Insomniac Games
- Peter Parker may be facing his toughest foe yet: mortgage payments.
- In the new "Spider-Man 2" Playstation 5 game, the mortgage on Aunt May's house is revealed.
- I spoke to NYC-area realtors to see if our Friendly Neighborhood superhero got an amazing deal.
Forget the Green Goblin, Sandman, or Venom: Spider-Man's real archenemy may be his mortgage payments.
In the new "Spider-Man 2" Playstation 5 game, a brief scene shows a bill for the mortgage Peter Parker has to pay on Aunt May's modest home in Queens: a whopping $4,419.24 per month on a second mortgage.
Fans online are losing their minds over the eye-watering sum, but is our favorite web-slinging superhero's mortgage loan really that bad?
I spoke to two mortgage brokers in New York City who say our Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man actually got a decent deal.
Major spoilers ahead for the game's Playstation 4 prequel "Spider-Man" and minor spoilers for "Spider-Man 2."
Insomniac Games' "Spider-Man 2" picks up nearly a year after the events of the first game, where an anguished Spider-Man watched his beloved Aunt May succumb to a deadly toxin in order to save the people of New York City.
During one scene in the new video game, Parker and his flame, MJ Watson, return to Aunt May's house in Forest Hills.
Cleaning up, Peter finds a bill for the house's mortgage and remarks that, before her death, Aunt May took out a second mortgage on the house to help pay for a shelter for the city's needy — one Peter is now responsible for. With great power, apparently comes great responsibility to pay the bills.
The game's developer, Insomniac, thankfully gave us a hand in figuring out what kind of loan Peter is facing.
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The home's address is listed as "15 Amfan Avenue" in Forest Hills. That street is fake, but there is an "Ascan Avenue" in the New York City borough with the same listed ZIP code. Based on the video game, it appears that Aunt May's house is a three-bedroom, two-bathroom single-family home.
Using the timeline of the sequel and information on the bill showing the remaining amortization, we can assume the loan on May's house is a 25-year mortgage with the listed 6.89% interest rate.
With 277 months left on the mortgage (according to the video game) that means the loan was taken out about two years prior in what would have been October 2018 in the game.
Insomniac Games
"His Spidey Senses were good. He got a great deal," Rafael Reyes, branch manager with Cross Country Mortgage, told Insider. "Second mortgages typically come at a higher rate. It all depends on what's going on with the market."
"His timing wasn't the best, he probably could have got it cheaper if he had waited a few months," Reyes added. "But he did really well for where the market was at the time."
Angelo Gionis, senior vice president at Contour Mortgage, told Insider that while he wouldn't say it was a super deal, Spider-Man's mortgage was fair — if it was actually a second mortgage Aunt May took out.
If, however, Aunt May had taken out a home equity line of credit instead, Peter Parker would be facing a nightmare of a loan with a rate way too high for what it should have been.
Spider-Man was fortunate. Had his mortgage been taken out just a couple of years later in 2020 or 2021 with that 6.89% interest rate, it would have been a terrible deal.
In those years, the rates were "artificially low" thanks to Federal Reserve intervention to stimulate the economy and the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, Gionis said.
And one thing's certain: If Spider-Man's 6.89% mortgage was taken out today, it would be a coup for a second loan with today's higher rates, the brokers said.
"If he took it out today, he scored," Gionis said.
Unfortunately for the rest of us non-super homebuyers, the housing market doesn't look like it's getting any easier anytime soon, Gionis added.
"The issue is the inventory is low, so even with the rates higher, there's still not enough inventory where the prices of the houses are going lower," he said. "It looks like we're going to have an inventory problem for a while."