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Saturday, July 18, 2009

Mortgage Insurance Quote Canada: You Can Still Find a Bank for a Mortgage

By Debbie F. Longo

Banks have been cutting their mortgage loan portfolios back, that is certain, but the careful borrower can still locate a mortgage.

Many local banks never got involved in the credit mess and are actively originating loans. This is not surprising. Home loans originated with the old building societies, like we see this time of year on "It's a Wonderful Life"- taking Joe's depositsto build Bob's house. Of course, they go by other names nowadays, but lenders that focused on their core business and area have for the most part avoided many of the problems in banking.

They are still issuing mortgages in an around their community, the community they know, and in many areas are filling the hole left open by the big lenders who are now gone.

While major banks project lower loan volume in all categories, including home loans, community banks expect stable numbers in loan volume for single family homes, although no increases.

Community lenders such as this, that may include credit unions and development banks, have had great success in lending to the so-called sub prime borrower, because they remain close to the customer they are lending to. These companies are not only remaining in business, they are earning a profit on their loans.

A good example is Shorebank of Chicago, a $2.3billion asset bank which is active in the low income community of this city and, compared to the national average of delinquencies of 18.7%, has only 3.1%. Since they are working with sub prime customers, their rates are higher, and they are extremely careful about how they manage their portfolio. And their goal is only to be profitable, not profit maximizing, a interesting point made by Mark Pinsky, the head of Opportunity Finance Network, an umbrella group for these types of banks. Reading between the lines, profit maximizing can be understood to represent the greed that has been one of the causes of the financial markets' current woes.

If you look at the salary of a CEO of one of these small community based institutes, such as that of Douglas Bystry of Clearinghouse CDFI, at $190,000 in comparison to that of Angelo Mozilo, CEO of Countrywide Financial at $22.1million, you can see a problem. Besides salaries, another example might be business decisions; Shorebank has its headquarters in a renovated building, not a new corporate high rise.

This breed of sub prime lenders are committed to the community and so to the loans they make, and instead of just originating the loans and reselling as most big lenders do, they use initiatives that help insure the loans will be paid. Shorebank, for instance, runs an energy conservation program since they realize that the home loan is more likely to be paid if the homeowner can afford to pay his electric or heating bill. - 23211

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