New scores help avoid subprime ratings
| Picture this scenario: You’ve lived in this country for the past 15 years, earned a decent wage, raised a family, always paid your rent, utilities, cell phone bills and other expenses on time, month after month. But you made little or no use of the conventional banking and credit systems — avoiding bank loans, credit cards and debts in general. Now you go to apply for a mortgage to buy your first home and get smacked with this sobering news: Sorry, but there is not enough information in your national credit bureau files to score your credit. We’ve got to either charge you an interest rate well above prevailing rates — 9 percent or 10 percent in a 6 1/2 percent market — or simply reject you altogether. |
|
Growing numbers of lenders and mortgage brokers have begun offering alternatives to traditional credit scores. At the convention of the National Association of Hispanic Real Estate Professionals this month, a new guide was released listing hundreds of brokers and lenders who use the Anthem system of non-traditional credit reports and scores as supplements to FICOs. Anthem, developed by First American CREDCO, the credit data subsidiary of Santa Ana-based First American, evaluates whatever information on an applicant may exist in the files of the national bureaus — Equifax, Experian and TransUnion. Then it mixes in information collected by CREDCO from other sources. These include regular child-care payments, telephone, electricity and other utilities payments, current and former rent payments, plus personal credit data from businesses that do not report to the bureaus — small local retailers that extend credit, payday lenders, rent-to-own companies and the like.
search for : mortgage, national credit bureau, interest rate
