Franklin American (loan, interest rate, approved, credit)

[voodoochilled]

Our FHA loan (3.5% down, 5% interest rate, 170,000 loan amount) was just approved through a local mortgage broker who plans to have it serviced by Franklin American Mortgage Company - http://www.franklinamerican.com
Has anybody had any experiences (good or bad) with Franklin American?

Also, we use Mint.com for our personal finance monitoring and I was surprised to see that Franklin American did not show up on their list of mortgage banks. Are they really that small?

[txgolfer130]

Yes they are. Franklin American just FYI is heavy into sub-prime mortgages. They are a very strong small bank, but put a lot of sub-prime (< 580) stuff into the market.

[voodoochilled]

Yikes! I hope they've learned their lesson (We both have 740+ credit by the way)
How do their past bets affect current borrowers in case they go down (even though they have a strong reputation)? Our mortgage broker seems to think very highly of them.

[txgolfer130]

They are ok. Most of their past loans should already be out in the market, and any recapture mechanisms SHOULD have already taken place if there were going to be any. As a former mortgage banker, they were great. They paid great YSP and were pretty fast. Your loan won't be with them for very long, it will be sold to a secondary market investor/bank pretty quickly. You will see that on your loan documents.

However, I would be cautious until you actually get through the final documents and actually have the keys in your hands.