Your concern about title transfer is one that I’ve seen discussed but I don’t know much about. I’ll defer to you.
I lived near the epicenter of the subprime mortgage industry at the time it was taking off. I used to pick the brains of friends who were in the business, partly because the numbers made no sense to me. We blew past the affordability index number that marks a market top in 2003 and just kept going.
My friends mostly learned subprime lending at Ameriquest and then struck out on their own. Hired a bunch of people off the streets to write loans- a far cry from your pre-bubble professional loan officers- and paid them $10k or $15k for each loan they wrote. They had warehouse loans from Wall Street which they used to write mortgages. When the warehouse money was used up the Wall Street firm would take those mortgages, bundle and securitize them, and reload the warehouse loan. Wash, rinse, repeat. The Wall Street end was looking for high yield paper, not safe paper. They didn’t pay much attention who you lent to. And there was plenty of fraud.
Good reading ... the faked assignments of mortgage are the cover-up to the preceeding criminal activity ... here are a few to start with ... basically the crimes are being ignored to help the banks screw the people.