The Easy Money Trap: What 500 Baltimore Homes Tell Us About Risk New York investors bought more than 500 Baltimore rowhouses without proving they could afford them. Not one income statement. Not one W-2. Just a bet that rent would cover the mortgage. The loan product that made it possible? DSCR loans, short for debt service coverage ratio financing. The underwriting question isn’t “Can you pay?” It’s “Might the rent, at least on paper, cover it?” When rents rose, nobody asked questions. When they didn’t, the dominoes started falling. Now those homes are hitting auction blocks. Families are being evicted. Neighborhoods that spent decades clawing back from vacancy are sliding backward. DSCR loans grew from obscure to mainstream in less than five years. Private lenders liked them because they were easy to bundle, easy to sell to Wall Street, and easy to ignore the risk. The math only works one way. Rising rents hide mistakes. Flat or falling rents expose them all. Sound familiar? It should. In 2008, we learned what happens when loans get approved based on rosy projections instead of real ability to pay. Appraisals got stretched. Risk landed on the people least prepared to carry it. The dominoes fell. Baltimore may be showing us Act Two. Full investigation here: https://lnkd.in/e29PpR6R