My office has been in business for 14 years doing all types of loans but has had it's greatest success in doing FHA loans.  We use and have used an FHA loan everytime we can instead of sub-prime and this is more important now than ever.  As you may know, FHA loans are not solely credit-score driven but are based on the "whole picture" of the borrower(s).  The running joke in our office is that we are GLAD to see a mid-FICO in the middle 500's because so often we are helping folks with mid-FICO's between 499-550.  We use down payment gift programs and can roll the down payment, closing costs and prepaids into the loan for those folks that need to come to the table with little to nothing.