life now, you’re adding more than $100,000 in today’s dollars to your net worth in thirty years if you just invested the difference between rent and the costs of owning. Actually, it’s usually more. That safe, conservative, middle of the road $552,000 net result after thirty years from the first example converts to more than $177,000 in today’s money! No flipping, no games, no wild schemes, no re-zoning jackpots and no wealthy benefactors to come along and pay you twice what it’s worth. In fact, in this scenario you never talk to another real estate or loan person as long as you live, and you’ve still effectively “gifted” yourself with almost sixty percent of the property’s purchase price immediately upon taking possession.

This should persuade most folks that they should want to buy a home, and that you don’t want anyone else to. After all, the more poor schmoes there are, the better this will work for the rest of us. Actually, that last crack about poor schmoes isn’t true, because the law of supply and demand is always in effect. But is shows how good for the overall economic health of the nation encouraging home ownership is.

Caveat Emptor

Should I Buy A Home? Part 2: Process

Continued from Part 1: Preparation

I am considering buying a home, although I have not made up my mind on the subject. This is not due to indecision, but rather due to a lack of necessary information. There are many factors to be considered in my case, and in order for me to make an informed decision about buying, I need to solve for several variables involving cost. My questions to you involve what steps I can take to solve those variables. Should I begin with a pre-qualification or loan approval? Will a lender invest time and resources in me when I have no specific property in mind, and I may ultimately decide to continue renting? Should I start by speaking with realtors in order to guage what is available in my price range? Will realtors invest time and resources in me when I have no loan arranged and I may ultimately decide to continue renting? Also, what is the proper sequence of action for someone who is seeking to collect all the relevant information in order to make reasoned decisions about buying a home?

Well, as I said in Part I, a major question is whether you can trust real estate agents to answer the question honestly. Some will, most won’t. If they tell you to buy, they make money. If they tell you to keep renting, they don’t. Mind you, if you can afford to buy, the numbers are overwhelmingly in favor of that, as we’ll see in Part 3. Nonetheless, one trusts that you see the potential for abuse.

Nobody should have a specific property in mind when they first approach an agent. Smart buyers won’t make an offer without looking at a certain number of properties first. The only exception is if you’re buying the old family home from your parents or something. You’ve agreed on the price, and the terms, and now you’re going to pay an agent to make sure all the paperwork is done and filed correctly and the inspections are done and all of that sort of stuff. This is a smart thing to do, by the way, but most people in this kind of transaction seem determined to “save money” when a low percentage agent’s fee or some flat fee would be an astoundingly good investment.

You needn’t worry about whether lenders and agents will “invest time in you.” Those who are unwilling to spend time on you in such circumstances should be avoided. Yes, I want my time to be spent on people who really want to buy and are capable of buying, which is why a basic prequalification is among the first things I usually do. I don’t want to waste your time showing you stuff you can’t, or shouldn’t, afford any more than I want to waste my own. But there’s a lot you can do to qualify yourself, so that you know how strongly you’re inclined to buy, and approximately how expensive a property. This way, you know that the agent or lender isn’t leading you down the primrose path with properties you cannot really afford. This is a severe problem, especially in expensive areas. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. You need to know how much house you can really afford in a sustainable situation, and you have to make certain your agent knows and sticks within your budget. The one who shows you the five bedroom house when you can really only afford the three bedroom condo is not your friend. I’d fire such an agent the first time they showed you something you could not reasonably get for your known housing budget (which is one reason of many I recommend against Exclusive Buyer’s Agent Agreements, and don’t ask for them unless I’m giving them something beyond MLS listings for their exclusive commitment). The agent who shows you the three bedroom condo you really can afford when everybody else is showing you the five bedroom house you can’t, is your friend, whether the “Oooohhh” factor is there or not, and even if the “Eeewww!” factor is there. Curb appeal is how sellers sucker buyers (and yes, when I’m a listing agent I’ll help you with that in every way I can. It’s the most important part of my job to help my client get the best deal they can. But right now I’ve got my buyer’s agent hat on, and my job is to help buyers see the diamonds in the rough and not pay more than they’re worth).

