In Denny Andrews’ premiere book, Confessions of a Mortgage Insider, he pulls the covers back on the meltdown of the mortgage industry and the ramifications on the United States economy.
Andrews (www.dennya.com) draws from his experience as a professional speaker, corporate trainer and 20 years as a loan officer to capture the revealing story of poor business practices, questionable ethics, greed, and the lack of borrower and loan officer knowledge and education: a recipe that ultimately brought the mortgage industry to a crashing holt.
Meet Rick Agnew, the main character found in the pages of Confessions of a Mortgage Insider.
Andrews main character takes the reader on a journey of examining ethical dilemmas, scandalous corporate coverups and illegal practices over the course of the past 20 years. With humor, information, and brutal honesty, Andrews reveals the truth behind the meltdown of the mortgage brokerage industry and offers solutions for the next chapter in repairing a cracked economy.
Recently, The Reporter sat down with Andrews to find out what caused the real estate crash.
Reporter: What led you to write this book?
Andrews: With everything that happened last summer with the mortgage industry, I saw everyone pointing fingers all over the place and nobody taking any responsibility or really explaining how it happened.
Reporter: What happened with the industry?
Andrews: It was more than 10 years of the programs becoming more and more aggressive and credit scoring had a lot to do with it.
Initially, credit scores were there to help underwriters make decisions and then slowly it got to the point where that was all they were using to decide. We really started getting into trouble was when Wall Street started buying any loan with a 720 score. They didn’t care if you had a job or putting anything down and that’s what led up to last summer when those foreclosure rates started to come back. The investors buying the paper from Wall Street could see that it wasn’t the 1 and 2 percent foreclosure rates, it was 10 and 20 percent.
They pulled a third of the buyers out of the market. It’s like one day we had 100 people who could buy homes and the next there were only 70. Thirty percent of the market gone.
Reporter: Who should read the book?
Andrews: I wrote this book so anyone can read it and understand what led up to where we are. I wrote it like a novel. Quite frankly I’d be bored to read a book on the mortgage industry and I’ve been doing it for 20 years.
I wrote this book so it’s really easy to read and follows one character that is framed after my life story.
Reporter: What does the industry’s current status look like?
Andrews: Those loan programs are not coming back. That would be a quick fix, but I don’t see that happening. People are hoping this is as bad as it gets, but over the next 12 months we have another one million loans that are capping out on two-year fixed rates. In the past, those people would just do another two-year fixed rate but those are gone, and now and those people will have nowhere to go. When those loans start capping, their payments are going to go up. So with nowhere for them to go, we will have a million more foreclosures.
Reporter: So, what’s the solution for the saving the mortgage industry?
Andrews: I propose the companies that have those two-year fixed-rate loans need to extend them for another two years – give us some time to recover before another ocean of foreclosures hits the market. The government needs to step in and offer tax breaks to those companies who don’t raise their rates.
These are taxes the government probably won’t get anyway because when these foreclosures hit the businesses, will be going out of business. This way it will help people to stay in their homes and provide some security without having everything melt down around us.
Confessions of a Mortgage Insider is available in hardback directly from the publisher for $24.95 at www.confessionsofamortgageinsider.com and is available on Amazon.com. The book will hit the shelves of Barnes and Noble in October.
