Even if You Don’t Qualify for a Standard Mortgage, There May Be Ways to Get a Loan

Source:  The Washington Post
Article by Kenneth R. Harney
October 3, 2014

Note:  “QM” refers to the federal Qualified Mortgage rules that are designed to foster safe lending.

Here’s some good news: A small but growing number of lenders has begun offering mortgages with more-flexible terms designed for borrowers like you.
 

Say you have solid credit scores and money in the bank but because of student loans or medical bills, your debt-to-income ratio exceeds the maximum that federal rules generally prescribe. Or maybe you are self-employed and find it difficult to assemble the documentation most lenders require on income, even though one glance at your bank statements would show that you earn enough to qualify. Perhaps you did a short sale on your underwater home a couple of years ago, too recently to meet the four-year minimum wait time prescribed by giant investor Fannie Mae before you are allowed to obtain a new mortgage.

Impac Mortgage, a New York Stock Exchange-traded company based in Irvine, Calif., has begun making loans nationwide — $30 million in the past couple of months — on what it calls “Alternative QM” mortgages to several categories of creditworthy borrowers with special needs:

● Near-miss buyers, who don’t quite qualify under standard rules. Say they have solid credit scores and good jobs but have a debt-to-income ratio of 49 percent. They’re likely to have difficulty under Fannie Mae’s or Freddie Mac’s underwriting systems, but Impac may fund them after taking a hard look at their bank reserves and assets.
● Self-employed professionals and business owners. They generally can’t show IRS W-2 forms and may have irregular income flows, complex tax situations and periodically high debt levels. Impac allows them to document their income using 12 months of recent bank statements and to have debt-to-income ratios as high as 50 percent.
● Investors with multiple properties. Investors who own 10 or more rental homes or commercial properties and seek to refinance and pull money out are frequently turned down by conventional lenders. Impac evaluates borrowers’ incomes based on the properties’ cash flows, and it has no limit on total properties an applicant can own. 

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