Once you’ve done your self-qualification, that’s when I’d go find a real estate agent. I wouldn’t worry about an actual lender’s prequalification as long as you know what your credit score is. A good agent is going to do a prequalification anyway, and if they’re a loan officer as well, they’ll set you up there. An agent who doesn’t do loans should be able to provide recommendations for someone to do the prequalification, and if they don’t recommend the same loan provider for the loan as did the prequalification, I’d go back and check with the provider who did the prequalification anyway, as well as finding other prospective loan providers, not to mention pointedly not accepting the new recommendation for a loan provider. Despite the fact that I’m a loan officer who also does real estate, I’m not sure I’d trust a real estate agent with my only loan application. I came to being an actual real estate agent from being a loan officer for several years first – and then I went and learned how to do real estate. The average real estate agent who does loans never spent an apprenticeship doing loans, never learned the ins and outs, and has no clue whether they can deliver what they put on the Good Faith Estimate (Mortgage Loan Disclosure Statement in California). They just figure “It’s the same license, so I can, and it’s an easy way to earn a lot more money from the same clients!” They don’t really know loans, they’ve just figured out that it’s a way to make more money. Furthermore, there are too many shady personalities out there, and way too many real estate agents think they know how to do loans but don’t. There are a fair number of crooks and incompetents and just plain gladhanders, who only care about whether they’re getting a commission on this particular offer, out there, but most of what I do as a real estate agent can be plainly seen and understood by my clients. What a loan officer does is much less transparent to even the most sophisticated borrowers until it is too late to change to another provider. I’ve seen way too many people burned by only applying for a loan with one provider, and am very upset that lenders and the government are making it more difficult for consumers to obtain a good loan. I’ve only ever not been able to do one loan on the terms quoted and locked (and I did my darnedest to help the provider who could, where most loan providers in my shoes would have obstructed to the best of their ability, as I’ve also learned by bitter experience), but I’ve seen a lot of people who applied with the loan provider who talked a better deal but who couldn’t deliver any loan at all, much less the one they talked about. Many times they have come back to me in desperation two days before escrow expires, or seven days after it was supposed to expire, and I can’t always help them in time then. Be very careful in choosing your loan provider, especially if it’s a purchase.

Take any newspaper advertisements you see about rate, however, with great heaping cargo ships full of salt. I’ll cover what’s really available later on, but for now what you need to know is that loan companies advertise with teasers like negative Amortization Loans and short term ARMs and hybrid ARMs that takes five points to buy the rate and you still won’t get it when it comes time to sign the final papers. The whole idea is to get you to call, so that they can sell you what they really do have. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a real rate on a real loan that I would be willing to get for myself advertised anywhere, in any medium. Even the so-called “best rate” websites and newsletters are notorious for cheating. I’ve gone right down the line calling them and asking about loans that were supposedly the standards they were quoting to, and gotten not one answer that was within half a percent of the rate quoted on the website or in the newsletter. Nor were any of the websites or newsletters I’ve complained to (or my company complained to, when I worked for an internet lender that was signed up with them) interested in enforcing the alleged rules. I don’t know one single loan provider who advertises actual rates that they can actually deliver anywhere. Those few companies who are actually willing to do it have all quit advertising in disgust and gone to finding clients in other ways.

Concluded in Part 3: Consequences

Caveat Emptor

Should I Buy A Home? Part 1: Preparation

I am considering buying a home, although I have not made up my mind on the subject. This is not due to indecision, but rather due to a lack of necessary information. There are many factors to be considered in my case, and in order for me to make an informed decision about buying, I need to solve for several variables involving cost. My questions to you involve what steps I can take to solve those variables. Should I begin with a pre-qualification or loan approval? Will a lender invest time and resources in me when I have no specific property in mind, and I may ultimately decide to continue renting? Should I start by speaking with realtors in order to guage what is available in my price range? Will realtors invest time and resources in me when I have no loan arranged and I may ultimately decide to continue renting? Also, what is the proper sequence of action for someone who is seeking to collect all the relevant information in order to make reasoned decisions about buying a home?

Well, a major question is whether you can trust real estate agents to answer the question honestly. Some will, most won’t. If they tell you to buy, they make money. If they tell you to keep renting, they don’t. One trusts that you see the potential for abuse.

The question here of “Should I Buy A Home” really separates into two basic questions: “How much home do I qualify for?” and “Is there a better alternative, financially?” You can then decide if buying or renting is the better alternative for you.

Qualifying yourself to buy a home, or to use better phrasing, figuring out how much home you should buy, is easier than most folks think. You can look in the classifieds section or on any number of internet sites to find out what the asking prices for properties like ones you might want to buy are in that neighborhood.

The personal information needed is easily available. First, you need to know how much you make per month, as you make mortgage payments monthly. Next, how much your mandatory payments are. Third, about what your credit score is.

Most people know how much they make per month. “A paper” guidelines go between thirty-eight and forty-five percent of gross income for your total of all required monthly debt and housing payments. Subprime lenders will go up to anywhere between fifty and sixty, with most limiting your debt to income ratio to fifty or fifty-five percent. I’d recommend staying within A paper guideline, but calculators are easy to use. So multiply your monthly income by thirty-eight percent, forty-five percent, fifty percent, and fifty five percent. This gives you a set of four numbers, which you may call anything, but I’m going to call A0, B0, C0, and D0. They correspond to what should by standard current loan guidlines be easy total debt service payments for most folks, moderate payments, difficult payments, and extreme payments.

