The issue is not the size of the average mortgage, but the size of the average Option ARM mortgage. Since those mortgages make up the majority of recent mortgages in some extremely high-priced areas such as San Diego, they are undoubtedly much larger than the national average mortgage. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to find out they averaged over $400K, or even over $600K, given that the median house price for the last couple of years in San Diego is higher than that, and that these mortgages have recently been used mostly for “affordability”, i.e., for people who couldn’t afford those houses and had almost no money to put down.
