We are in unprecedented times. Hindsight is 2020 (pun intended), and while we do not have a crystal ball, we can look to the past to better understand the present, and thus what should be in the future. My goal in writing this article is to explain what drives market forces, and how these forces may impact homeownership in the community I am grateful to call home.
I have been in the lending industry for over two decades. I have seen rates at over double what they are today, greed drive people to unstable situations, tumultuous changes in guidelines, funding abilities, terms and choices. I ran an Operations Team during the Great Recession of the early 2000’s and have been in the Top 1% of Mortgage Originators since the second year I started originating loans*. Yet while the situation before us is certainly very different than anything we have seen before; it also bears a resemblance to the uncertainly of the not-so-distant past.
The main difference between now and then is that this instability is being created by external, versus internal, events in the housing market. Let us break that down.