YAMILA AYAD (Broker, President of Mission Home Loans Inc.):
Anybody basically who raised their hand got a home loan.
So everybody was signing up because there was a false sense of proprietorship.
My name is Yamila Ayad and I am a mortgage broker
and I am the owner of Mission Home Loans, Inc.
Roughly 20 years that I have been in this business.
My family migrated so I'm first generation immigrant.
Came to this country in 1963.
My first career, this is my second career, I nursed for about 17 years.
I did emergency pediatrics and I did neonatology.
People always ask me "well what made you go from nursing into lending?"
And I think it was my recognition for one, that I wanted to have a greater sense
of autonomy on my life and my own growth.
I wanted to have something that was my own.
Sort of that entrepreneurial spirit that comes with new immigrants, you know?
When you ask "what does a mortgage broker do?"
There's a myriad of differences between a lot of us.
It's not a field that tells you that it has a specific performance, and that's why you'll find
that some people in this industry have a very tarnished image
because they probably are seen just as the salesperson.
But there's also a great amount of mortgage brokers who are just like me,
who really want to serve as a community through education and empowerment of literacy.
Most lending required that when you applied for a home loan,
you needed to prove what your income was.
For a minimum of 2 years you had to show the bank, your lender, mortgage broker,
mortgage banker, "here's where I've been for two years, this is the income that I make,
here are the taxes that I have filed, here are the bank statements that I have,
here's how much money I have in checking and in savings."
These programs literally, did not require for the consumer to prove either.
So nobody was actually checking to see what the actual income was of the homeowner,
what the capacity of making payments was, there was no proof that they needed to come
in with any money because most of these were 100% financing.
So you literally were putting people with no qualifications whatsoever into homeownership.
It's like letting a five-year-old get into a car with no drivers license.
I mean, it's absolutely irresponsible behavior.
We're living in a total contrast today, in lending in 2009
to what we experienced in the last three years.
Lenders lending in sort of a paranoid state, meaning that it's almost
like we really don't want to lend to you, I know you've taken your loan application, yes,
I know you meet all the criteria that we've told you on paper
but I'm still uneasy about this loan.
And in fact, in some ways, what I've noticed is what we call subjective underwriting.
Subjective underwriting is where opinion is actually placed into the process.
There's software that actually you feed a certain amount
of information, it'll give you an approval.
Technically, if you get an approval from that software, and all of the information is factual,
is all real, the lender is supposed to give you an approval no matter what.
Because it's guaranteed that Fanny and Freddie are going to buy that loan.
Okay? Well what we've noticed today is that even when you have a D-U approval,
they're overlaying with additional conditions.
So they're adding more conditions that were not part of the process when you started the loan.
So part of the madness for us today in lending is that you might start with a product
that looks like this and it ends up looking like that.
So, we're having more difficult times closing on time,
we're having more difficult times communicating to our consumers with appropriate information,
because we say "this is what the product looks like, this is what I'm going to need from you,
you meet all the criteria" and then somewhere along the line we get changes
that now make it difficult for me to go back to my consumer go like "Oh my God.
No longer is this product available to you."
That's very painful.
It's critical that what we learned from what's happened in the last four years
that should never happen again, at least in our lifetime.
We can never be so blinded by greed, blinded by products that weren't good for families,
and allowable, everybody looked the other way.
And so, we didn't get here by accident.
The blame game is bountiful.
It's from the top to the bottom to the consumer,
everyone needs to take responsibility for what happened.
ANNOUNCER: If you're having trouble with your home loan or think you may be headed
to foreclosure, help is available.
2-1-1 San Diego can connect you with the community resources you need.
You can dial 2-1-1 or log onto KPBS -dot-org-slash-mortgage-crisis.
We're facing the mortgage crisis together.