An Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA) spokesperson said that several independent mortgage companies made extreme changes in their loan product offerings. This includes an increase in writing FHA loans, a category which increased to 45 percent of loans in 2008 from 10 percent the year before. Lenders reported that they closed an average of 56.6 percent of all loan applications.

The Fed has been providing liquidity to the mortgage market in their purchase of Mortgage Backed Securities (MBS). Between August 13 and August 19, the Federal Reserve purchased a gross total of $26.640 billion agency MBS.

The Fed purchased an average of $5.00 billion per day, up from last week’s $4.08 billion per day. This doubled the average daily originator selling, illustrating that the Fed continues to provide a generous supply of liquidity to mortgage bankers looking to hedge their pipelines of committed and uncommitted loans.

We can only hope that the evolving mortgage market swings back to more responsible lending practices, especially in the mobile home market. Manufactured homes ar very difficult to finance and refinance currently, which is a sobering fact among the retired and elderly in America, because they are the majority of Americans being targeted as “risky” by lenders.

Banks were irresponsible with loose lending practices such as “stated income,” but now they are too tight in their lending procedures. Now, there are so few programs, that the entire mobile home mortgage market is at a standstill. With their retirement only a fraction of what it used to be, retired Americans cannot even pull equity out of their manufactured homes. This is because their homes have dropped in value, and lenders look for any reason to decline their loan application.

The moral of the story is that banks were too loose, now their too tight. And America is left asking: WILL LENDERS EVER GET IT RIGHT?

Average rates for a 30-year mortgage fell to a 6-week low at 5.15%, which is increasing demand for purchases, refinancing, and new mortgages to all advance. The manufactured home market generally follows the housing market trends, but has also been known to stray.

Keep a tight watch on your mobile home financing and refinancing options by coming to our blog, and also feel free to call us at (800) 882-1999 if you have any specific questions about financing or refinancing your manufactured home. We’ve been doing this for 28 years, so we kinda know what we’re talking about.

Lenders are Tight on Home Loans

“Domestic banks indicated that they continued to tighten standards and terms over the past three months on all major types of loans to businesses and households,” the Federal  Reserve’s survey of senior loan officers said.

Looking ahead, the Fed said most banks plan to keep lending standards tighter than average levels over the past decade, but that should be expected given the reputation lenders made for themselves leading up to the subprime crisis.

This is definitely expected, however very unwelcome. These tight standards that banks now hold themselves to can only be compared to a farmer that depletes all the resources from the soil as fast as possible, then blames the grocery store for their loss in livelihood. The banks have been taking supreme advantage of the loose legislation for half a decade, and they are very irresponsible for doing so. Now, the hens have come home to roost, and the banks are acting irresponsibly in the other direction. Lenders are finding phantom reasons to decline even the lowest risk loans.

In an economy that the banks are majorly responsible for ruining, they are now proceeding to decline America by acting reactively and not responsibly. A retired American with a good bank account, credit score and income cannot get a loan to purchase a manufactured home, even though Berkshire Hatheway recently came out and said that they are a lower risk than a traditional home loan.

Banks and their irresponsible tight lending practices are sending ripples throughout an already brittle economy, and the ripples are effecting the working and retired alike.

Using a manufactured home finance specialist will save you money and grief.

It seems like common sense that if you need financing for a manufactured home, then working with a lender or broker that specialize in your needs is the way to go. However, many mobile home buyers are lied to or deceived by desperate agents or companies that specialize in traditional lending, trying to break into mobile home loans. Only after dragging their customers through the entire (process and racking up quite a bill), do they realize that they could not secure financing for a manufactured home to begin with. Many of our customers don’t find us until another lender or broker has cost them up to $1,000. If this isn’t convincing enough, here are 3 reasons to seek out a mobile home loan professional to learn your financing options.

1. The banking and real estate market changes every day, and this includes the mobile home market.

Only a specialist in mobile home finance will know the lenders that do and don’t lend for manufactured home loans. Many lenders that used to lend for mobile homes, stopped their programs within the past 6 months, and if they didn’t cancel their program they have changed it quite a bit. Only a firm that specializes in mobile home finance will know the ebb and flow of this highly specific niche market.

2. Manufactured home finance has it’s own laws and regulations.

An agent or broker that only works with traditional loans does not know the intricacies of the mobile home market. This leaves the buyer, seller and any third party very exposed to legal action if the agent or broker’s ignorance causes any legal or regulatory snags in the deal. Manufactured homes are treated very differently in federal and state laws, and unless the agent or mortgage broker is in the know, there is a huge potential for a catastrophic mistake.

3. Using a mobile home loan specialist will save you money, short term and long term.

Real estate agents and mortgage brokers without mobile home experience try to apply their traditional housing experience to mobile homes, and this does not work. They will charge you to get an appraisal on a home that may not even have any comparable sales in the area, which makes it nearly impossible to finance. This will waste $400 of your hard earned money, and you’ll get nothing for it. A manufactured home specialist knows the process, and you will enjoy the wealth of experience they currently have, instead of being drug through the learning curve of a stick-built agent. Use a manufactured home finance expert from the beginning, and you are much better off.

So you think you know how Mobile homes came to be called such? Easy, Right? Because they can be moved from place to place, hence a home that is Mobile. Mobile Homes.

Well, this is actually a common misconception.

According to snopes dot com, “The origins of the mobile home are tied to the end of World War II. The rapid downsizing of the U.S. armed forces after the surrenders of Germany and Japan in 1945 brought back millions of servicemen (and servicewomen) to the United States from overseas in the mid-1940s, many of whom were coming of age and anxious to establish their independence, attend college, get married, and raise children. This demographic bulge, coupled with America’s burgeoning post-war recovery from the Great Depression and a wartime economy, created an unprecedented demand for housing — both for standard residential units and for quarters to accommodate the many servicepeople who were taking advantage of G.I. Bill benefits to complete their educations at colleges, universities, and other types of schools.

