Loan Think

A new sales coaching student of mine asked an interesting question during our first session. "Steve, would you have difficulty selling a $5 bill for $4?" Without hesitation I replied, "No, however I'm sure to encounter several obstacles. With the proper preparation, when given the opportunity, I'm certain to succeed."

Rejected documents from the county recorder create time delays and decreased efficiencies add up to a cost of billions for the industry with the burden of this cost falling on the current holder(s) of the note. The process of preparing corrections, transporting and re-recording documents will cause double, sometimes triple, the work for employees of those firms.

The text of commitment letters is extremely important and must contain the exact terms and conditions of a loan commitment. It will contain all essential specifics. In order for one to generate an effective commitment letter, one must have a clear understanding of all the terms. To get there, it is often desirable to start with a term sheet.

Marc Savitt is someone we call a "homer" - a fan who roots for the home team and in this case that home team happens to be mortgage brokers. Savitt, the former head of NAMB, has long believed that the brokerage sector would come back (at least to some degree) and that we would see a trend toward nonbank and depository loan officers switching over to broker status.

I pay attention to tag lines! After the name of the company or the loan originator, a tag line is a phrase that "fills in the blanks" when it comes to providing a little more insight to what you do or what you have to offer your clients.

Fannie Mae has purposely kept its mouth shut regarding its investment in servicing rights - especially its $74 billion MSR purchase from Bank of America this past fall which cost the GSE about 50 basis points. But its days of being super secretive may be coming to an end.

For every 12 relationships that you systematically market to each year, you can expect two transactions. One will be a direct buyer or seller, and the other will be a referral. Compare that to your marketing efforts towards strangers. He found that for every 50 people that you market to that you don’t know, you can expect one transaction. Which approach makes more sense?

I believe that being a baseball or softball umpire (as I've been since 1984) had skills and lessons that very easily translated into the sales process. After all, new umpires are instructed to sell the call through their mannerisms and use of logic on the field.

Apple co-founder Steve Jobs revolutionized the computer, phone and music industries. But mortgage banking? Okay, so Apple (from what we know) has no designs on mortgage banking, but it's interesting to think about it because the inventor of the iPhone/iTouch/iPad and other gadgets is sitting on roughly $100 billion of cash and securities.

According to Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke in a speech at the National Association of Home Builders International Builders Show in Orlando, "The state of the housing sector has been a key impediment to a faster recovery."