So why has your home languished on the market with no offers?

Credit:  Part 1.  Very plainly, borrowing money for home purchases is now very difficult for those with less than perfect credit and will be for some time.  Fortunately, credit is repairable.  To make a very long story short, Wall Street investors have lost confidence in the security and soundness of the bundled loan packages they used to buy with such zeal from local lenders.  When Wall Street investors will not buy loans if the borrowers measure a tad less than perfect, from the localized mortgage brokers the mortgage brokers cannot make the loans.  Yes, Wall Street will still buy loans attached to less than perfect borrowers, but they will pay much less.  Therefore, the mortgage broker has to charge you and I more.  For a solution, skip to the Who you know section.

Credit:  Part 2.  If you have great credit, you are in luck.  BOrrowing for home purchases is becoming cheaper!  Fortunately, lenders still have tons of cash to lend.  If they don't lend it out it is sitting there useless putting lenders in a bit of a bind.  If they can't make loans to what were 40% of their customers (sub prime and sub a borrowers) how do they make money?  Simple attract more of the preferred group of customers!  How do they do that?  Lower the interest rates being offered to well qualified borrowers.  If you are a well qualified borrower and were thinking about making an investment in Vail Real Estate, now is a fantastic time.

Savings:  One of the key factors making a loan sub prime that many people do not talk about is very simply the size of the loan.  A borrower can have perfect credit, assets several times the size of the loan in question and seven figure income but if the loan amount is $418,000 it's a subprime loan.  This means it's buyers will now be using more of their savings and or the gain from the sale of old homes to finance the new ones.  It also means that many buyers who were considering purchases in the $500,000 to $700,000 range may now be priced out of the market financially.  This will have a direct effect on the sales of properties in those price ranges as the size of the pool of potential buyers has now shrink by almost 40%.

Who you know:  Fortunately, not all lending institutions are so strictly bound by these lending policies.  Visit your local Portfolio Lender.  These are organizations that often hold their loans "in house".  They do not sell their loans on Wall Street and use their own money or borrow it themselves to lend it to you.  These organizations are looking strictly at you and you alone as an opportunity to gain your business and balance that against your and only your risk factors.  You and your credit are not being measured on a nationwide policy scale.   You are not rejected because of some national trend but judged on you and you alone. Dave Portman of First Bank of Vail 970-479-3309 and Jim Brenner of Blue Sky Mortgage, 970-476-0602 have proven excellent in the past and are great sources of information about portfolio lending.