Preemptive Strike
A carpet salesman in Ohio is gaining notoriety for his unique solution to avoiding
According to various media
"When I see I owe $160,000 on a home valued at $350,000, and someone decides they want to take it — no, I wasn't going to stand for that, so I took it down," Hoskins has been quoted as saying.
Hoskins' home had been scheduled for a sheriff's auction in late February, according to
He told the Associated Press that the Internal Revenue Service placed liens on his business and his commercial property and the bank then claimed his home as collateral.
A subsequent
RiverHills bought his commercial property, including the carpet store, at a sheriff's sale for $666,666.67, according to the Clermont County Sheriff's Office. However, Hoskins told the Enquirer that his lawyer worked out a deal that will let him stay in business and rebuild his home.
A Web site has since been set up to help Hoskins raise awareness of his plight — and raise money, through the sale of hats and T-shirts emblazoned with a bright yellow bulldozer.
Hoskins' three-bedroom, three-bath home had oak vaulted ceilings, a wraparound deck, a gazebo with a hot tub and an in-ground swimming pool and pool house, according to the site,
New Math
One of Fannie Mae's new loan-quality guidelines goes against the grain of traditional mathematics teaching.
As part of an
The latter example is at odds with a widely held rule of rounding: that whole numbers are rounded up only when the first decimal is the number 5 or higher (so 96.01% is rounded to 96% and 96.51% to 97%).
Observers said that while Fannie's formula bucks tradition, it is prudent to err on the side of caution when determining a borrower's leverage.
"The agency is trying to protect itself," said Marco Avellaneda, a professor of mathematical finance at New York University and a partner at Finance Concepts, a risk management consulting firm.
Either way, "I don't think it will have a material impact," Avellaneda said. "If the round-up was to the nearest 10%, then you could complain. … If it's a round up to the 1%, it's not material."
He compared loan-to-value ratios to driving speeds. "If you're going at 55.1 miles an hour, are you going above the speed limit?"
The new rounding policy will take effect for all loans or mortgage-backed securities submitted to Fannie beginning on Jan. 3 of next year, the GSE said.
"Lenders must ensure that the LTV ratio provided at delivery uses this methodology or one that will result in a higher LTV ratio," Marianne E. Sullivan, a senior vice president and Fannie's single-family chief risk officer, wrote in a
Fannie launched the loan-quality initiative, which covers a range of topics, to help lenders avoid ending up having to buy back ineligible loans, she wrote. Such buybacks are a growing source of
Double Check
Fannie also is encouraging lenders to pull a second credit report before a mortgage closes to check if the borrower has taken on any additional debts since the outset of the application process.
As part of the loan-quality initiative, the GSE said, it now requires lenders to include "all debts of the borrower incurred or closed up to and concurrent with the closing of the subject mortgage" on the final application. Refreshing a credit report just prior to closing may uncover additional debt, Fannie said in a one-page
Chris Thomas, the owner of Mortgage Support Services, a Westminster, Colo., correspondent lender, said the new rule is likely to delay closings at the very least, since any newly discovered liabilities will force a lender to send a loan back to underwriting.
But he predicted that many lenders would miss the forest for the trees.
"You know what originators are going to complain about the most? The cost of the new report," he quipped.
Quotable …
"Our song should be Billy Joel's 'We Didn't Start the Fire.' "
— Eric Schuppenhauer, a senior vice president of Fannie's national servicing organization, after rattling off a list of challenges the industry faces, at a Mortgage Bankers Association conference in San Diego last week. The 1989 pop hit's lyrics are a litany of historical figures and events.
