Chip Allen with Lakewood Residential Mortgage on the state of the mortgage industry

BrokerIPTV: Today we are talking with Chip Allen branch manager of Lakewood Residential Mortgage, a division of Universal Lending. Chip welcome to the show.

Chip Allen: Good to be here Dan.

BrokerIPTV: Alright, obviously what the whole world not just the U.S. has been talking about is the economy and mortgage and housing is right in the middle of it. How is this affecting your business?

Chip Allen: Well, I'm glad my office is on the ground floor I'm not tempted to jump things are down quite a bit.

BrokerIPTV: Yeah

Chip Allen: I'm going to be missing a few meals but that's a good thing. We are seeing some light at the end of the tunnel and ah, I think things are looking up but it's going to take a while.

BrokerIPTV: What is the light at the end of the tunnel, what are we seeing?

Chip Allen: Money is available, number one. Number two, we are starting to see not only first time buyers jump in we are also seeing investor groups grab single family properties we saw this a long ago, twenty years ago. Informed individuals coming in and buying things, tends to indicate that the market had bottomed out.

BrokerIPTV: Ok, how do you feel when you hear all this talk over the last month in the media. And a lot of people, different people have said it that it is all the fault of the predatory lenders.

Chip Allen: Well, there were a lot of predatory lenders um they're no longer a factor. Number one, they don't have the bad products to peddle to people. Number two, government regulation. Regretfully there's enough of the blame to go around. Not only the predatory lenders, which I wish more of them would go to jail, but government had a big part of it and we also had irresponsibility...um, and ignorance on the hands of consumers so everybody is kind of involved.

BrokerIPTV: Then we have the Wall St. piece which we could talk about for a while. So the state of lending is that there is money available but clearly the guidelines and the game has changed. Can you give us some of that?

Chip Allen: Yeah, um [Phonetic] always reflects the worst abuses of the past. We got a lot, we've got rid of a lot of the very bad programs. Which we shouldn't have had in the first place, 100%, Stated Income, Investor Loans with a 600 credit score...there's a toxic mortgage, it's just waiting to blow up. FHA which I've always been a champion of is gaining a lot of inroads, it's a good solid program. They've tightened the requirements up considerably, this is not intrinsically a bad thing. Some of the programs for example, Stated Income is pretty much gone. Stated Income programs um, I don't think are intrinsically bad if we have really good credit, a big down payment and reserves.

BrokerIPTV: Define sufficient credit.

Chip Allen: Sufficient credit, in reference to Stated Income, um...

BrokerIPTV: Or just Full Doc. I mean these days if somebody is coming in and they say, ya know my credit score's not terrible, it's not great. Where does it need to be now with the kind of the new frontier in lending.

Chip Allen: If you are in the lower six hundreds you are going to be ok FHA. But if you want Conventional you better be six eighty and above, and you better have a down payment. The thing to remember um, I pretty much think that all of your loans over ninety percent, most of them are going to have to go FHA. If you are going Conventional you are going to have problems and you always have to remember if you go over eighty percent with a Conventional product you need mortgage insurance. So um things have tightened quite a bit. They are taking more of a look which I don't think is necessarily a bad thing.

BrokerIPTV: Chip, thanks great information.

Chip Allen: Thank you.

BrokerIPTV: Appreciate it.

Posted on November 19, 2008 13:52:11 by Blog Author