It’s a word or phrase that is quite common these days. Accountable. Gotta hold that guy accountable! Accountability is an issue here! Who’s accountable and who’s not? It seems if you turn on any cable channel and the word is spoken several times during the half hour. Okay, so what? What does that have to do with the mortgage industry? Good question but there’s a solid answer. It relates to where you might get your next home loan.
A lot of the mortgage origination business these days is generated online. There’s no shortage of mortgage rate aggregators who charge mortgage companies to advertise on their site, including interest rates. And unless one of these lenders is a national or regional bank, some of the names will be unfamiliar to you. Someone may be licensed to issue home loans in your state but don’t have a physical presence. Not just the absence of a loan officer but no office.
The loan lead is generated online and you’re assigned (usually) a loan officer who will work with you, quote rates and fees and get your loan documents to the settlement table. That’s all good if the rate and terms seem fair and everything goes as planned. But when things don’t go as planned, and that certainly happens, you might suddenly feel a little lost.
Say you submitted an online loan application to one of these lenders and you’ve just paid for your appraisal. Your loan disclosures soon arrive and you sign where needed and return. Then a couple of weeks go by. You’re still waiting on your loan officer to contact you regarding your loan approval. But something happened along the way. The rate you were quoted is no longer available. Or, the rate you locked in at has expired. You’re more than a little upset, it’s likely you’ll miss your closing date. So you call your loan officer and leave a message.
A day or two goes by and no response. Now you’re really teed off. All those pretty words at the very beginning now sound more feint. No contact. No explanation why your loan application is delayed or even worse…declined. Do you think the loan officer on the other end of the phone feels bad? Do you feel as if the loan officer is going to pull out all the stops and push your loan through? Probably. But what if the loan officer doesn’t? What if the loan officer simply sends your ‘adverse action’ report and grabs another loan application from the pile? This is where accountability comes into play.
If you worked with a local loan officer, either via a referral from your real estate agent or from a personal referral, there is accountability. If a loan officer totally drops the ball, it damages the reputation. The local loan officer has more skin in the game. How so? Top real estate agents refer business to loan officers they trust. That trust is earned through performance. A good loan officer earns a solid reputation for getting deals done. Real estate agents refer specific loan officers who have a reputation of seamless closings. Loan officers know that if deals start to go sideways and fall out, real estate agents will eventually stop referring buyers to them. The referral mine is played out. When multiple deals fall out it harms the agent’s reputation who will then see fewer referrals to them.
A local loan officer lives with accountability. Sure, it’s not to say going all online for a mortgage is a bad thing, it’s just that when things do start to take a wrong turn, you want someone local with a reputation to maintain.
