It took about three months for 20-year-old Stephen from Durham to find a car that he wanted to take home. But finding the pre-owned black Chrysler Sebring at a smaller Durham dealership wasn't originally part of the plan.

"I went to some other dealerships, and it was really hard for me to actually get a car -- to get approved for anything," he said. "I went to two or three."

Stephen didn't want to be identified by his full name. He said he tried to buy at a Chevy dealership.

"They turned me down ... said I didn't have good enough credit. And I went to another one -- it was a Hyundai. They also said I couldn't get approved for much."

Stephen wound up putting $2,000 down at Boulevard Pre-owned and wound up financing through the dealership itself.

"We've definitely seen more people [who] would be buying from a new car dealership," Boulevard Finance Director Kirk Ollis said. "The credit crisis has definitely caused those major lenders to not have the cash that they would have to loan to people that they would have loaned in the past."

Ollis has been in the business for 12 years and worked most of the time in new car financing. Two years ago, he began working at Boulevard Pre-owned.

"The big difference is people don't have the buying power that they used to because banks just aren't loaning the money the way they used to," he said.

And he said the dealership has also seen another trend.

"We have a lot of people who are bringing us their cars who can't afford to keep them," Ollis said. "It's changed people's lifestyle. They're not keeping cars that they normally would have."

The story isn't all bad, though.

"I would say 99 percent of our customers can finance through a bank as long as they have a sufficient down payment, as long as they have some type of income to repay a loan and it doesn't necessarily have to be a job ... and they have a residence," Ollis said. "The independent banks who have always had their own criteria for doing business -- they haven't been involved in exotic derivative trading and things like that. They still have their own financing. They've got their money. They can still do the lending that they've always done."

UNC Assistant Professor of Finance Ed Van Wesep agrees.

"All credit's definitely not frozen up. I think if you have good credit, you can still absolutely get loans these days, secured or unsecured."

"If you want to buy a car, I think the main thing is that you just have to put money down these days," Van Wesep said. "A couple of years ago you could finance 110, 120 percent of the value of the car. You can't do that anymore."

Van Wesep explained why the larger banks have cut back on lending quite a bit.

"The reason is a lot of their funding sources were securitizations. They would bundle the loans and sell them off to investors. That market is much-much smaller than it used to be. A lot of their opportunities to get funding to finance loans are gone," he said. "They're asking themselves the question: ‘Should we keep money on our books and sort of preserve it as capital against potential losses or should we lend it out?'"

Van Wesep said that smaller banks never engaged in that sort of securitization practices.

"They never got involved in a lot of the risky lending. So they're able to make loans just like they were before and in fact, for them, these are great times because they can borrow money very cheaply and lend it, actually, at a pretty good margin," Van Wesep said.

"They're perfectly willing to lend, but the fact is that these smaller banks always had tougher lending standards than the large ones."

VIDEO EXTRAS
Click on video 1 to hear more from Van Wesep, including what you should look for when getting a mortgage now.

Click on video 2 to hear from Mark Pearce, Deputy Commissioner of Banks for North Carolina.

MORE RESOURCES
Click here to find about more about the smaller banks and credit unions in your area.

Credit Union Division
http://www.nccud.com/queries/directory.asp

NC Banks
https://www.nccob.org/Online/brts/BanksAndTrusts.aspx