The below rant was posted on craigslist rants and raves section early on May 1 and seems to be missing but I saved the text to review it again as a reminder to see what comments were posted at craigslist in response because it is so true!

For any Journalists looking for a story, much of what is related below mirrors my own experiences while at a similar mortgage company. All they do is refinances and very few purchases with a similar hiring method and pay structure. I wonder if they will still be in business because apparently there have been reports from ex-employees to the NLRB and the mass of applications taken that cannot go forward because of the drop in values has caused many to quit or be laid off or fired. There's alot of other activities that I won't mention here that would give great joy to the California Department of Real Estate and even Mr. Finney concerning consumers to expose and put a stop to, but for legal reasons I won't name the company here but I would be happy to share my experiences anonymously for the sake of a story to educate the unuspecting job seeker and consumer.

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Rant & Warning Loan Officer 'Job' Postings

This is my rant and a warning to all job hunters: Do not consider working as an employee (ie: as a W-2 employee) at a mortgage company where you are only allowed to use the leads they provide unless you only plan on staying there for 2 to 3 months as a locum tenens until you find something else more viable in terms of stability. I was fooled into thinking I could get a good head start and have a long term 6 figure opportunity coming from an unrelated corporate field that for want of a better term ‘dot bombed.’ I had to learn the hard way about the mortgage business and a friend of a friend who is a mortgage broker who does it out of his house set me straight about how a TRUE PROFESSIONAL operates as a mortgage broker-it’s a lot more than just cold calling to make your own appointments. I’ll go into that at the end of this rant and warning.

The company I worked at is running ads and has been running job ads for the last 4 months at least prior to my being let go for ‘not producing’ when I as well as 5 others of us who were 'top producers' who are no longer there had similar rates of productivity in the top percent of that office and experienced a ‘dropoff’ due to the devaluing of properties and frankly, were given obviously OLD and RECYCLED contact lists so we could be 'offed' before we could get paid higher splits!

I took a position with this company which I will not name since common sense would say that all mortgage companies working this way at this time when the global economy appears to be facing a ‘correction’ of unknown duration-this is nothing like the S&L crisis and it does not have the same ‘feel’ (see the latest news occurring daily, go into google.com for the s&p/Case-Shiller Housing reports, Citibanks’ analyst Scott Peng’s paper ‘Is the Libor broken?’(hint, it’s been ‘broken’ since August 2007 according to the TRUE PROFESSIONAL mentioned above) and the daily reports of declining property values in USA and UK along with all the ARM resets coming up) all mortgage companies have to be experiencing the same drop off in business and more so if they are not pursuing a more diverse range of business including realtors!

You might see this company’s ads as well as a few others like them here on craigslist, careerbuilder, monster, hotjobs, bajobs etc. mentioning any combination of salary (up to $2500 per month)or simply that ‘N/A’ meaning maybe straight commission for now? Or that 'pay is competitive' as an example (once you are a candidate you will get paid a bit less, those without experience in mortgage business close to half of that & even those with experience the 2 I know were only paid $2250 plus only $300 on each of their 1st 2 transactions (even rookies were paid $300 on the first 2 transactions which at $1500 per month adds only an extra $100 per month if it takes you your first 3 months to close those transactions.) I worked at one of these companies for 6 months and was 'let go' since there has been such a drop off in doable deals because properties in the Greater Bay Area are largely going down in value so much that even people who call in looking to avoid their ARM resets (that's Adjustable Rate Mortgages) over 80% of the time cannot be helped because their home is worth LESS than the loan amount on the home.

