Guero

Personal Responsibility and the Housing Bubble

Hey what did Billy Mays ever do to you? Magic Putty was a technological breakthrough!

Working for a homebuilder, I had a front-row seat to the breakdown of personal responsibility. Our in-house mortgage company would turn someone down, they would come back with a loan commitment from a mortgage chop-shop. If you are in the business of selling housing and someone comes in "approved" for a loan, you have to be very careful to whom & when you try to say "no." Only when we started requiring several thousand dollars additional deposit on deals like this did most of the hi-jinks stop. By then it was too late, the damage was done.