Most people have recurring debt of some sort. Credit card payments, car payments, furniture payments, student loans, etcetera. This does not include monthly bills that you are paying as you go. You know what your monthly obligations are. Whatever this number is, call it $X. Subtract $X from each of those four numbers above, so that you have the numbers that you really have available to spend on housing in each of these four scenarios. Obviously, the smaller $X, the more house you will be able to afford on the same income. I’m going to call these numbers created by subtraction A1, B1, C1, and D1.

These numbers you have must cover all the recurring costs of owning a home. These include not only the principal and interest payments on the loan, but property taxes, homeowner’s insurance, homeowner’s association dues if applicable, Mello-Roos districts here in California, and anything else that may be applicable where you want to buy. Within the industry, the acronym most often used for this is the PITI payment, for Principal Interest Taxes Insurance, with the understanding that it includes anything else necessary as well. Association dues and Mello-Roos districts are a function of where you buy. Every condominium or coop is going to have Association dues or some equivalent. Mello-Roos districts are limited time property tax districts assessed to pay for things like municipal water and sewer service for new developments. Most newer developments here in California have them, and the equivalent districts are becoming more and more prevalent in newer developments elsewhere. Homeowner’s Insurance is mandatory if you’re going to have a loan – no lender is going to lend money on an uninsured property, but note that even the best homeowner’s policy does not include flood or earthquake coverage, so if you’re buying in an area where that is a consideration, the extra cost of a flood policy or earthquake policy is probably worth it. Condominium owners should have a master policy of homeowner’s insurance paid for by their association dues, but it’s still a good idea to have an individual policy for your unit, called an HO-6 policy here in California and by the NAIC.

Property taxes are paid to city, county, state and possibly utility districts, but your county tax collector should be able to quote overall rates. There is no way to know how much they will be from here, but you can make an estimate, if nothing else by calling the county and asking. Note that they usually quote taxes in terms of a percentage tax value per year. Multiply assessed value by tax rate to get a per year tax bill, then divide by twelve to get a per month value. In California, there’s a rule of thumb that property taxes per month are approximately one dollar per thousand dollars purchase price per month in most places (it will be more if there’s been a bond issue approved or any number of other circumstances), so take the last three digits off the purchase price and that is usually close to your monthly tax liability. $250,000 purchase price? $250 per month. $500,000 purchase price? $500 per month.

By subtracting off all those figures, you get a range of monthly payments for the loan that you can actually afford. Call these A2, B2, C2, and D2. Armed with these and your credit score, you can figure out what kind of rate you might qualify for. When this article was originally written thirty year fixed rate A paper purchase money loans of no more than eighty percent of the value of the home could be had without points at something between 6.25 to 6.5 percent. When I originally wrote this, “Piggyback” seconds would go to 100% of the value of the property, but that is no longer the case, so if you don’t have 20% down and you aren’t a veteran, you’re going to pay PMI in some form. You can usually get significantly lower rates by being willing to accept a hybrid ARM (I’ve been doing it for fifteen years), but some people aren’t comfortable with them.

Knowing the payment you can afford, the interest rate, and the term of the loan, you can calculate how much of a loan you can afford. Knowing any three of principal, interest rate, payment, and term, a loan calculator can tell you the fourth. Do this with your four values, A2, B2, C2, D2, and you get four potential loan principal amounts, A3, B3, C3, and D3. These correspond to loan amounts where the payment should be easy, moderate, hard but doable if you are disciplined enough, and a real stretch. To this, add any money you have available for a down payment, and subtract projected purchase costs (maybe $1000 plus 1 percent of home value). This gives you four values A4, B4, C4, and D4. These correspond to the purchase price of the homes you can afford under those four prospective loan amounts. You can then compare these amounts with what is available, and at what price, in those areas you might wish to buy.

Continued in Part 2: Process

Finished in Part 3: Consequences

Caveat Emptor

Manufactured, Modular, and Site-Built Homes: How Lending Practices Drive the Sales Market

Many people are unaware how profoundly lending policies influence the market for residential property. So I am going to go over the various gradations in available loans for various types of property.

Pretty much everyone is familiar with the standard house, built on site, mostly by hand, from basic materials. Called “stick built” to differentiate it from other building methods, this is the default housing that everyone is familiar with. Once emplaced upon that property, there is no real way of getting it off the property intact, and therefore it is appurtenant to the land. This might come as a shock to people who concentrate on the house, but when you buy a property, you are buying the land upon which it sits – the lot – and the structure comes along because it is appurtenant – because it cannot be moved off easily. It is this type of property which has been at the forefront of liberalization of lenders loan policies, precisely because it is both universally desirable and non-portable. That land is defined by its boundaries. It isn’t going anywhere. The structure isn’t going anywhere that the land isn’t, because in order to remove it, you pretty much have to destroy it. It’s built on a several ton concrete foundation, which, if you nonetheless manage to pick it up, is still overwhelmingly likely to crack if not disintegrate, not to mention ripping out plumbing, electrical, and other connections.