Working at this mortgage company was not unlike a trial by fire or torture by repetition, take your pick! You are told your first year income can be as high as over $100K then you spend your first couple of days of 'orientation' learning about 'conversational application intake.' For 3 days you will watch a few associates within their cubicles cold call off of lists that show homeowner's names, address/es, square feet, year built, lender name, loan amount and sometimes the loan type. The cold calling is the biggest ‘scammy’ part of the job because you will spend 7 hours of your work day on it and it dawns on you as you are led into the actual calling room-the ‘office beyond the lobby and the conference room’ that you realize this is basically a ‘glorified outbound with some inbound telemarketing job.’ It’s too late to realize you’ve been bamboozled into performing the marketing portion of the job and this is the only way you will obtain business! The ‘some inbound’ occurs in a flurry one week of every month in that office when a ‘sprinkle’ of ‘hot transfers’ comes through-about 5 per rep only on average and it’s the ‘luck of the draw’ who gets them. Inbound from mailers occurs throughout the month somewhat sporadically along with a small stack of response cards from the mailers too. You get in at 9 AM, have customary 15 minute breaks, get off at 1:30 to 3:30 get ‘briefed on goals, group accountability and trained’ to 4:45, have another break and call from 5 to 8:30. You make approximately 150 to 300 or maybe even 450 or so dials per day depending on how many people answer the phone, in October when I started through to about February the number of applications by the whole office of about 50 of us was anywhere from 110 to 186 per day, by the time I was let go at the end of March the number of applications for the whole office averaged 23 to 67 per day (more on this and the lists prior to ‘dispatch’ of perfectly good employees). On the 4th day you are led to your cubicle and your 2 or 3 supervisors (licensed loan officers who will get your applications/if the deals are ‘doable’ and within 1-2 hours’ driving distance will become your first chance to see presentations) will work with you to show you the ‘flow’ of the application, an actual form 1003 loan application. You will learn the standard conversational greeting and the questions and answers to encourage completion of the application by phone including client social security number, date of birth and appointment setting for either phone consultation or in home presentation. The bright pink top border highlighter marked (by yourself and per instruction) sheets were for in-home consultation geographic areas, all others were phone consult only so they were either transferred to one of the supervisors at their desk so they could input it on Calyx, pull credit and workup the programs and necessary disclosure paperwork such as the MLDS (mortgage loan disclosure etc.)

After the first week to a month you will notice people who are no longer working with you because not everyone has the patience to ‘do the drudgery’ and endure the physical discomfort and yes, pain too sometimes. Daily you make your calls, it’s extremely monotonous and since everyone has the same identical desk and cubicle, the ergonomics suck big time and they don’t even provide you with a headset! (I used to work at Comcast and ergonomics was a big issue, your chair, computer keyboard and headset were all ‘fitted’ to you and you alone) so I know that everything at this mortgage company was incorrect when it came to ergonomics-I was seriously sore every day after about the first 2 months working there. No wonder people quit and some said as much before moving along. Daily the 2 or 3 supervisors come to your cubicle and circulate as well to supervise and ‘cheer lead’ you and your quadrant and the whole office. If you are ‘in call’ and don’t demonstrate enough control over the conversation they will listen in on you and state the rebuttal responses to the potential client objections. Because there are so many working in such a tight narrow space despite the cubicle walls a lot of the time you can’t hear your client, yourself and to top it all off one of your supervisors is yelling over the din the suggested rebuttal and wonder of wonders THE CLIENT hears everything and you will have quite a number of hang-ups because it sounds like a freaking boiler room which it is because with that much going on and the pressure to keep smilin’ and dialin’ is ever present!

Whenever you take an application with an appointment on it there’s a tally board with four sections on it with a subset of 2 to 3 groupings of cubicle reps to supervisors with your name semi-permanently lettered into the grid followed by the number of calls per each hour of call session, application count and number of ‘lives’ as in live contacts made-you take your ‘incompletes’ those applications that did not turn into ‘completes with appointments’ or your ‘completes’ with a notation of whether an appointment was made if it’s a ‘pink’ lead and because you note the date and time on all applications in the top left corner on a pre-copied grid you note those as you get them which allows for a ‘stretch’ in terms of a walk to the tally board whether you have a ‘complete’ or not and at least a brief reprieve from sitting.

If you ‘make it’ by month 3 and have a minimum of 2 transactions you ‘graduate’ to 35% ‘split’ per deal and you start getting ‘trigger leads’ which have a bit more detail on them, what makes them just a little easier to use is the partial social security number on it so that when it comes time to request it all you say is ‘with the first 3 of your social I can open the file with your preferred programs’ vs. having to request someone’s social and deal with more objections. You go into a more thorough presentation training week that begins on a Wednesday (that way you can study on the weekend and wrap up the following Wednesday-very strange but also consistent with squeezing out any slackers who fail to take initiative and study on their free time.) You are given a booklet of about 25 pages on presentations in addition to the first one which basically instructs you on manually working up a good faith estimate, loan scenarios with and without cash out, some stuff on different loan types including HELOCs, Reverse Mortgages and FHA for example and a whole section on using Calyx and pulling credit. The training includes mock meetings with ‘clients’ your 2 or 3 supervisors who will play-act scenarios similar to what you will encounter ‘out in the field’ multiple scenarios including how to demonstrate and explain the types of mortgage programs, how they work, keeping the program selection narrowed to no more than 3 different types with a max of 4 to choose from, minutiae of full disclosure, what to say as paperwork is signed to get the process going, what to do in terms of ordering appraisal and working with the processing department. Also, they do a mock signing day at the end and you have to launch into it by rehashing client goals for the refinance and/or cashout review of each document and, if the appointment is at other than a designated title company, the procedures for working with the Notary. Since purchase loans were not the focus of this office we rarely had them. During the time I was there only about 5 loan officers had purchase transactions but that was in November and December. I was lucky concerning my signings though, only a few of my transactions involved the signing at the client’s house, most of mine wanted to meet at the title company and not a single one was a ‘crazed client’ as were a few of the ‘mock scenarios’ in training. If you make it through that week you then go on 3 more appointments and by the last one you will have demonstrated before one of the supervisors accompanying you to your client appointment the necessary proficiency to handle the appointment/presentation independently.

