When Your Home Loan Gets Declined here’s What To Do

So today I'm here to talk to you about a very interesting story: Sarah. Hi, this is Benson Pang, broker owner of NestMade Mortgage. So a couple months ago, a real estate agent came up to me and said, Hey, Benson, I got this deal that's about to fall through. Her client is actually relocating from Ohio to California to join her family.

So she wanted to buy a house in California while she's moving. So a lot of you may know that getting a mortgage, you need credit income and assets. For her, her income is actually retirement and her inherited farm. She was looking to use her farm income to qualify. Well, at least that's what the bank was doing. And she was doing soy at the time.

Apparently soy you don't collect your crops until October and you're not going to have any invoices. During a pandemic, getting invoices is something that is required to qualify for a self-employed loan. In her case, she doesn't have any invoices. Who am I kidding? We can't really move the house and tell the seller, Hey, we can't close until October.

So now Sarah is in the middle of a transaction. Her earnest money deposit, a security deposit is in jeopardy, and the bank last minute declined her loan. So agent calls me and say, Hey Benson, is there something that you can help you and your team, is there anything you guys can help?

And I immediately called up one of my loan partners. We did a three-way, four-way call with Sarah and we started asking questions. Questions after questions as if, I don't know, interrogating her or something. She was like, oh my god, why are you guys asking me so many questions?

But you know, as a mortgage broker, we work with 25 different lenders, and asking those questions will just help us put your situation in each of those buckets and see which one would you fit. In her case, we didn't need to put her into a different lender. She still qualified for a conventional loan. We just need it to ask more questions.

The bank needed to ask more questions because she's retired. She has retirement income, social security, she has pension income, she has an annuity, she has a 401k that now she's required to take monthly distribution on. There's so much income that she has, but the bank wasn't able to see it. We didn't come up with new income for her, we just asked her questions.

So we didn't go down the same rabbit hole that the banker was doing. In fact, we dug ourselves out, asked the right questions, and we yielded the better result, the result that ultimately Sarah wanted. If you guys have any questions, if this story resonated with you, your family, or anyone around you, please have them reach out to me and my loan partners. We're more than happy to help you.