Re: help this new mortgage loan officer

>Hello!
I used to be a loan officer. I worked for 2 different brokers. We worked with people with bad credit and only did refinancing of 1st mortgages and sold 2nds. Here it is in a nutshell as a broker. The company typically has a commission schedule based off of the amount of origination fees that you charge. The 2nd company I worked for gave you half of everything you closed. THe other one didn't give you half until after $7500. Their commission structures are all different.
Our company had telemarketers and did the usual newspaper advertising. We would get leads for potential customers. We would call them, set up an appointment (we usually did face to face at their home), review their credit, find out what the loan was for whether paying off bills or whatever.
We would then take their loan info and submit it to various banks we worked with. Typically about 7-10 different ones. You get the feel for what each bank likes in an application. You receive a few denials and a few acceptances.
You tell the customer what kind of a deal you can get and find out if they want the loan or not.
If they choose to do the loan, you add an origination fee which can be up to 10% I believe, it was when I did loans. I typically did about 5-7%. You then had the appraisal completed and then closed the loan. Say the loan is for 25K, and you charge $1,000 as the origination fee, you would make about $500 and the company would keep $500. There were some months where I made a lot of money and some where I didn't. You could also make money through "the back end".
It's a sales job because you have to sell the mortgage. Sometimes people like the loan and then they rescind after the close (they had 3 days). This meant that you lost the deal and you got stuck paying for the $300 appraisal fee. Another thing that happended was that they would lie about things, like $40K income tax liens on their property that they "forgot" to tell you or they would quit their job within days of the closing and you needed their income to work the loan to match the net-debt ratio. These things could easily disqualify a loan application.
I personally didn't enjoy it because I was an independent contractor, I had to handle my own taxes. The health insurance was too expensive and we were straight commission so it was feast or famine. Some months you did terrible while others you could do really well.
My supervisor made $150K per year at it so it was his calling. He showed me some of his paychecks. There were coworkers that made great money and if you didn't you were out. It's a tough and competitive business but their is money to be made if you are good at it. Being a good salesperson helps because competitors are trying to sell them also.