Major banks are heading into the jumbo arena

New money is about to flow into an area of the real estate market that has been hardest squeezed by the credit crisis: mortgages too large to be purchased or backed by Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac or the Federal Housing Administration.

Although heavily concentrated in California, portions of Florida and the Northeast, higher-cost neighborhoods throughout the country traditionally have depended upon the ready availability of "jumbo" mortgages to finance houses. But with the collapse last year of the private mortgage bond market on Wall Street, home buyers, builders and refinancers who relied on jumbo financing were left with few sources - except at punitively high interest rates and huge down payments.

That's about to change. Major banks are heading into the jumbo segment, originating big loans at affordable rates - not for Wall Street bond traders but for their own investment portfolios.

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