Buying a home is an exciting journey, but it comes with its share of expenses—one…
Choosing the Right Lender by Looking behind the Curtain
Transcript
Choosing the right lender. Many people when they’re looking to get a mortgage, they don’t realize there’s a second part to choosing a lender that they don’t see, and it could have a greater impact on their mortgage. Due to the fact that that’s the person who decides the pricing. So there’s two components in choosing a lender.
First one is the mo most obvious, the loan officer. They’re gonna tell you your loan options, give you your programs, give your down payment options, your payments, the all the, all the normal things, tell you if you’re qualified pre-qual, you. Those kinds of things. See if the payment fits your budget. That’s the most obvious and that’s what most people make their decision based on.
A hundred percent. What they don’t know is behind the loan officer is the person who sets the pricing. Now, that’s usually the owner of the company or the person in charge of the secondary pricing model. If it’s a larger bank or mortgage company, that person, the loan officers probably never even. But that person is gonna set the pricing on that day for that loan program.
These are also the people that can change. Revenue on different programs. And we talk about the different revenue that certain lenders, which is almost all do on VA loans versus conventional loans and how the rates should be much lower. And they don’t do that. They move the margins up. They make a to big profit center for these, these companies in my links below.
You’ll get to see some of the other videos that talk about this in detail with the variable pricing model and the used car treatment that veterans get, even conventional people get as well. So, That’s the second part you don’t know. So if you don’t know the owner of the company, the person that sets the pricing well, that loan officer could be a great loan officer.
Good person. They could have your best interest at heart. They have no control. They have no control over the pricing. It is 100% controlled by the company behind the scenes by somebody that probably doesn’t live in the city. Maybe not even the state is, I don’t know, hanging out at some second or third or fourth home in Montana or Aspen somewhere.
Cuz they’re probably pretty wealthy from all the money they’ve made from owning this company. So that’s who controls your pricing. So it’s really hard to get that, to figure that out. The only way to find. How honest these people are is anecdotally, look at the difference between their conventional and VA pricing.
Then you’ll know if they’re targeting veterans, making a higher margin on them. There’s a couple of other things I can go over and we can look at things on the web. This is all open information. It’s not something, it’s not my theory, it’s not my, even my idea, I’m just putting a flashlight on an area that people don’t.
Because they only see the frontline person, the loan officer, and they think that person has the control. But the reality of it is they could be a great person and not be able to give you a good deal. Or they might be charging you a much higher profit margin to the company for a veteran loan based on it or compared to a conventional loan.
And they don’t even know it. They don’t even see it cuz that’s, that’s in the secondary market gains. That’s way above their pay grade. So, This is something that’s really important when choosing a lender is knowing how that pricing policy is enforced, who does it, and whether they do a variable pricing model, like I talk about in my other videos, whether they do higher margins or whether they do the high quote in the beginning, and then they give you the best rate, and then the next one is the new best rate.
They check with their manager. The new best rate and into the best rate keeps changing. Obviously somebody lied there. But every customer’s been there. I mean, whether you’re getting a mortgage or buying a car, unfortunately it’s a very similar scenario, which is they try to hide the margins. We’re transparent about our margins.
We’re the same across the board. So you call me once, you call me a hundred times, you’re gonna get the same quote. We’re the same FICO score and the same programs. We’re one of the few lenders that does that and sets us. I mean, in my opinion, everybody should do that. But I set the pricing margins and I set those fairly for a reason.
My veterans don’t get charged any more than a conventional loan. I get charged the same across the board, and this gets passed on to you. You also get the lowest quote on the first, the the first call. This is something people appreciate. So those are the two criteria for choosing a mortgage company, one loan officer.
Two, the secondary market. Pricing model behind the scenes for, at that particular company. That’s the part that’s hard to figure out, and that’s the hard part. Even the loan officer probably has no idea of what goes on behind the scenes, but it impacts you, it impacts your wallet, impacts your rate, impacts your, your fees as well.
Hopefully that’s helpful and helps you make the right choice when you’re choosing a lender, and you can see the full picture as opposed to what just people wanna show you. Thanks.