'Exotic' mortgages seen losing their allure

"Joe" is a homeowner who did not want to give his full name for this story because he’s ashamed to admit that he soon won’t be able to afford his monthly mortgage payments.

In order to get the $800,000 house he bought early last year in California’s Silicon Valley, Joe got an “option ARM,” an adjustable-rate loan that lets him choose from a variety of payments every month. The smallest payment included no principal and less than 100 percent of the interest due. The unpaid interest was tacked onto the principal, creating “negative amortization.” 

This let Joe trade lower payments now for higher payments later. He initially thought his salary would rise along with his home’s value — he was a marketing executive for a small software firm he was confident would be successful. But when a lost deal closed the company and  “For Sale” signs popped up  — and stayed up — in his neighborhood, a now-unemployed Joe is wondering how he will afford those higher payments when his rates adjust.

Joe is not an atypical homebuyer in the Bay Area or other now-bursting bubble markets across the country. Nearly half of the homebuyers and thirty percent of people refinancing mortgages in California chose interest-only loans last year, according to research firm LoanPerformance. The nationwide numbers are not so high — 32 percent for homebuyers and 20 percent for refinancings — but they do reflect the country’s increasing reliance on these so-called “exotic” mortgages.

Payment shock
Now these cheap mortgages that fueled the real-estate boom are beginning to hurt the homeowners they once helped. Higher interest rates and the end of honeymoon periods for too-good-to-be-true teaser rates are increasingly causing payment shock for borrowers.

"Nationwide, approximately $400 billion of [home-purchase adjustable-rate mortgages] are scheduled to reset at some point in 2006," said Frank Nothaft, chief economist with Freddie Mac in McLean, Va. "A significant number of homeowners will face some adjustments." In fact, the ARMs with scheduled payment increases this year work out to about 5 percent of all single-family debt outstanding in the country now, he said.

Many of these mortgages carry negative amortization features that permit borrowers to pile on additional debt beyond their original balance, and make minimal payments for the first several years. Once the initial period is over, however, payments could shoot up by 100 percent or more as the loan resets.

Other programs allow interest-only payments with no reduction in the original loan balance until the reset point. Then payments can jump by 50 percent or more in order to amortize the debt balance over a compressed number of years.

Like Joe, more California homeowners are having difficulty making their mortgage payments, according to a report by DataQuick Information Systems. Banks and mortgage companies sent warning notices to more than 20,000 homeowners earlier this year, telling them they were in danger of foreclosure. That’s an increase of 67 percent, the biggest one-year jump on record. Though a notice of default doesn’t mean a homeowner will lose their house, it could be a key measure of financial distress.

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