Now, here’s where the last couple of months at that company got interesting especially among the top producers with more tenure than myself and with whom we all had considerable respect because we all knew we ‘busted a gut’ to get our deals through. Heck, I have a family to feed so I did the odious thing, I would take my lists home and call all day on most Saturdays so I could have a few applications for Monday to kick off the week. That was soon to change as I began to notice more not doable deals because properties were under-value because the loans were many times greater than the value of the house or the LTV (loan to value) was greater than we could do with NRCC’s (non-recurring closing costs) rolled into it including our origination fee (4.25% of loan amount max for loans under $325K and 2.75% for loans over $325K) origination was negotiable but the way we demonstrated tax deductibility to 100% along with the savings and ‘break evens’ in most cases along with results the client would realize with cashout it usually prevented any objection even at signing since we rehashed their goals again) most clients did not have enough in reserve to pay the costs out of pocket and most just simply want more immediate gratification or simply need to get certain important financial issues addressed such as clearing up credit, buying a new car or something major such as a roof replacement. There were increasing rates of ‘repeats’ of names on my lists, others had them too and, even among those who were ‘let go’ who were not ‘top producing’ they noticed that some of the data was a few years old and more prevalent towards the end. One had a client who said the information was over 5 years old because they had refi’d several times in between. Their property profile bore that out because I got to see the file after that rep was ‘dispatched’ for lack of production-they failed to have 3 presentations in the last month and had no appointments in the first week of the month they were ‘let go.’ So, for that deal, the rep did not get it, their Supervisor/Broker got it and they get 50% plus $2850 per month salary. Anyway, since none of us had any control over who got what lists or any clue as to the aging many times towards the end of a rep’s. tenure the lists were clearly ‘called over, once over, twice over’ just like any old ‘leftover’ they were ‘warmed over, twice over’ and well overdue for the shredder. My last 2 months there was a huge dropoff in productivity companywide, 2 of the top supervisor/broker loan officers left (only Brokers were allowed to be Supervisors by the way.) If you had a real estate license you could work under one and be an Assistant Supervisor with one loan officer trainee. The Supervisor/Brokers could have up to 10 loan officer trainees and could also hire their own telemarketers but it was permitted out of their pocket only. The telemarketers could also work out of their house and only a few of the Supervisors did this.

Anyway, it’s getting awfully wee in the morning as I write this. I meant to mention more on what the TRUE PROFESSIONAL shows is different between what I was doing and what the mortgage business is about. He leveled with me that it’s a business that requires you have a diverse range of sources you contact and that folks who work at places like that never become a well rounded loan officer because they are limited and stunted before they get out of the starting gate. He gave some sites, http://www.mortgagecicerone.com , http://www.mortgageratesreport.com and shared with me the Loan Officer Survival Guide from this guy http://genuinechris.com/ wherein there is a pie chart that shows the percentage of resources a good loan officer needs to be marketing to and which also mentions the high rate of burnout for anyone telemarketing for more than 4 hours per day. It’s also pretty obvious to this professional (who has always worked the business on a commission only basis) and myself that the mortgage company I was with was and is only interested in ATTRITION so they can get more deals and obtain a greater portion of the commission since for every 2 deals done under the new loan officer in training (that’s only $300 per deal plus modest salary of $8.75 per hour) and the Supervisor/Broker the mortgage company rakes in about 60% of the gross origination while they chew up and spit out those without any experience in the business!

So, now you’ve been warned and know ‘the scoop’ also, very few ‘make it’ to Supervisor/Broker and half of them were hired straight in as a Supervisor/Broker bypassing the crap I was doing. So, what am I doing now? Seriously considering getting my Broker or Salesperson license and doing it under the guidance of this friend of a friend or possibly anyone he might refer me to. Meanwhile, I may go back to something related to my old technical field or something related to one of my avocations.

Thanks craigslisters for letting me ramble on my soapbox but hopefully I’ve let some other job hunters know what they might be getting themselves into.