Because the land isn’t movable and the structure isn’t either, lenders have gotten comfortable that you’re not going anywhere with that structure. Because the combination is so universally desired among consumers of housing, they have gotten comfortable with giving loans for essentially the full purchase cost of the property, knowing that it takes a special set of circumstances for them to take a loss on the property, and they can charge higher interest rates in order to insure against that. (I am using insure in the statistical, law of large numbers sense that is the essence of insurance.)

Once upon a time, lenders treated condominiums far less favorably than single family detached housing. But it was always obvious that condominium units weren’t going anywhere, and in recent years condominiums, in all their incarnations, have reached a level of acceptance among housing consumers that assures their marketability, and even the price discrimination against high-rise condominiums is gradually dying out. It is far less than it was just a few years ago. For condominiums four stories and less, the only difference their status makes to lending policy has to do with required expenses and Debt to Income Ratio: There is no homeowners insurance requirement, because the association dues pay for a master policy, but there is the additional expense of Association dues to charge against the borrower’s monthly income. As far as Loan to Value Ratio goes, condominiums are precisely like single family residences, and you can find 100% loans just as easily for them, at the same rate cost trade-offs, or very close. More and more, the fact that it’s a condominium is becoming irrelevant to loan officers. Many lenders have completely eliminated the “percentage of owner occupied units” guidelines that used to be such a bugbear for getting condominium loans approved. For these reasons, among others, condominium prices have taken off. In the last fifteen years, they have gone from being about half the price of a comparably sized and furnished detached home, to the point where they are basically proportional to detached single family homes, and in some areas, higher price per square foot due to the fact that they are a viable less expensive consumer’s alternative due to (usually) fewer square feet to the dwelling, and so less expensive overall if not proportionately so.

The first real step away from the “stick built’ house is the modular dwelling. These are piece-manufactured at factories, and assembled in pieces on site. Usually, it’s something like one entire room-wall in a piece, with all the necessary plumbing and electrical already embedded in it, although sometimes it does take the form of entire rooms. Think of it like modular furniture, which is manufactured in individual pieces, but those pieces are intended to be put together so that instead of an arm chair and an ottoman, you have a chaise lounge. The important difference is that unlike modular furniture, once that modular house is assembled on that foundation, it’s not going anywhere. Try to disconnect the plumbing hookups, or disassemble the pieces, and all you will likely have is much smaller pieces than you started with. Modular housing, once assembled, isn’t going anywhere. It is permanently attached to that land. For this reason, lenders are in the process of phasing out pricing discrimination against modular housing as opposed to stick built homes. For some lenders, modular gets the same exact loans as stick-built, for a few, there is a hit to the rate-cost trade-off that may be anywhere from a quarter of a point to a full point. Over half of the residential lenders in my database are happy to do residential real estate loans for modular housing on pretty much the same terms as stick-built. 100% percent financing, interest only, even the horrible negative amortization loan are all available on modular homes. As a result, prices of modular homes may be a couple percent lower than those of stick built properties, but they are very comparable and the the investment potential is just as strong and there is no large amount of difficulty getting them sold due to the difficulty of getting a loan. Some lenders still don’t want to touch them, but it’s pretty easy to find lenders that will, and on the same terms as they do any other property, so the lenders who still will not lend on modular properties are hurting no one but themselves by dealing themselves out of possible business.

The next step away is manufactured housing on land owned by the home owner. Now technically speaking, modular housing is a subset of manufactured housing, but when most lenders are talking about manufactured housing, they are talking about homes built at the factory in entire sections, and assembled with only a few total joins at the home site. True manufactured housing is portable, where modular really is not. If you’re in Idaho and decide to move that house to your property in Georgia, it’s doable.

Because it is portable, as you might guess from things I’ve said here about the prevalence of attempted scams that lenders have had issues with people dragging them off. You’d be right. Lenders file foreclosure papers on the land, and the homeowner metaphorically backs up the pick-up truck and takes that residence somewhere else, leaving the lenders with a piece of land and no residence. Because there is no longer a residence on it, it’s not worth anything like what it was when there was a residence on it. Lenders have lost multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars on individual properties around here. You get burned enough times, you start getting wise. Those real estate lenders who will lend on manufactured homes require a laundry list of conditions, and even if they are all met, they won’t loan 100 percent of the value, or anything like it, and there will be an additional charge of at least one full point of cost on their regular loan quotes. Cash out loans are typically limited to sixty-five percent of value, making it hard to tap equity. Furthermore, due to accounting standards and depreciation, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac made a rule that manufactured homes were limited to twenty year loans, which drastically limits not only the type of loans available to their owners, but also has the effect of restricting what they can afford to borrow, because the payments principal has to be paid back over a shorter period.

