Mortgage underwriting in the United States

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Mortgage underwriting is the process a lender uses to determine if the risk of offering a mortgage loan to a particular borrower under certain parameters is acceptable. Most of the risks and terms that underwriters consider fall under the three C's of underwriting: credit, capacity and collateral.

To help the underwriter assess the quality of the loan, banks and lenders create guidelines and even computer models that analyze the various aspects of the mortgage and provide recommendations regarding the risks involved. Because large securitizers such as the GSEs and other banks are large purchasers of loans from originators, and because many originators lack the balance sheets to hold onto loans for extended periods, automated underwriting guidelines are a crucial determinant of whether a mortgage will be made and at what price. In the U.S. the mortgage underwriting processing is done by a software called Automated Underwriting System (AUS). There are 2 AUS systems, and algorithms designed for this purpose, the first one Desktop Underwriting (DU) is designed by Fannie Mae and Loan Prospector (LP) by Freddie Mac. Some lenders still manually underwrite ^[1] the loan if the borrower doesn't pass the AUS but has additional compensating factors to be able to obtain the loan.