Real Estate Insights

Today we said good bye to GreenPoint Mortgage. For all those who have current mortgages with Greenpoint, do not fear, once your loan was funded it was transferred to another sector of the company for loan servicing which is still in business, or it will be sold to another company for servicing.

GreenPoint Mortgage was a pioneer in prime Alt-A jumbo loans as well as more aggressive no-documentation and low-documentation mortgages through out the past decade. They built their niche in the market by providing purchase and refinance loans to the borrowers that did not conform to A-paper guidelines, those self employed borrowers such as attorneys or insurance agents, who had a sudden surge in income but couldn't qualify for a large mortgage based on recent earnings alone.

GreenPoint Mortgage was truly a dominant lender in the mortgage market who helped many brokers and mortgage bankers grow their businesses by providing an easy to use wholesale channel for originating home mortgages. Their demise comes at time when the mortgage market needs a lender like GreenPoint around to provide loans to those borrowers who do not conform to strict A-paper guidelines. Their shutdown comes as bad news for an already distressed credit market, which has already lost access to a plethora of Alt-A lenders.

What does this mean for the Real Estate industry and your local housing market?

To have a source as large as GreenPoint be removed from the mortgage market will cause even a larger stress on an already crippled credit market. So instead of asking whether or not the continued demise of mortgage lenders will affect your housing market, the true question is to what extent will their demise affect your market?