Exclusive: Lender launches Alt-A offering

Brokers will now have another option for Alt-A mortgages, with one major lender announcing an alternative product that will target a brand new customer base.

Brokers will now have another option for Alt-A mortgages, with one major lender announcing an alternative product that will target a brand new customer base.

In an exclusive interview with MortgageBrokerNews.ca, Bridgewater Bank’s assistant vice president, B2B, Todd Poberznick discussed Gateway – the lender’s recently launched alternative product.

“The Gateway product is (meant) to help people get into homes and act as a gateway to their next step-up and hopefully that is into a lower priced loan that will allow them to get financing that is more long-term,” Poberznick said. “We soft launched it on the 23 of October and we are taking it out to CAAMP on the weekend and it will officially be out to everyone at that point.”

The soft launch was done in a bid to seek broker feedback ahead of its official launch next week.

“We’ve gone out a little bit ahead of time to get some broker feedback and we had leaked it out to some brokers to be able to give us feedback about our product and what we are going to present and for the most part it got very positive feedback and they gave us some good criticism on some areas they thought we could improve on so we took that to heart and made some moves and that’s what we’ve launched on the 23,” Poberznick said.
And that feedback led to some tweaks to the product before its official launch.

“Brokers thought it was important to be able to go up to 30 year amortizations, so we’re going to allow that; we also took into consideration rental properties,” Poberznick said. “We’re dealing with one two and three year terms.”

With the new product, Bridgewater Bank will target self-employed clients, new Canadians, those with bruised credit and hopeful homeowners who have been shut out of the market due to tightened mortgage lending guidelines.

Bridgewater currently has seven underwriters on staff to support Gateway and they will offer the product to Canadians across the country, with the exception of the Maritimes and Quebec.