I think this is the one Furnishedowner was referring to:
All our loans are with smaller banks. The big banks have tried to talk a good game, but haven’t delivered when the rubber met the road. One lady at a corporate bank acted like she was begging people to get mortgages from them because no one wanted any money. She told us 20% down. All sounded good. When we approached her with a potential purchase, she came back and said they weren’t able to do NOO loans for amounts <$50K. We can’t find anything that will cash flow above that purchase price because of market rents. I refuse to change our business model to suit a lender’s directives so we moved on.
With another local bank, I had the banker willing to give us 100% financing on another purchase. That seller decided he wanted to play hardball and refused to negotiate down his asking price for his house that has been on the market for about 13 months.
Banks are hit and miss right now. We went bank shopping. Many banks have changed their standards or completely got out of the game for NOO loans.
The local banks we’ve run into don’t necessarily have hard/fast rules for cash reserve amounts. They’ve tended to look at the big picture. We have 750+ FICO, stable income from the military, and a DTI ratio of about 28%. We don’t have a huge savings account, but we’ve still done ok getting lending. It’s getting more difficult, but we still have people willing to work with us. We go into banks with our portfolio and financial info. It’s better if you have everything to show up front. We keep print-outs of all our property listings. That will show most pertinent info for the bank. We also have the last 3 yrs of tax returns, P&L statements from the last 2 yrs (how long we’ve been in business), and current pay statements.
So far, the banks have been relatively impressed at our organization. I don’t go somewhere just hoping they’ll lend us money. I go in there and show them why they should work with us.