Manatee ranked 2nd in Florida as best place to get mortgage

Aspiring homeowners are more likely to be approved for a mortgage in Manatee County than in most other Florida counties.

Manatee County ranks second only to Sumter County for loan approvals on the SmartAsset list of best places to get a mortgage.

Rankings were based on the number of mortgage applications and the number of approvals by county.

In Manatee County, 63.13 percent of mortgages were approved, compared to 71.58 percent in Sumter County. Sarasota County ranked sixth in the state with a 61.52 percent approval rate.

To determine the best places in the country to get a mortgage, SmartAsset looked at four factors: overall borrowing costs, ease of securing a mortgage, property tax rate, and annual mortgage payments.

SmartAsset ranked locations based on those four factors, and then averaged those rankings, giving equal weight to each factor. The areas with the lowest average rankings are the best places to get a mortgage.

“To calculate the overall borrowing costs, we looked at the expected costs over the first five years of a $200,000 mortgage with a 20 percent down payment, including closing costs,” SmartAssets.com reported. “We calculated the ease of getting a mortgage as the ratio of mortgage applications to actual mortgage originations (secured mortgages) in each county.

“We based annual mortgage payments on the annual principal and interest payments for a $200,000 loan in that location, using average mortgage rates in each county,” according to SmartAssets.com.

This story was originally published June 20, 2017 at 3:57 PM with the headline "Manatee ranked 2nd in Florida as best place to get mortgage."