Ensure your financing source employs process solutions that help you thrive

Rob Katz, president, Del Mar DataTrac

As published in Scotsman Guide's Residential Edition, December 2009.

Brokers must focus on providing superior customer service and working with lenders that will still be in business tomorrow. The two go hand in hand.

Brokers' customer service is only as good as their lender's ability to execute and provide timely information. If their lender drops the ball, brokers look bad to their borrowers.

The impact of a lender's operational weaknesses also can threaten business viability. One of the worst things that can happen to brokers is for their lender to go dark with borrower files sitting on their desk. And without stable lender relationships, there is no broker business. Period.

Lenders that are positioned to support a broker's strategies for managing through the uncertainties of the coming year often implement a few technological solutions. It can be in brokers' best interests to work with lenders that implement best practices for paperless lending; rules-driven workflow; and enterprise, dashboard-assisted management.

Exploring paperless partners

Mortgage lending is a paper-intensive process, and document management often has been lenders' Achilles' heel and a stumbling block between them and brokers. Lenders that adopt paperless loan processing eliminate many opportunities for error and increase the likelihood that their loans will proceed to a no-surprises closing.

Adding an electronic-document-management solution to their workflow process lets lenders share, archive, retrieve and distribute all pages of a loan file with the broker and borrower.

For brokers, a paperless loan file composed of imaged documents can be more borrower-friendly. It can allow for quick assessment of missing borrower documents and a more orderly loan-file review.

With a lender using a document-management system, brokers can help avoid situations in which the lender calls after the loan is funded to seek one more borrower signature.

Not only is this embarrassing for the broker, but it can also be inconvenient for borrowers who already have moved into their new home.

Further, paperless loan files can eliminate many problems that affect warehouse-line turn rates and lessen the chance of liquidity constraints holding up funding.

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