Why a slow market is the best time to invest in broker education
In a market like this, one veteran said the brokers with the best chance of coming out ahead are the ones treating the slow period as an opportunity to get better, because the knowledge gap is where deals are disappearing.
Kimber White (pictured top), president of the National Association of Mortgage Brokers (NAMB), has been originating loans for 40 years and said he has not seen anything like the current environment.
“I’ve been in this business 40 years in October, and I’ve not seen such a secular shift in the market,” White told Mortgage Professional America. “I’ve not seen the rates fluctuate up and down in such an instability in the market. And most loan originators, a huge majority of them, have not seen this kind of market. They don’t know what to do.”
Closing the education gap
White said the danger of entering a market without the right knowledge shows up in deals lost to originators who were better prepared, and in some cases the broker never even knows the deal was there.
“If you don’t know what you don’t know, you’re going to lose deals that you don’t know,” he said. “Things are changing. Underwriting guidelines are changing, condo rules are changing, how you market yourself is changing. The importance of an originator is that people and realtors want, number one, to close the deals. Number two, they want you to answer their questions.”
