The Truth upfront is better than broken promises. 

One of the most important decisions you can make regarding your mortgage financing is making sure your loan officer knows what he’s doing.  Maybe it’s just me, but the kid down at the corner branch of the bank that sorta knows how to fill out the application might not be the best choice.   I know that a big part of customer service is ON TIME DELIVERY.   We’ve all heard horror stories of the moving truck parked in front of the house, the soon to be owners scrambling to find a hotel room for the night and for whatever reason the lender isn’t ready to fund the loan.  It might not even be the lender’s fault, but it’s a nightmare scenario just the same, and it happens every day, often because lenders over promise and under deliver.

People that know me know that I’m sort of a Trekkie.  Not the dress up like a Klingon and go to conventions kinda Trekkie (although I did go hear William Shattner speak one time), but I admit I like Star Trek.  Most of life’s lessons have been covered by one episode or another.  In one episode, the original ship’s engineer Scotty, was brought back from the past (he’d been stuck in the buffer of a transporter for 100 years) and found himself onboard the Enterprise E (Picard’s Enterprise from The Next Generation).  The ship was having problems and the chief engineer told Capt Picard he could fix it in 8 hours.  Then he got on the turbo lift (think elevator) with Scotty.  Scotty asked him how fast he could really fix the ship and the young engineer replied he could fix it in 8 hours just like he’d told the captain.  Scotty blurts out, “Oh laddy you never tell them how fast you can really fix it, how else are you going to get the reputation of being a miracle worker if you don’t do better than you tell them”.  THAT is setting expectations.

With almost 3 decades in the business, if I were an airline I’d have a 99% on time arrival rating.  A big part of that is setting the right expectations and being honest and upfront about what I can deliver in the real world.  It’s true, I’ve gotten loans done start to finish in a week, but that’s the extreme exception not the rule, and that was when business was slow and none of my staff had much else to do.  Speaking of staff, sometimes in the lending universe, especially at a support staff level, it’s easy to forget that these “borrowers” are real people.  They really do have furniture on a truck, they really do have other transactions involved, they really do have kids in the back seat without a home to go to, and they really do need to close today because they have to go out of town on business the next day.  These are real people leading real lives, not just a bunch of paperwork in a file folder.  A good loan officer never let’s his staff forget that.

For many years, 16 to be exact, I was a  “direct endorsement” underwriter, I know the game.  When I do a “pre approval” it’s the real deal and not just a good guess on whether or not a loan will be approved.  I’m upfront honest.  I don’t tease with low rates just to get you in the door.  I’ve lost a few deals because of that only to have the borrower call me a few weeks later and tell me their new lender mislead them.  Having the correct information early and often makes life a lot easier and buying a home a lot less stressful.