The widespread use of military-style prefabricated housing eased the severe housing shortgage temporarily, and the eventual creation of suburbs such as Levittown took care of much of the long term need, but neither of these solutions addressed a potentially lucrative marketing niche — people who were dissatisfied with living in barracks-like housing but didn’t want to (or couldn’t) wait years for the construction of affordable suburban housing. It was James and Laura Sweet, a couple from Prichard, Alabama, (a town just outside of Mobile) who came up with the concept that fulfilled that market niche.

James Sweet, a machine shop supervisor by trade, was reportedly finishing off his workday lunch one afternoon in January 1946 when a newspaper article about the post-war housing shortage caught his eye. What if, he thought, someone could manufacture a type of housing that could be put together cheaply and quickly at a central location, but was small and light enough to be transported to wherever the purchaser wished to locate it? Something like the prefabricated structures of the era, but much nicer and more home-like — a prefab housing unit divided into discrete rooms (rather than one large open space) with all the electrical and plumbing fixtures already in place. They could be built as one- or two-piece units, then loaded onto flatbed trucks and delivered wherever the purchaser desired.

Sweet’s wife, Laura, was a commercial artist who did illustrations for magazines, and she drew up a few simple floor plans according to her husband’s directions. James Sweet built a couple of prototype units in his off-work hours to prove his concept viable, and then, satisfied with the results, used the couple’s savings, mortgaged their home, and borrowed against his life insurance to establish Sweet Homes, a company dedicated to the manufacture and sale of prefabricated  homes.

National advertising was still something of a rarity in the 1950s, but as the new national highway system enabled the sale of prefabricated homes to spread outwards (mostly to the north and west) from the Alabama/Mississippi area, more and more consumers were exposed to the houses, liked them, and began clamoring for their own “Mobile homes.” Business boomed, more manufacturers entered the fray, and factories were established all over the U.S. to better serve local customers. Eventually whole communities of these types of homes were created all across the country, populated by homeowners who preferred them to more expensive and more closely-quartered suburbs full of site-built housing.

Over the years, however, as the generation who fought World War II aged and prefabricated homes became commonplace throughout the U.S., newer consumers were unaware that the appellation “Mobile home” was a geographic reference, a term coined in acknowledgement of the area in which the industry got its start. The name was more and more frequently rendered as a common compound noun (“mobile home”), leading many to mistakenly conclude that it referred to houses that were “mobile” — that is, movable from place to place. While “mobile homes” can indeed be transported, they are of course far from mobile — in the vast majority of cases they are never moved off the sites to which they are originally trucked. (Most “mobile homes,” once situated, are moved again only if their owners replace them with newer models, or if they have to be removed because the land on which they sit has been converted to other uses.)”

And now you know the true origin of the Mobile Home.

go to snopes dot com for further information and literary citations.

In the current economic recession, it seems like the average American is able to afford less and less.

These unfortunate circumstances have placed affordable housing in quite high demand. It’s no surprise now that manufactured homes and mobile homes are paving the way when it comes to reasonably priced housing. With this increased demand, there will be more and more Americans living in factory built homes. As ownership of manufactured and mobile homes has increased, so has the demand for Mobile Home Loans.

At the introduction of manufactured and mobiles to the housing market, most of the average mortgage banks were uninteresed in offering Mobile Home Mortgages. Most mortgage banks lumped Mobile home loans in the same category with car or vehicle loans. Much like vehicles, manufactured and mobile homes were thought to quickly depreciate in value, unlike a traditional stick-built home or condo that typically sees equity gaining over time.

Due to the lack of equity appreciation, for many years it was improbable that a manufactured or mobile home refinance or equity loan would be made available to owners of factory built homes at all.
As time went on, home values skyrocketed faster than general income could keep up with. The depreciation of manufactured and mobile home owner’s equity started to slow down.  Eventually the equity losses  stopped altogether. Manufactured and mobile homes soon were actually increasing in equity, in part due to the increasingly superior quality and safety of manufactured and mobile housing, coupled with federal and state laws governing the factory-built process.  While mobile home owners invested in their homes and continued to maintain and improve them, they gained precious equity.

Today, rate-and-term mobile home refinance loans and cash-out equity loans have become readily available to eligible owners of manufactured or mobile homes. It has become reasonably easy to locate what was considered “non-traditional” and even undesirable financing for manufactured or mobile homes.

As the current real estate market begins to recover, the manufactured and mobile home market endures the same loss of value as the “stick-built” and condominium homes. In the midst of the recovery, manufactured and mobile homes still remain viable for financing at terrifically competitive interest rates. These loans should be eligible for rate-and-term refinancing in the not-too-distant future and perhaps even “cash-out” equity loans in the somewhat-near-future.
There was a time when a manufactured or mobile home loan was frowned upon as a mere “car loan”.
Those days have long passed as manufactured and Mobile Homes have emerged as the last affordable housing in America with competitive financing available to qualified buyers.

Mobile home loans or manufactured home loans can be financed as a chattel mortgage or a personal property loan. In this article you will learn the differences, and how they relate to tax write-offs, payment structures, credit scores, bankruptcy, and much more.

When searching for a mobile home loan, it is very important to find an expert that specializes in manufactured home finance. Otherwise you may end up losing your approval in the eleventh hour because the underwriter realizes that they just can´t approve a loan for a manufactured home.