Hey there —

Every investor I know has had the same week at some point. The rate you were quoted was real. The terms you closed on were different. And nobody lied to you at any point in between.

Here's the number I keep coming back to. In the 2024 federal mortgage disclosure data — the full public record, not a survey — the median rate on investor originations was 7.82%. On owner-occupied, 6.61%. That's a 121 basis point gap, across 280,592 loans. It isn't a negotiation you lost. It's the price of the category you're borrowing in, and it's the cheapest of the three things your quote sheet won't tell you.

The other two are bigger, and both are computable before you ever apply.

The first is the ratio. Lenders publish a minimum — 1.20, 1.25 — and it gets repeated like a property grade. It isn't one. It's a covenant, and what actually moves you across it usually isn't the market. I ran every metro we track: at today's rate, 19 clear 1.25 at 20% down, and 97 clear 1.00. Put 25% down instead and 136 clear it — 39 metros cross the line on the down payment alone, and the largest of them is Chicago. Same city, same rent, different side of the bar, decided by cash rather than by geography. The whole map is here.

The second is the term sheet. A 6.75% quote with two points and a five-year prepayment step-down can cost $6,119 more over three years than a 7.25% quote with none. Not a trick — the rate is a price per year, and your cost is a price per holding period, and the two costs that decide it are both fixed at closing and neither appears on the rate line. I worked the full arithmetic here.

That's the thread running through everything this week: the number the lender quotes you is not the number that governs. An 800 FICO and $95,000 in reserves can still get declined — on an eligibility overlay, not on the math. A deal can miss by $54 a month and be dead. And pulling the down payment for the next deal out of the property you already own can drop that property from 1.45 coverage to 0.99, which is a price nobody puts on the term sheet at all.

So the practical move is small and unglamorous: compute the two inputs yourself before you apply. Rent, and the full payment. That's it — that's the whole bar. Run your actual deal through the calculator at the rate you can genuinely get today, and you'll know which side of the line you're on days before an underwriter tells you.

Then ask for the eligibility matrix and the prepayment schedule in writing, before the appraisal is ordered. Both documents exist. Both are what underwriting actually reads. Almost nobody asks.

So here's my question this week: when you got your last quote, did you ask for anything beyond the rate? And if you're about to get one — what's the first document you're going to ask for? Hit reply and tell me. I read every one.

Martin