While communication between loan buyers and sellers arguably has gotten better since the downturn, Titan Lenders Corp. executive vice president Ruth Lee Lee believes it still needs to improve.
“Quite often, what we find in the industry is people have really an understanding of their perspective.
So when changes are called for and regulations are made, people look at it and they don't understand how that impacts the person they're delivering the loan to. So they have no real empathy with issues it is causing,” she said in a recent interview.
Lee said her company takes a broader view of the mortgage “supply chain” aimed at ensuring it produces quality loans, something the current regulatory environment has heightened the need for.
“The way that the new regulations work is the investor is buying the compliance of every single person, including the loan officer and so, more and more, everybody's in it together.
That might change, but right now that's what it is,” she said. “If you have any degradation of quality at any place along that supply chain, whether it's in application with the loan officer, processing, underwriting, closing, funding, post-closing or delivery.
In any of those pieces, if the quality degrades there it is going to impact the quality of the whole loan.”
Lee views mortgage bankers as having better prospects for business growth than mortgage brokers, but noted that mortgage banking is not for everybody.
“We have a group of people who very much understand origination but they have never understood the consequences of correspondent lending,” she said. “A person who want everything to be an exception, that's not the person to do it.”
The difference between being a broker and a banker comes down to “You have to ask permission to do things,” she said. “When you're a broker, you're asking whoever is the actual lender for permission [to make a loan] and if they say 'no,' the answer's 'no.' When you become a banker, you have to ask yourself.”
