MAY 20248MY OPINIONIN MY OPINIONINTHE INCREASINGLY CHALLENGING ROLE OF A MORTGAGE BROKERImagine you've been given $400,000 a month from now. Your 8-year career is getting off to a good start, and you've bought a house in 2015 for $150,000. Fast forward five years, and that home is worth $600,000. Your coworker with whom you share lunch has the same experience, and you invite him or her to dinner. Virtually overnight, you got access to $400,000 in the capital all the country is embarking on one of the most transformative times in recent history. Your coworker sees the opportunity, and both of you are able to pool two others into your newly formed investor group. Focusing your sights away from your city in Southern California, the search starts for opportunities in the eastern states. Pockets in Texas and Florida have become prime targets as prospective property prices haven't grown much since the minimum wage has increased enough to create a demand for new home buyers.You're not the only one looking; millions of others have the same ideas to invest in real estate as they are catching a boom in its infancy. Then, interest rates took a downward trending position, and the first wave of the equity tsunami broke. Lenders scramble to recruit staff to train new hires as they are being brought into the industry on highly incentivized terms. Lenders are somewhat hesitant to act due to the fluctuation and cyclical nature of the mortgage industry. Training new loan officers to handle increasing demand also takes time. They are already six months behind in this process. Mortgage transactions are getting backed up in underweighting, processing, and holding patterns for five and six months at a time. With document resubmission processes surrounding recent laws integrated by the CFPB and under TRID laws, getting a mortgage was frustrating; it was a nightmare. Every agency involved in the process was inundated by approvable transactions and toxic whims that had hoped to get approved in the confusion.Appraisers, title agents, inspectors, Engineers, loan officers, processors, contact centers, production staff, Underwriters, real estate attorneys, notaries, closing agents and many more were not suited technologically nor properly staffed to handle this influx in volume. This gave birth to many Innovative technological advances that we use in today's business framework. As homeowners, home buyers and investment groups were frantic to jump on every opportunity for fear of missing out, the industry struggled to keep up. This created a terrible experience for these clients as they had little to no representation at the venue to provide an astute voice for their transactions.By Douglas Wilkerson, Senior Mortgage Broker, Edge Home FinanceDouglas Wilkerson
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