New - Down payment assistance in Arizona!

In addition to the Down Payment Assistance program that’s available for the Greater Phoenix area (Maricopa County), there is a new program available!


The Home Plus program, administered by Arizona Housing Finance Athority, provides 4% of the mortgage amount to be used for down payment and/or closing costs in most other Arizona counties.

A few of the highlights:

4% of loan amount is a GRANT – NON-Repayable !!

Up to $315,569 purchase price in Pinal County (call me for other counties)

Grant is available for Primary Home only

FHA, VA, or USDA financing regulations apply

Minimum 640 credit score

This is a great program. Visit the Arizona Housing Finance Athority web site for details on a tax benefits.

Only approved lenders can offer you this opportunity. Call me for additional details or to apply.

Subprime Again ?

Would a return to subprime mortgages be good or bad for the real estate market?

There are so many different ways to look at it that I’m not exactly sure what I think.

On one hand, I do believe that the subprime mortgage debacle played a huge role in the implosion of our housing market. But what was it that drove the machine in the first place? Was it lender greed? Borrower ignorance? Crowd mentality? Inflated appraisals? Over enthusiastic Realtors? Buyer desperation? Keeping up with the Joneses? Bad timing? “Big bank” duplicity? General apathy? I would tend to go with All of the Above. And who benefitted? We all did. There are millions of thankful homeowners who wouldn’t be homeowners at all if it weren’t for the leg-up they received from their first (subprime) mortgage.

On the other hand, I keep having this nagging feeling that if everything negative in our economy hadn’t come together just as it had, in precisely the right way and at precisely the right moment, the real estate crash mightn’t have been so severe (would it even have happened?). There’s such a muddle of cause and effect in this whole snarl of events that it’s become a “chicken or egg” debate. No one is really certain what came first and what caused what.

I watched the movie Too Big to Fail again last week. It’s an eye-opening little piece of cinema for sure! All about manipulation… ultra-powerful people in various stages of delusion, seducing and misleading the general public. I felt gullible and exploited. But then maybe it’s just a movie. Maybe.

As much as I’ve mulled over our economic maladies in the past 5 or 6 years, I am no closer to understanding them. That’s frightening to me. Does anyone understand, and are we doomed to repeat this?

This all incites me to share a very brief article I read today, courtesy of Housingwire.com. You can read it here. Apparently someone is suggesting we return to some version of the subprime mortgage.

Knowing what I know, which as you can see is very little. And feeling what I feel (very much conflicted). I’m right back where I was before I read that article. I have no idea what I think.

What I know…

1.)    People need a place to live.

2.)    People deserve a second chance.

What I feel…

1.)    This might help our housing market and in the process, our economy.

2.)    We still don’t know what started this whole thing.

Mortgage Lending - one step forward and two steps back

Sweeping reform of residential mortgage financing is no big secret, but were you aware that there is a lot more to come? The Qualified Mortgage Rule, a segment of the Dodd-Frank Act, is largely undefined and only vaguely understood. The premise is solid, that all borrowers should be able to demonstrate an ability to repay the money that they are borrowing. But most analysts believe that in its zeal to cure all the ills, and revolutionize our housing industry, it goes way, way too far. The predominate feeling is that too-tight restrictions on mortgage lending may freeze and possibly even reverse the tenuous progress that our country’s real estate market has been making. There is legitimate fear that this may disable first time homebuyers for years to come. In fact nearly 100 rules laid out in the Dodd-Frank Act are yet to be completely delineated and implemented, and countless others have simply been overlooked. Our country had obvious issues as a result of loose lending practices, but over-correction is alarming many experts in the financial industry, and rightly so.

I can tell you from experience that credit-worthy borrowers are already being squeezed out of the market by new regulations that do not take individual circumstances into consideration. You cannot paint the entire home buying public with the same brush, but this is exactly what’s been happening.

Smart lending is a balancing act, and it’s something that’s worth getting right. With unemployment still at an unnerving high and real estate just beginning to recover, the lending industry needs to proceed with extreme caution, but make no mistake, it does need to proceed.