November 30, 2006
A Mortgage Broker’s State of Affairs
The following post is an email from Michael J. Dorff, a mortgage broker with Trans World Financial about the state of affairs in Orange County California. Monday evening I will have an update from Mike Morgan to share.
Mish,
Here is a synopsis of the mortgage side of things here in Orange County and for that matter California in general.
What people don’t see, the NAR in particular, is the upcoming train wreck. I am talking about all the sub prime loans for refinances as well as purchases that were taken out 2 to 3 yrs ago and are now all coming due to reset. My guess is that 99% of all sub prime loans are all done on a 2 or 3 yr fixed interest only type program. People thought that it made no sense to take a 30 year fixed loan those homes when the short term rates were a lot lower, but they were all wrong.
The time bomb is about ready to go off. All of the subprime loans taken out 2 to 3 years ago have margins of at least 5% or higher and usually based on the London LIBOR program. Those loans are starting to reset now at fully indexed rates somewhere in the high 9% to 10% range. When those loans were initiated 2 to 3 years ago, they all had start rates of high 5% to low 6%. As of now, the LIBOR alone stands at 5.388 for the 6 month and 5.336 for the 1 year. Take those LIBOR indexes and add the margins to see what is going to happen.
Here is a case in point. One of my clients who took out an interest only subprime loan from another lender just received her reset notice. Her current margin is 5.25% and her index for the 6 month LIBOR index is 5.388%. This means her new interest rate will shoot up to 10.638%. Her note states that her first adjustment cannot go higher than 9.2%. So she will be at 9.2% for the next 6 months. With an initial loan balance at $251,000 at 6.2% interest only, she had a monthly payment of $1,296.83. In December her new payment will be $1,924.33 for the following 6 months before it adjusts again. This is a $627.50 jump in monthly payment. She simply can not afford this payment.
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