Guest Post: The mortgage debacle makes me smile

The focus of my blog is to help loan officers become more effective professionals. I get a ton of email asking for advice and lately many of them go something like this.

Hi Todd, I've been a Loan Officer for two years now. I can't believe that all the good loan programs are gone and that interest rates are so high. All of my business is gone and I'm really hoping you can give me some idea of what to do next.

What I would really love to say is, "I think Dairy Queen is hiring". That would be extremely unprofessional, but it makes me laugh to think it. So why the animosity? Well I got my start in the mortgage industry in the early nineties. At the time, not only were rates considerably higher, but there were only a fraction of the number of loan programs available today. Even after the last few weeks, there's ten times the number of opportunities to get a first time buyer into a home today than there were back in 1990. For an experienced and competent Loan Officer, the situation is a struggle. But it's not the end of the world. Many newer LO's are more Refi Salesman than Loan Officer and they never bothered to learn how to do their job.

For a loan officer to succeed in the near future, they will actually have to be competent at qualifying their borrowers. That means it will be very hard to dump a borrower into a stated program when they could go full doc for less (but at greater effort to the LO). It means FHA borrowers will get FHA loans, instead of Subprime garbage. It means there's less opportunity to confuse borrowers with ARM's. It means lots of mediocre LO's are leaving, and that makes me smile.

Todd Carpenter - lenderama

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