PORTLAND, Ore. -- Unitus Community Credit Union Mortgage Lending Manager Dawn McCarn reports that delinquencies there are very low at less than .10% and just four loans were even late in October.
"We're not experiencing a high amount of members seeking relief from subprime or resetting ARMs just yet, at lease in our area. But we'll try to do a work out loan for them and get them into a fixed rate if we possibly can. Then, we'll be sure to keep the loan in our portfolio," she added.
Unitus does its mortgage marketing and lending through a subsidiary (not a CUSO, but a dba) called Unitus Mortgage. "We decided to brand our mortgage operation rather than promote mortgage lending from inside the credit union itself. We did that a year ago and it's worked very well for us. Often, if you say 'credit union' then realtors don't understand. Rather than having to tell them all about credit unions as home lenders we just decided to brand the mortgage operation separately. So far, it's helped us to develop business with real estate agents," said McCarn. (See related story on ACUMA's booth at the NAR Convention & Expo, which is designed to counter real estate agents' unfamiliarity with credit unions.)
Unitus has assets of $675 million and a total first mortgage balance outstanding of $252,400,985 including held and sold loans.
"Although we do our best to offer competitive mortgage products, we chose to not offer non-traditional mortgage products, such as option ARMs," McCarn said. "We do, however, offer interest-only ARMs, but the size of that portfolio is less than $2 million, which equates to a very small percentage of our portfolio."
For McCarn, that means Unitus is not in the subprime mortgage business and the bulk of its mortgage loan portfolio is classified as low risk. "We are in a very stable market; Portland has not suffered from significant home price declines, and although we will likely see
some depreciation over the next year or so, it will be insignificant."
McCarn said Unitus is having a great year. "Our production has increased 47% over 2006 production levels and I look forward to that increasing even more as we get the word out that a credit union is a great place to get a mortgage loan."
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