Professional wanted.  Must be good with numbers, excellent with people, and willing to work long hours on a straight commission basis.

 As a bonus, you will be required to allow the State licensing bureau to pull your credit report, and if it's not clean for the last 3 years, your license will be denied and/or revoked.  Said credit report will also be made a part of the public records of the State in order to give every identity thief in the world easy access to it.

Also, you will be working in an industry that now has a lower public opinion rating than used car dealers. 

Once you have located a prospect, you will submit your deal to one of the few sources remaining and your file will go in a queue to be handled in order of receipt, often 30 days or more, by which time you will have multiple parties (usually the buyer, seller, and both of their real estate agents) yelling at you daily to hurry up.

In the end, the short sale on the property will be denied and/or the property will go to auction, or something will have changed in the buyer's credit file, or the lender will have eliminated the program you were submitting the file under, all resulting in the same thing.  Nothing.  After months of working the file, it will be placed in your turn-down file and you will not receive any commission for your work.

So, what do you think?  Wanna be a mortgage broker? The Florida House and Senate passed a bill (SB 2226)  that is going to make this scenario an absolute reality at the end of this year.  First estimates were that 50-75% of all mortgage brokers would be out of the business because of the 3 year clean credit requirement (how many Realtors could pass that right now? Or better yet, how many politicians?) but now even the ones with GOOD credit might opt out of the business because they don't want their credit reports made public record! 

The only place that will be left to get a mortgage loan will be... the big banks!  The ones that started all of this mess in the first place...got Zillions of dollars in bailout money... paid their people BIG bonuses... and now they will 100% get every bit of the mortgage market as their punishment.  When a monopoly is created, costs to the consumer go up.  Period.

By the way, mortgage brokers account for something like 75% of all originations.  That means they do all the work, package the file, and all the lender/bank has to do is approve it.  Without mortgage brokers, all of those other steps will have to be now handled by the lenders that are already short staffed (tried to do a short sale lately?) and not set up to handle those types of tasks.

Just my rant for the day!

p.s.  As a Realtor, you SHOULD care about the future of the mortgage industry.  Did you ever get a client referral from a mortgage broker? That would be gone!  Remember when big banks tried to get into real estate?  They're not going to refer clients to you...they're going to try to figure out a way to bring it in house for their own benefit!

p.p.s.  Want to subscribe to my weekly e-newsletter for real estate pros?  Visit www.AndyTolbert.com and you can even download my free report... the 6 Critical Questions that Every Agent Needs to Ask About Short Sales.