Overcoming the income obstacle for conventional

[Matt Liu]

I found one mortgage broker who is willing to qualify me for a triplex BASED ON THE CASHFLOW ALONE. She said: All you need is the money for the downpayment since the DebtCoverageRatio is so high. Of course... that was for an 80k property in Rochester.

Then, when I was looking at a 250k triplex in NJ, I found a mortgage guy from Investors Bank who was MUCH stricter - he only used 75% of the rent for the computation, AND said I have to have plenty other income so that my "housing payment quotient" is 30-40% of all my income.

Is the trick to deal with an understanding mortgage brokers who take a nice fee, rather than bankers who work with more red tape?

[Joel Owens]

Local, regional, national banks all have different programs and they are usually limited in scope.

A mortgage broker has sometimes hundreds of different programs and many sources of money to pull from. They can't work miracles but sometimes have more options than walking into a bank and getting only offered the vanilla loans.