On every deal that we do, we have got to get better at the business that we’re in. The old saying goes: there are loan officers with twenty years of experience, and then there are loan officers with one year of experience twenty times in a row. What helped me to separate myself from the pack (besides Tony’s advice about returning phone calls) was to DELIBERATELY learn something with every loan that was funded, and to document my processes.
It’s a way to catch trends in underwriting.
It’s a way to figure out where your business is coming from.
And it’s a way to get better almost automatically.
Really simply, at the end of every file (if closed or not) we ask a few questions of ourselves. You can make your own, but the ones I’ve been using are:
- What were the unmet stips after submission?
- What were things that cost us time?
- What things did we have to go back to the borrower for?
- What can we do better every time?
- Is it worth adding to our process?
- What did we do well?
- Did we adhere to our processes?
- What impacted the borrower?
- Overall, how would we grade ourselves?
- How many passes did the underwriter take? (Hint: you want an average under two…30% of the time you should be clear to close on the first pass).
Those are the broad strokes. If you’re a niche player, you might have more details you want. So many loan officers reinvent the wheel on every single loan, and those morons make us all deserve our reputation. (What, you mean I needed my 1003 signed?) That’s not the way to survive at all. That’s a failure path and a way to lose the game in spectacular fashion. Those basic questions was the start of how I codifed my operations manual in 2006. Basically, I had a bunch of loans that didn’t QUITE go smoothly. So I started to wonder why.
If you take responsibility for getting better, and deliberately open your eyes, you will get better. A lot of little ticky-tack things add up. And once your packages improve, you have stories to tell. You can improve your borrowers chances of getting approved at the margins, and have something of value to give. Some people will always see you as a middleman with nothing to add, more people will understand that you’re doing the job that the wholesale channel was intended to do: help buyers close safely and securely.
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