Physician Mortgage Loans in Memphis, Tennessee

The Memphis Medical District, just east of downtown, is where the city's teaching medicine sits. The University of Tennessee Health Science Center keeps its colleges of medicine, dentistry, nursing, pharmacy, health professions and graduate health sciences there, and UTHSC faculty and residents staff Regional One Health and Le Bonheur Children's Hospital, much of Methodist University Hospital and the Memphis VA Medical Center. St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, whose pediatric research draws referrals from around the world, sits on the north edge of the same district.

The second thing to understand about Memphis is that it is a three state metro. Tennessee, Mississippi and Arkansas all sit inside a normal commute, so where a physician household actually lives changes the tax return, the school district and the list of lenders who can write the loan. Very often it is the spouse untangling all three while the doctor finishes a training year. The sections below follow the order physicians and their families gave us when we polled them.

What physician families rank #1 · 27%

Cost of living for a physician household

An attending salary covers more house in Memphis than it does in Nashville or in the coastal markets most candidates are leaving, and housing is where the gap is widest. For a household carrying training era debt, that difference is not a lifestyle upgrade so much as breathing room in the monthly budget.

The state line is the wrinkle nobody warns you about. Tennessee does not tax wage income, while Mississippi and Arkansas both do, so a household working at a Memphis hospital and living in DeSoto County, Mississippi or across the river in Arkansas has a different filing picture than one living in Shelby County. Property tax practice differs across the three states as well, so identically priced homes in Collierville, Southaven and West Memphis can carry different monthly costs. This is a conversation to have with a CPA before you choose a side, not after.

Rather than guess at any of it, run your target price with local taxes and insurance through the mortgage calculator and read the Tennessee physician mortgage guide before you set a budget.

Where Memphis physicians work

Regional One Health, founded in 1829, is a primary medical and surgical teaching site for UTHSC, and its Elvis Presley Trauma Center is the Level I trauma center that surrounding counties in Tennessee, Mississippi, Arkansas and Missouri depend on. Le Bonheur Children's Hospital, part of Methodist Le Bonheur Healthcare, is the region's pediatric hospital and a UTHSC teaching affiliate, and Methodist University Hospital is the system's flagship adult hospital.

Baptist Memorial Health Care runs the other large network, with Baptist Memorial Hospital in Memphis on Walnut Grove as the flagship of a campus that also holds Baptist Memorial Hospital for Women and a children's hospital. The Memphis VA Medical Center on Jefferson Avenue, founded in 1922, is another primary adult teaching hospital for UTHSC, and orthopaedics has its own long standing presence in the city through the Campbell Clinic, where UTHSC faculty practice.

St. Jude Children's Research Hospital deserves its own line, because it changes the character of the city for a physician family. It brings pediatric research faculty, international referrals and a research culture that reaches well beyond its own campus, and it is a reason spouses in research and clinical trial work find opportunities here that a metro this size would not otherwise offer.

Poll rank #2 · 14%

Weather and seasons

Memphis summers are hot and humid, the kind that push outdoor plans to early morning or the evening. Spring and fall are long and are the best of the year, and the Mississippi River corridor keeps things a shade milder in winter than the same latitude further inland.

Two weather patterns matter for planning. Spring brings severe storms to the Mid-South, and winter occasionally brings an ice event that closes schools and complicates a call schedule for a day or two rather than a season. Households arriving from the upper Midwest usually find the winters easy and the humidity the real adjustment.

Poll rank #3 · 12%

Recreation and family life

Shelby Farms Park east of downtown is a sprawling urban park with trails, paddling and open water inside the city. Overton Park, closer in, holds the Memphis Zoo, the Overton Park Shell and an old growth forest with trails. The Big River Crossing carries walkers and cyclists across the Mississippi to Arkansas on the Harahan Bridge, which is a genuinely unusual weekend outing.

Music is the other reason people fall for this city, and it is a different tradition than the one two hundred miles east. Beale Street, the Stax Museum of American Soul Music and Graceland carry the blues, soul and rock and roll history rather than the country music industry, and the Memphis Grizzlies play at FedExForum right beside Beale. Barbecue here is a legitimate reason for out of town family to visit.

Poll rank #4 · 11%

Schools and education

Shelby County has an unusual structure. Memphis-Shelby County Schools serves the city and the unincorporated county, and six suburban municipalities opened their own districts in 2014: Arlington, Bartlett, Collierville, Germantown, Lakeland and Millington. Across the state line, DeSoto County Schools serves the Mississippi suburbs. That means school research here is comparing several systems, not one, and assignment follows the address rather than the hospital badge.

Boundaries do not always follow city names and they change, so confirm the assignment with the district office in the state where the house sits. On the higher education side, the University of Memphis, Rhodes College and the University of Tennessee Health Science Center all sit inside the city, which matters when a spouse is finishing a degree or looking for faculty work.

Poll ranks #5-6 · 10% each

Commutes and getting away

Memphis drives well. I-40 and I-55 cross the metro, I-240 forms the inner loop, I-269 swings wide through Mississippi and back into Tennessee, and State Route 385, the Bill Morris Parkway, is the commuter route east toward Germantown and Collierville. The Medical District sits close to downtown, which is why a household working there can reasonably consider an in town address, an eastern suburb or a Mississippi one and still get to morning rounds.

Memphis International Airport is the FedEx global hub, and the passenger side benefits from infrastructure built for far more traffic than it carries. Allegiant, American, Breeze, Delta, Frontier, Southwest and United fly nonstop to cities including Atlanta, Boston, Charlotte, Chicago, Dallas, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, New York, Orlando and Salt Lake City. For a household running board review courses, locums weekends and flights home, a compact airport you can get through quickly is worth more than a longer route list.

What more than 1,000 physician families told us. We surveyed more than 1,000 physician families about what matters most when choosing a new city, and cost of living came first by a wide margin, 27%, ahead of weather (14%) and recreation (12%). In Memphis that ranking runs headlong into the state line question, because the cheapest looking address is not always the cheapest once three states of tax rules are in the picture.

Financing a Memphis home as a physician

Dr. Home Finance is a research and matching service, not a lender, a broker or a financial advisor, so what follows describes how lenders in this market tend to work. Physician mortgage programs are widely available from lenders serving Tennessee, Mississippi and Arkansas. Depending on the lender, these programs may allow a smaller down payment than a conventional loan, treat medical student loan debt differently in the qualifying calculation, and waive mortgage insurance where it would normally apply. Eligible degrees, how long after training eligibility lasts and every other term vary by lender, and nothing is guaranteed.

The three state geography matters here too. A lender has to be licensed in the state where the property sits, so the list available for a home in Collierville is not automatically the list available in Southaven or West Memphis. If you have not settled on a side yet, find out early which lenders can follow you across all three.

Ask about contract based closing in the same conversation. Some physician loan programs allow underwriting and closing on a signed employment contract before the first paycheck arrives, which is what lets an incoming UTHSC resident close ahead of a July start. Bring the contract, the start date and your student loan documentation, price each state in the mortgage calculator, and get matched with lenders serving Memphis.

Hero image: Quintin Soloviev, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.