Because loans are more expensive, harder to get, and amortized over a shorter period of time, this has the effect that even if someone wants to purchase a plot of land upon which the primary residence is a manufactured home, they cannot afford to pay as much for it. Let’s say par rate on a thirty year fixed rate loan for a stick built house or condominium is 6.25%. To keep it simple, let’s hypothesize that someone can afford loan payments of $2000 per month. That gives a loan amount of just under $325,000 for the stick built house ($324,824). But because of the minimum one point hit, the equivalent rate on the manufactured home loan, even though it still sits upon owned land, is about 6.75%, and you’re limited to a 20 year loan, giving a loan principal of about $263,000. The same person who can afford a stick built loan of $325,000 can only afford $263,000 for a manufactured home. This means that the manufactured home is not going to sell for as much money, because for what most people thing of as the same price (monthly payment) they cannot afford as much manufactured home as stick built. This leaves completely aside such issues that magnify this difference as the fact that because the loan terms are more favorable, it’s more cost effective to improve a stick-built home, so equivalent stick built homes have more amenities and are therefore even more attractive and more desirable. Not to mention the fact that the lender will require a twenty percent down payment on the manufactured home, where they might not require one at all on the stick built. The people who are in the market for relatively inexpensive housing are first time buyers. I can’t remember when the last time I encountered a first time buyer with a significant down payment (5% or more). Very few of them have down payments. This means that even if they are inclined to purchase a manufactured home, they are going to be constrained to purchase a stick built house by lending policy. That $263,000 loan I talked about earlier in the paragraph is only available if the buyer puts a down payment of $65,750 or more in addition to closing costs. For the vast majority of buyers, this limits their choice to stick-built, or none at all. For these reasons, when people go to sell manufactured homes, one can expect the prices to be more than proportionately lower than those of comparable stick-built homes, and so investments in manufactured homes do not tend to pay off nearly so well as property earlier on this list.

There is one further step down on the list: Manufactured homes on rented land. These are not, properly speaking, real estate loans at all. There is no land involved. If there is no land involved, it’s not real estate. Since there is no land involved, the loans are not real estate loans. They are listed in MLS because the people are buying and selling housing, but they are not real estate loans. It is very difficult finding lenders who will lend on them at all, and those few who will mostly do so through their automotive department. Furthermore, whereas space rent might be cheap if it’s your only cost of housing, it is expensive as compared to homeowners association dues, let alone property taxes, and the loans are still all twenty years or less. Because lenders don’t like to touch them, because the down payment requirements are large, and because of the additional expenses imposed by space rent, prices for manufactured housing on rented land are microscopic by comparison with everything else. Even here in southern California, $100,000 buys a really nice 4 bedroom place where by comparison the lowest priced 4 bedroom anywhere in the county right now are $337,000 (manufactured on owned land, and way out in the hinterlands of east county).

Lest anyone think that this is in any way shape or form due to inferior construction, it is not. Because these buildings are manufactured on assembly lines which are largely robotic, there are many fewer problems with things like forgetting to nail at appropriate intervals, workers getting distracted, not getting corners square, and all those sorts of problems. I’d bet that a manufactured dwelling is probably of superior construction to a site built dwelling, all other things being equal. It is purely lender policy, as influenced by the history of their experiences with these kinds of properties, which is driving these differences.

So before you think a property is a great bargain, consider what kind of property it is, because even if you have plenty of income and a huge down payment and these concerns are irrelevant to you, when you go to sell it your prospective buyers will generally not have those things, and every time you eliminate a possible buyer from being able to consider a property, you statistically make the final sale price lower, and you statistically make the sales process take much longer. Eliminate enough potential buyers, and you’re going to be very unhappy indeed.

Caveat Emptor

Making Certain You Shop Your Mortgage – Whether You Want To Or Not

Ken Harney had some welcome news on Move afoot to end uninvited mortgage pitches

To a certain extent, these are a good thing for consumers. However, it gets way overdone.

What happens is this. Let’s sat I get a client into my office, they apply for a mortgage, and I run their credit. The three credit bureaus, Experian, TransUnion, and Equifax, then turn around and sell the fact that this person has just had their credit run under a mortgage inquiry code, together with some of their more easily obtainable information.

Result? My clients are besieged with mortgage pitches. For months, every time they answer the phone it’s likely to be someone else who has paid the money for a red hot mortgage lead.

Needless to say, my clients aren’t happy. I have had several clients come out and accuse me of selling their information to telemarketers. Now, the fact that I encourage folks who come here to shop their mortgage around notwithstanding, it would be shooting myself in the head to sell their information to other providers. I know what I’ve got, I know what I quoted them, and I know I intend to deliver. The only thing that will stop me is if they do not qualify for that loan. If someone is satisfied with what I intend to deliver, far be it from me to tell them to shop around because they might be able to do better. My family and I do have to live, you know. I won’t stop or prevent or hinder them from shopping their loan around (which alone sets me apart from 90 percent plus of the loan providers out there), but telling them to do so is just not part of my job description at that point in time. It’s like expecting the mechanic as he starts working on your car to tell you that you might be able to get a better deal somewhere else.

