What lenders are REALLY doing HARP refis?

[Jeremy Vohwinkle]

I stress really because even though HARP 2.0 is supposed to help with underwater or high LTV ratios, investment properties, and all of that, in my experience every lender has so many in-house restrictions that it's virtually useless. They set their own LTV limits, they say they won't do it for non-owner occupied properties, or won't do it if they don't currently service the loan.

Long story short we bought a primary residence back at the end of 2005, with very little down, in Michigan, which in hindsight was clearly poor timing. That being said, our situation changed about five years later and we had to move, but obviously couldn't sell that house given market conditions and what we still owed. Since we could afford to keep making payments and take on another mortgage, we did that and then started to rent out the other place.

Problem is, it's in an awful location for a rental home and the amount of rent we can get is relatively low. And with a mortgage rate of 7.5% we're losing money. Again, it isn't the end of the world because we can afford it and I want to keep working toward paying it off and weather the market for a few more years, but if we could refi and get the rate even down to 5% it would help the cash flow situation tremendously.

Last year, shortly after HARP 2.0 went into effect I contacted maybe six or seven lenders, including where our mortgage is now, and nobody could help. Our bank didn't want to touch it, and who could blame them when they are milking that interest rate. A few other banks wouldn't do it because the loan wasn't through them. A few others wouldn't do it because it wasn't a primary residence. Even more wouldn't do it because of strict LTV limits.

After wasting a lot of time I got frustrated and gave up. But now that I've got more time and the new HARP program has been around longer, I wanted to begin searching again. But I also don't want to blindly make calls or meet with people only to get nowhere, so I was hoping there were some HARP friendly lenders out there to go to first.

If I had to guess, the property probably has a LTV of around 115%, although it's hard to say because there are no real comps to look at (extremely rural area, unique waterfront/lot size anomalies with our property, etc). To further complicate matters, we've put some decent money into updates over the past year, but from all the lenders I spoke to last year it seems like they pretty much just do drive-by appraisals and look at comps.

So yeah, anybody have a good idea of where to start looking? Just bite the bullet and get a mortgage broker and have them do all the dirty work?