Solano Real Estate Scene: Jim Porter
Article By: Jim Porter – August 22, 2025
Loan officers sell something nobody wants but most people need to buy a house. None of my clients wake up in the morning, and while sipping on coffee, dream about their new mortgage.
A bridge loan is a temporary loan to buy a house before the old one sells.
A terrific agent at Twin Oaks Realty in Benicia, sold a one-story house last month to an 80-year-old sweetheart widow, and after her client moved into her new forever home, listed her free and clear two-story home for sale that she had lived in for 40 years.
This very sharp senior citizen didn’t want to touch her IRAs, so she put down $200,000 from her liquid savings and did a short-term loan for $415,000 to bridge the gap. She did not want the loan or really even need the loan, but the seller could not give her 60 to 90 days to sell her old house, so the bridge loan, which I call a temporary loan, came in very handy.
The cost of this loan is relevant to this story because unless a buyer can get a bridge loan from family, bridge loans cost money, and because the lender is usually aware the loan will be paid off in 90 to 180 days, the fees can range from 2% to 4% of the loan amount because regular mortgage lenders that offer loans with zero points do not do six- to nine-month loans.
There are ways of obtaining a temporary loan with no fees but this needs to be done well in advance of writing an offer on a house, and I will write about this at a later date.
For now, the punchline is this: Sweetheart Widow could not be happier with her new house in her over-55 community and, to her, the cost was worth every penny, and she is grateful to her Realtor for helping her achieve this big move.
Jim Porter, NMLS No. 276412, is the branch manager of Solano Mortgage, NMLS No. 1515497, a division of American Pacific Mortgage Corporation, NMLS No. 1850, licensed in California by the Department of Financial Protection and Innovation under the CRMLA / Equal Housing Opportunity. Jim can be reached at 707-449-4777.