Indeed, if I had the option of paying extra for that credit report so my clients aren’t besieged by unsolicited offers, I would take it every time. Not only would my clients be less harassed, but the prospective providers who pay for that sort of information are not precisely known for their sterling character, if you know what I mean. I’ve had clients tell me stories of people determined to sell them negative amortization loans without informing them of the drawbacks. I’ve had clients tell me of people determined to get their business that they told them of loans that do not exist, often with conspiratorial pitches like, “This is the loan they won’t tell you about! You have to ask for it!” Well then, why are you offering it? By all means, put it out there on the table and let’s compare the two loans by cranking the numbers, but the vast majority of the time it turns out the reason you have to ask for that sort of loan is that it’s a piece of garbage and no self-respecting loan professional would expect you to accept such awful terms.

Now let me tell you about the numbers of such pitches. Because each of the big three credit bureaus is innocent of the actions of the others, it starts in three places, each of which pitches to the prospective providers that it sells the information no more than four places. I don’t know why the number four became magic, but it seems to pop up everywhere in the mortgage leads industry. So each of them sells to four, and there are three of them. That’s twelve people you’re going to be getting a phone call from right there, and never mind that you’re on the “Do not call” list.

But what’s going to happen the majority of the time is that somewhere around ten of those who initially buy the information are resellers. They pay sixty bucks a pop, and turn around and sell the information to four other folks at twenty-five bucks a pop. Some of these places are in turn resellers; indeed, some of them got this information directly, which is all that keeps the whole process from snowballing until people are besieged by what seems like every last person with a valid mortgage license for the area. So twelve, forty-eight, hundred forty four, four hundred thirty two wannabe mortgage providers swarm each person I run credit on. I try to remember to warn them, but there is nothing I can do to stop it from happening, however much I might want to.

Do not get me wrong. It is a good idea to shop your mortgage, because at the end of the process the power is all in the loan provider’s hands and it is often abused.

But there is a major difference between that and setting this pack of wild ravening prospective mortgage providers on my clients, willing to promise the sun, the moon, and all of the stars and planets if my clients will simply drop me and sign up with them instead. There is a major difference between agreeing that shopping the loan is a good idea, and throwing my clients to a pack of hundreds of telemarketers who call for months – sometimes as long as two years, so that they seem to be part of the next wave the next time those folks need a real estate loan – and bulk mailers who are almost singlehandedly responsible for global deforestation and accelerated filling of our urban landfills. If it does happen, I will be pleased to see it end.

I’m also gratified to see National Association of Mortgage Brokers on the correct side of this:

But the National Association of Mortgage Brokers doesn’t agree. When credit bureaus sell overnight trigger lists to third-party lead generators, the brokers argue, they fail to comply with a key provision of the Fair Credit Reporting Act: that anyone receiving consumers’ personal information must be in the position to make a “firm offer of credit” or have previously received permission from the consumer to obtain credit file data. Third-party lead generators obtain no permission and are in no position to make any credit offers, firm or otherwise.

There is a world of difference between suggesting you shop your mortgage and making certain you shop hundreds of providers, whether you want to or not.

Caveat Emptor

Undisclosed Short Sales

What happens if a home you signed to purchase goes into foreclosure before the closing date?

We were supposed to close on a home four months ago. On the day of closing we get a call from the seller’s realtor that the sellers owe 22K and need time to figure out negotiations w/the mortgage company. We go through a series of extensions & hear a variety of excuses from the sellers realtor (sellers haven’t turned in paperwork, wrong forms filled out &new ones were overnighted, etc) In June, a Lis Pendens was filed & our realtor checked it out. He talked to the sellers realtor & found out that it had been filed but has been negotiated off &was no longer in effect. On 8/9 our realtor gets a call from the sellers realtor that they have finally been in contact with the mortgage company &there is 1 more paper that needs to be completed & they are “on top of it”. After not hearing anything last week, I check with the online courts to see if anything else has occurred to see that a foreclose decree was noted for 8/4. What happens now? Can we purchase the home from the bank?

Somebody has not been “on top of it”. Probably at least two somebodies, and they’re not exactly fulfilling full disclosure requirements, either.

Yes, an Notice of Default adds thousands of dollars to fees due. But what do you think the lender would rather have: An already negotiated sale that is consummated and they get their money, or go through that whole dismal foreclosure process, not knowing if anyone else will put an offer in?

So what is going on here is an undisclosed short sale. What this means is that the lender isn’t going to get all of their money, or the transaction would have closed by now.

So what’s most likely going on is that the bank is taking their own sweet time about approving it, but your realtor has allowed the selling realtor to feed you a line of BS. Indeed, they’ve probably actively cooperated. They’re probably afraid of losing the commission, but if they keep it open “just a little longer” maybe the lender will approve it.

