Released: October 28, 2008

Home loans no longer a sure thing

Source: Stephanie Armour, USA Today

Jonathan Schecter is set to close next month on the purchase of an apartment in New York City, but it’s been an adventure getting there.

He began home-shopping a year ago. Schecter’s lender said in September that he could count on 80% financing up to $420,000. The other 20%, or $105,000, would come from Schecter’s down payment. But things changed after he committed to buy a place on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. The bank said it would finance only $393,000, increasing the down payment he needed by $27,000. He scrambled to come up with the extra money and managed to hang on to the place.

“It was trying to get the mortgage that was hard,” Schecter, 25, a senior manager at a marketing and public relations agency, says of his home-buying experience in the rough-and-tumble Manhattan market.

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