April 28, 1985

BUYERS in the market for mortgage financing are being beckoned with tantalizing offers of quick loan approvals. Instead of having to wait a month or more, they are told, they can get an oral or written commitment within days or even hours. But while such an offer could be tempting to anyone who needs to sell or get into a home in a hurry, lawyers are warning borrowers to be cautious. The applicant may have to provide a larger-than-usual down payment, pay an additional premium and provide far more detailed documentation about employment, income and outstanding debts than for conventionally timed financing.

President Reagan will leave Tuesday for an economic summit conference in Bonn to press six other industrial democracies to adopt the policies that made the United States economy the world's fastest growing for the last two years. The 10-day trip, with stops in Spain, Portugal, France and other parts of West Germany, has been overshadowed by outrage over the President's plan to visit a cemetery that has graves of Waffen SS soldiers. Today officials said the White House chief of staff, Donald T. Regan, was seeking to shift attention from the cemetery visit on Friday to a previously announced trip to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp site earlier that day. [Page 16.] Fears of a Recession But the President's trip is also clouded by new apprehensions that the American economy, which pulled other countries from a prolonged global recession, is showing signs of pushing them into another.

DESPITE his pledge of abstinence, Jay Kennedy sneaks out to the garage sometimes to catch the sports scores on a portable television set. But his two daughters, Corrie and Devin, check up on him, feeling the set to see if it is warm. It is ''the reverse of the parent-child trick,'' said Mr. Kennedy with a laugh. The children, he said, ''really don't miss it much. I guess it's been harder on me.''

Wherever he was today, George Steinbrenner must not have been smiling. On national television, the Yankees let a game slip away twice, which is not the kind of thing that is likely to keep their principal owner content. The Chicago White Sox, who seemed on the brink of losing in regulation and again in the 11th inning, strung together five hits in the bottom of the 11th, the last coming on a bloop single by Carlton Fisk that beat the Yankees, 5-4, at Comiskey Park. Yogi Berra, the Yankee manager, called his team ''snake-bit'' afterward, certainly an accurate description in light of today's proceedings. Steinbrenner, who was expected to attend the game, was a no-show, perhaps because of the weather: 44 degrees, windy and rainy.

TO enter the cooperative housing market in New York is to enter a world of shadows. It is a murky place in which buyers and sellers alike must often rely on the flimsiest of rumors and suspected trends to find their way. Turbulent submarkets, like investor demand for occupied apartments in converted buildings, further cloud the waters. The problem, according to brokers, buyers and sellers, is partly a lack of hard information about co-op apartment sales and partly the fact that what information does exist mostly concerns a narrow band at the high-priced end of the market, a segment that may not be reflective of what is really happening overall. Also, some experts believe that because the few published co-op indexes - notably the Corcoran and Douglas Elliman reports, both of which track recent co-op sales, though in different ways - are so heavily weighted toward the upper end of the co-op market that they may distort the perceptions of buyers, sellers and government regulators about the market as a whole. Many buyers and sellers are now saying, in fact, that much of the co-op market has softened - quite the contrary of the upbeat conclusions of both of the most recent of those two reports.