Martin and Cindy Arroyo knew they were not ideal candidates for a home loan.
She had gone through a foreclosure after losing her job, and he was finishing his M.B.A. and had not yet found his current position. But they had managed to put together a down payment of more than $550,000, or three-quarters of the asking price for a four-bedroom house in Los Gatos, and thought they would find a bank willing to lend the rest. They didn’t.
So the Arroyos found an alternative: a subprime mortgage.
Despite the notoriety that subprime loans gained as a prime cause of the financial crisis, they are re-emerging, under much more careful control, as one answer to the tight lending standards that have shut out millions of would-be homeowners.
via In Home Loans, Subprime Fades as a Dirty Word – NYTimes.com.