It’s the listing agent’s job to talk the lender into approving the sale. Perhaps the bank is imposing some conditions that the seller can meet, but does not want to. Perhaps the bank is demanding some money, or that the realtors reduce their commission, and they don’t want to. Perhaps the listing agent just clueless, but I doubt your agent has exactly covered themselves in professionalism either.

The person with the power to break the logjam is you. Talk with a lawyer, but if you put in a 48 hour notice to perform, the lender is likely to suffer a sudden attack of rationality, especially in this market. They’ll likely net more money through the sale than through the foreclosure process, but if you allow them to go on ad nauseum they will keep the transaction open as long as possible. You see, once the transaction closes they can’t get their money back if a better offer comes along. Therefore, they are trying to put you off for as long as possible in the hopes that such a better offer will come along. From their point of view, they have this transaction well in hand, they are just hoping to get more money from someone else, and the longer you allow this to go on, the higher the likelihood they will. If you don’t force the issue, the only possible resolution is unfavorable to you. There are possible issues with the deposit, and damages they could owe you and you could owe them, which is why you need to be careful. But putting them on Notice to Perform is the thing that is going to break the logjam one way or another, and your agent should probably have done it months ago. You’re stuck with them for now, but if this transaction doesn’t close you should probably find a new agent. Good agents know that if they are willing to risk losing a particular deal, they will not only better represent their clients interests, but also that they will end up with more deals overall. Approached correctly, it’s a way to have even the client whose entire family has their heart set on a particular property that you are acting on their behalf, not just looking for a commission, and they will send you their friends, and they will come back to you when it’s time to sell, or to buy another property.

PS: A lis pendens that is recorded also needs to have the removal recorded.

Caveat Emptor

Impound Accounts Facts and FAQs

I’ve seen a fair number of questions on impound accounts in the last several months. An impound account, also known by the confusing term escrow account because the lender is holding it in escrow, is money that you give the lender in order to pay the property taxes and homeowner’s insurance on the property when they are due.

The first thing to note and emphasize is that money going into an impound account is not a cost of doing the loan. It is your money. You own it. It will be used solely to pay your property taxes and your insurance. At the conclusion of the loan, whether you paid it off with cash or refinanced or or sold the property, you get any money left in the account back. The lender is required to send you the check within sixty days of loan payoff.

An impound account is meant to address any lender’s two largest worries in regards to a loan: Uninsured destruction of the property or losing the property to an unpaid property tax lien.

The problem with an uninsured destruction should be obvious. The structure is destroyed or heavily damaged and no money exists to rebuild. The borrower doesn’t have it and the bank isn’t going to throw good money after bad. Here in California, the average property is worth maybe $500,000 or so, but without the home sitting on it, the property may only be worth fifty to a hundred thousand. Within ten miles of my office sit hundreds, probably thousands, of new homes that sold for $700,00 and up even though they sit on a lot that’s less than 5000 square feet (0.115 Acres). Many condominiums are over $400,000. Given the location, a 5000 square foot lot may be $200,000, but it’s not $500,000, and the lender will take a loss even on the $200,000 because they’re not in the business of real estate. They loan $500,000, it burns down without insurance, they lose $350,000. People also lose their jobs over this.

Property tax liens are a major issue as well. They automatically take priority over everything else, and the rules about what the condemning governmental entity has to do are much looser than they are for the bank. They will usually do quite a bit over the minimum, but they will sell the property most of the time, no matter how minimal the best bid. Minimum auction amounts and many other things mandated for when lenders sell the property go out the window when it’s the government. Many times this situation can require the lender to step in and pay the property taxes, intending to turn around and sell the property themselves merely to take a smaller loss.

A lender wants you to pay property taxes and homeowner’s insurance, and they want to know you’ve paid them. They encourage this via the method of impound accounts. The theory is simple. Every month you pay the lender, in addition to your actual loan payment, an amount equal to your pro-rated property taxes and homeowner’s insurance, and they will take this money and pay those bills when they are due.

No lender is perfect about these, and some are less so than others. A large percentage of the biggest and worst messes I have ever dealt with came about as the result of the lender somehow messing up the inpound account. Others have arisen because even though the lender acted within the law, the client got angry about something. Sometimes it’s for a good reason, sometimes it’s not.

Because lenders want you to have them, however, they are ubiquitous, and every lender I know of charges extra on your loan if you do not want to do an impound account, unless you live in a state which prohibits the practice. Usually this amount is about one quarter of a discount point. On a $500,000 loan, this amounts to a charge of over $1250 just to not have any impounds.

