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mschnurman@star-telegram.com you don’t have to be a mortgage expert to know this home loan was going to be trouble.the borrowers had 25 credit accounts that had gone into collection, plus six charge-offs totaling nearly $6,000. They had no cash reserves; to make the down payment, they got $3,800 in assistance, presumably from the seller.Their monthly housing costs jumped from $250 in rent to a $1,468 mortgage, an increase of nearly 500 percent.They made one mortgage payment in fall 2007 — and no more. the government, which insured the loan, eventually lost more than $102,000.the case was one of a dozen cited in a federal audit of loans gone bad at an Arlington lender, Americare Investment Group. It’s the second mortgage company from Tarrant County to be spotlighted that way in the past two weeks.Americare, which operated as Premier Capital Lending, and Alacrity Lending co. of Southlake were among the targets of a federal investigation, Operation Watchdog. the Office of Inspector General is looking at 15 lenders in 11 states that have high default rates on FHA loans.About half the audits have been completed, and they reveal just how much the underwriting standards declined in the second half of the decade, even after the housing bust had begun. Of 19 loans examined at Alacrity, six borrowers made no monthly payments, and only two made more than five payments before defaulting.A buyer of a manufactured home who never made a payment got a $108,534 loan despite having 117 collection and charge-off accounts with an outstanding balance of more than $47,000.

Americare approved one loan after the borrower almost doubled his income by including his 84-year-old mother’s Social Security check. she wasn’t a party to the mortgage, probably because she had filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy four months earlier. Just three payments were made before the first default.Americare’s president didn’t respond to the federal inquiry. but Alacrity’s president said that if the loans were so bad, why did HUD approve them and provide FHA insurance?”We received no comments or questions from HUD when these files were submitted,” Steve Holmes wrote. “The signal we received … was that our underwriting was exemplary. this signal was confirmed when all of these files were insured with no comment.”The inspector general’s office said Alacrity failed to verify income, document credit histories or properly assess financial ratios for borrowers — all the responsibility of a loan company. but Holmes has a point, because lenders weren’t alone in playing the game of easy money. Borrowers, insurers, investors, real estate agents, appraisers and regulators all had a hand in the go-go era.”Three or four years ago, if I rejected a loan because the borrower had been working for just two days, another broker would suck the business right up,” said Judith Smith, who’s been making local mortgage loans since 1969. “They wanted to impress the builders and the Realtors, and they’d say that I was being too tough.” Looking for comments? Lessons learned from loans gone bad