As the commercial and residential mortgage bankers of the Northeast meet this week in Atlantic City, N.J., they must be feeling a little seasick. And it’s not from Hurricane Sandy, which barreled through this venerable shore resort last year, leaving the whole city temporarily under water (and we don’t mean underwater loans).
What’s the No. 1 thing on any employee’s mind? It’s how do I get paid?
Mortgage originators have lost a lot of sleep, and maybe clarity, as well over this essential issue since the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau took over the loan officer comp rule from the Federal Reserve, which (probably gladly) relinquished it to the new bureau.
Most recently, though, loan officers had some small praise for clarifications in the reg CFPB put out in January. They were happy that bonuses are now allowed to be paid, even though the maximum is a rather skimpy 10%.
It also seems as if LOs can be paid more for purchase mortgages than for refinancings, and everyone sees refis waning so that’s a good thing.
Meanwhile, Northeast mortgage bankers that service loans must be really seasick from the full metal jacket of servicing rules the CFPB also put out. There are nine of them, and the summaries alone take a daunting amount of time to go through.
There are bright sides, of course. The real estate markets are tilting back upwards and like love and marriage, where you can’t have one without the other, mortgage finance will also perk up. As interest rates drift up, though they have done slow very slowly, refi interest goes down and purchase mortgages, the real lifeblood of the business, will come back to the fore.
The conference itself, run by the Mortgage Bankers Association of New Jersey, seems to have rebounded nicely from the slump which winnowed its ranks during the first years of the housing bust.
The commercial and multifamily markets have been doing well, especially multifamily (the New Jersey show is one of the few in the nation that combines commercial and residential sessions, though they are run as different tracks).
Of course, if single-family lending trends up, multifamily should trend down. A little more seasickness thrown in for good measure.
Can anyone say Dramamine?
