California Mortgage Brokers

Housing Recovery Stymied by Government

Sue Stamper, a business owner in Sacramento , California, wants to buy a home. After mortgage- financiers Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac imposed the strictest loan standards in more than a decade, she doesn’t qualify.

Pam Crawford of Lyon Real Estate is trying to sell a three- bedroom bungalow on Sacramento’s east side for $179,000, a third less than what it went for in 2004. She hasn’t found a buyer even after cutting the asking price by $10,000 two weeks ago.

The two women, who haven’t met, illustrate the deadlock crippling the U.S. housing market five years into the crash: While a record share of Americans want to buy homes, U.S. policies, often working at cross-purposes, are making it more difficult. Government-controlled Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have boosted standards so high that some people previously considered prime borrowers no longer qualify. That’s limiting a real estate rebound that also has been damped by a state attorneys general probe into foreclosure practices and an Obama administration loan-modification program that has fallen short of expectations.

“It’s very important for a robust recovery that we get the right credit standards,” said Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel-prize winning economist and professor at Columbia University in New York. “Giving out unsupportable mortgages was a disaster, and now the danger is overreacting and making the standards excessively high.”

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, seized by the U.S. during the closing months of the Bush administration in 2008, have tightened more than a dozen mortgage qualifications since then, including those for down payments and credit scores. The restrictions come after the government handed out $16.2 billion in homebuyer tax credits to pump up demand and the Federal Reserve bought more than $1 trillion of mortgage bonds to lower borrowing costs.

The Fed on June 22 lowered its estimate for 2011 economic growth to a range of 2.7 percent to 2.9 percent from the 3.1 percent to 3.3 percent it projected in April, citing the residential real estate market as a factor. Housing is “a big reason that the current recovery is less vigorous than we would like,” Chairman Ben S. Bernanke said in a speech last month.

“The government is working at cross-purposes,” said Doug Bandow, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, a libertarian policy-research center in Washington . “There’s been a desperate attempt to reinflate housing by throwing money at the problem. The worst time to tighten lending is after doing that.

How can I become a mortgage broker in california? | 411mortgagefaq ...

I simply cannot seem to find legitimate information on becoming a mortgage broker in California. Many of the web sites that purport to have information really share very little of anything and some are equitable plain frauds. I’d like to find information on mortgage broker training and possibly information on finding a school (preferably Los Angeles) where I tin get training on becoming a mortgage broker.

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