Katriona: Today I’m here with Lynn Rose from Citizens Bank and I want to talk about a role-playing situation where I’m a buyer of a 5.5M dollar townhouse. I’m thinking about what I should be doing in terms of making that decision and concern I might have about my monthly payments.

Lynn: Listen, right now, there are a lot of concerns that people come to me with and we’re being more creative than ever figuring out how to make purchasing work for people. One of the concerns that I get quite often is that the stock market has come down and people don’t want to liquidate their portfolio. In that instance, we talk about doing a higher loan to value or putting down less of a down payment, like 90% financing, so they don’t have to liquidate right now. Others who are concerned about their monthly payment - we will talk about interest only. So they can lower their payment doing interest only and then have a refinance opportunity in the future.

Katriona: What about a situation where the seller might be part of the solution?

Lynn: Absolutely. So you can buy down your rate at any time before the loan closes. We often talk about either the seller paying $10K on a $1M mortgage - they can bring the rate a half a percent and that really affects how much the buyer is going to pay. So that is always a conversation.

Katriona: The most important take-away here is to HAVE the conversation!