To help free up more credit for underserved borrowers, the wholesale lending division of Carrington Mortgage Services is eliminating its underwriting fee, the company announced on Wednesday.
‘In an increasingly competitive lending environment, organizations like Carrington are standing out and succeeding by being in a position to offer additional easy to use and efficient services to the broker community,’ says Ray Brousseau, executive vice president of Carrington Mortgage Services' mortgage lending division, in a release. ‘Eliminating the underwriting fee simplifies the process for mortgage brokers, providing more of an opportunity to focus on meeting the needs of consumers, while delivering on Carrington's service proposition.’
Carrington announced its intention to go after the underserved market back in March. Along with Wells Fargo, it was one of the first lenders to significantly loosen its lending criteria in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis – lowering its minimum credit requirement for certain loans to a FICO score of 550. It also expanded its guidelines on a number of Federal Housing Administration (FHA), Veterans Affairs (VA) and U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) loan programs.
As Brousseau explained during a recent interview, these non-prime loans are underwritten using a whole different set of criteria compared to the subprime loans of the mid-2000s and are fully compliant with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's new ability-to-repay and qualified mortgage rules.