Investors Who Do a Few Mortgages on the Side

(Wall Street Journal)- Across the nation, a number of mom-and-pop investors are pulling money out of their retirement accounts and safe, but low-yielding, savings to take on the risk of becoming "hard-money" mortgage lenders, who charge high interest rates to borrowers who have been rejected by traditional banks.

Hard-money mortgage lending represents just a tiny slice of the mortgage market, although the activity is growing rapidly. Guy D. Cecala, publisher of trade publication Inside Mortgage Finance, estimates hard-money loans will account for about 1% of the 5.5 million mortgages expected to be originated this year. But he says activity in that sector is up sharply from a few years ago, when very few hard-money loans were originated. Read more here…