Over the weekend I enjoyed a lively debate regarding the couple that is suing their Real Estate agent in Carlsbad. Brian Brady wrote a humerous post and it generated a lot of comments. The idea that I walk away with on so many of these issues is this: what ever happened to personal responsibility. We are all so up in arms over the housing mess and we automatically blame the lenders. I am just as guilty. As a matter of fact, one of the reasons I stopped blogging for a while was my disgust with the mortgage industry. But the main reason I stopped blogging: my disgust with the average borrower that had no interest in hearing the truth! Before concentrating on coaching real estate agents I was a very active lender and one of the leading proponents of Transparent Lending. (If you are unsure what that is you can search my site or Google it and you will have loads of reading material.) Yet the more I explained to people the more loans I lost. I guess it is a lot like the old joke about everyone liking sausage but no one wants to know what goes in them. My clients did not want to hear how the industry really worked and how I was going to save them money in the long run. They were interested in the quick deal with the made-up interest rates and fancy web sites. They wanted to know how much home they could buy, not afford. They came equipped with no knowledge of yield spread but a thorough understanding of ‘stated income’. In short, I saw an awful lot of borrowers that brought the current problems on themselves.
Please do not misunderstand. There are a lot of unscrupulous lenders out there and I have written about some of the most eggregious I have seen. I am just saying that I think, every now and then, we need to acknowledge the borrowers that lied about their income, throwing caution to the wind and stop pointing the finger solely at the lenders.
Filed under: BUYERS, INVESTORS, LENDERS, REALTORS, SELLERS, foreclosures, responsibility, stated income
Life That POPs 