I attended an FHA training this week sponsored by the Washington Mortgage Lenders Association. There were about 100 people in the training. A large percentage of the audience was not from the greater Seattle area. People had come from as far away as eastern Washington, Idaho, Montana, Oregon, California, New Mexico, and even Guam. Most of the attendees were processors and underwriters. Many of the underwriters had experience underwriting conventional and subprime loans but no experience underwriting FHA. What I found interesting is that there were very few loan originators in the room. Maybe if they had offered continuing ed credit, they would have had a larger turnout.

Interesting insight: An FHA representative said that if there was one thing that could “bring down” the titanic (referring to the titanic that is, of course, FHA) it is the downpayment assistance programs. The FHA representative made no apologies for his absolute disdain of those programs, none of which were mentioned by name, and gave no statistical analysis of default statistics to back up his concerns, just that “defaults are dismal” under these programs. This would be an interesting area for further research.

There was no mention of the recent scathing HUD audit of local broker A Plus Mortgage.