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We are often asked why there is so much paperwork mandated by the bank for a mortgage loan application when buying a home today. The bank needs to know everything about us and requires three separate sources to validate each entry on the application form. Friends and family tell many buyers that the process was a hundred times easier when they bought their home ten to twenty years ago.
There are two reasons why the loan process is much more onerous on today’s buyers than at any time in history.
- The government has set new guidelines that now demand that the bank prove beyond any doubt that you can indeed afford the mortgage. During the run-up in the housing market, many people ‘qualified’ for mortgages that they could never pay back. This led to millions of families losing their homes. The government wants to make sure this can’t happen again.
- The banks don’t want to be in the real estate business. Over the last seven years, banks were forced to liquidate millions of foreclosures and negotiate another million plus short sales. Just like the government, they don’t want more foreclosures. Therefore, they must double (maybe heaven triple) check everything on the application.
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However, there is some good news in the situation. The housing crash that mandated that banks be stringent on paperwork requirements also allowed you to get a mortgage interest rate probably below 5%.
The friends and family who bought homes ten or twenty ago experienced a more straightforward mortgage application process but also paid a higher interest rate (the average 30-year fixed rate mortgage was 8.12% in the 1990s and 6.29% in the 2000s). If you went to the bank and offered to pay 7% instead of <5%, they would bend backward to make the process much easier.
Instead of concentrating on the additional paperwork required, let’s be thankful that we are able to buy a home at historically low rates.