On the other hand, in places where property values are high, you can have to come up with $5000 or more at loan time just to adequately fund an impound account. Here’s a computation of how much you need to fund it works. The lender will divide the annual property taxes and homeowner’s insurance by twelve. This will be the monthly payment. The lender is legally able to hold up to two months over the amount required to make the payments, and they want this reserve. So they will look at the projected payments for the next year and figure out how many months they need up front to always have two months worth in reserve. I’m writing this on February 3, and California taxes were due on the first even though they are not past due until April 10th. But the lender uses February first to calculate even though they won’t actually make the payment until early April (they earn interest on the money, whether or not they pay any. Some states require that interest be paid, but it is typically something small and worthless like two percent).

February first is usually when the lenders here in California figure will be the low point of the account for the whole year. But if you closed on a loan in February, you wouldn’t make your first payment on that loan until April first, and of course, they cannot count on you making your next February payment right on the first. So they are going to figure that you will make payments on the first of every month April through January, ten months, before they have to pay your property taxes. Since they have to pay twelve months, and they get to keep two in reserve, that’s fourteen months of payments they want to have on February first. Fourteen minus ten is four months that you will have to come up with in advance, or have rolled into the cost of your loan. On a $500k property, that’s about $2000 for property taxes even in a basic tax zone, and if your insurance is $1200 per year, you’ll have to come up with another $400 for that. $2400 into the impound account.

It gets better. Because the property taxes are due within two months of your purchase, you’re going to have to come up with your pro-rated share right up front as well as paying for an entire year of insurance. Since California requires six months property taxes at a time, that adds almost another five months taxes and twelve months insurance up front. Total cost of this in the example given: $3700. Actually, this is due whether you have an impound account or not. Total you need just for property taxes and homeowner’s insurance: $5900.

It can be worse. Suppose you were closing on a refinance in October. You originally bought in February. You are only going to make two payments (December and January) before the insurance is due, so your impound total for the insurance alone $1000 for insurance. You are going to have to come up with $3000 to pay the first half of your property taxes, plus because you only have two payments before the second half is due, another $3000, or six months payments for that. Total due, $7000.

There are really only two methods for coming up with the money for an impound account: Bring in the cash from somewhere else, or have the lender loan it to you, adding it to your loan balance. Except in rare circumstances where you are refinancing the same property with the same lender (and usually not even then), existing impound accounts cannot be used to “seed” the new account. This is because it’s your money, held in trust. The rules for these accounts are rigid, and I’m not certain I understand well the rules about whether a bank even has the option of rolling one impound account into another.

This typically means that you have to come up with a good chunk of change out of your pocket for a short period, or add the additional amount into your loan, where you’ll be paying for it as long as you have a loan on the property. Every situation is different, but most often I prefer to either come up with the money myself or not have an impound account. The extra charges may be sunk as opposed to refundable, but I’m not paying interest for thirty years on thousands of dollars.

Furthermore, if you are adding the money to create the new impound account to your loan balance, since it’s going in before the computation of points, it can add another $50 to $100 to your costs of the loan per point you’re paying. Minor in and of itself, but adding insult to injury if the loan has points involved. More to the point is that adding impound creation it to your loan balance means there may be a couple years before your balance gets as low as it was before the refinance, just from this. Indeed, the fact that it raises your loan balance is the worst thing about the impound account issue. On the other hand, unless you have a “first dollar” prepayment penalty, what you can do is turn around and put the check for the previous impound account when it arrives into paying down the new loan. It typically won’t bring you even, and it won’t reduce your contractual payments on the new loan (although that is usually a good thing), but it will ameliorate the damage to your loan balance.

Initial loan closing is not your only opportunity to start an impound account if you want one. If you don’t have one to start with, the lenders will be very happy to let you start one later. I’ve literally never heard of a lender saying anything but “YES!” (usually with a pump of the fist) to a request for an impound account. Why? Because now they know that your taxes and insurance will be paid, and get to use your money, and after you paid a fee for no impounds. Oh, happy banker!

If you want to cancel an impound account, especially within a year of whenever the loan was funded, you can expect to pay the “no impounds” fee, possibly prorated, but usually just the whole thing. Roll thousands of dollars into your loan balance where you’ll be paying interest on it and then pay a lender’s charge for no impounds? Ouch!

Can you force the bank not to do any of this? Not really. They don’t have to lend you money. Yes, they are in the business of lending money, but if they don’t loan it to you, they’ll find other uses for it. Somebody else is always willing to accept the bank’s terms. You try to violate guidelines that lenders have established in order to lend you the money, and you’ll be told, “Sorry but you don’t qualify.” The golden rule of loans is that those with the money make the rules.

Furthermore, those lenders who didn’t require this would be at a competitive disadvantage as regards rates, because their loan portfolio would be a significantly riskier one, and they would have to increase their rates to compensate for this. You could qualify for a better rate or lower closing costs somewhere else. Better to not argue. Assuming that I already have an impound account, all the extra I lose is a maximum of sixty days interest. Two months interest on $5000, even at ten percent, is $83. That’s a lot cheaper than any of the alternatives.

Caveat Emptor