Dennis,

I have done some commercial loans and the most important thing ALWAYS, commercial or residential is to pay attention to details.

One of the SBA loans I did the gentleman had eight houses he was putting up for collateral. He rented these houses out.

There was a DoT and Assignment of Rents and Leases for each property. THe package was 532 pages long--that is NOT counting his copies.

He had an employee not show up for work that day and between that and the sheer number of pages--it took well over 5 hours.

Most will take 1-3 hours.

Mary Ellen,

Thanks so much for that information. That's the kind of stuff I'm looking for. WOW!!! Over 5 hours! That must have been a killer. I hope you got paid well for that one.

Dennis

Hi, Dennis

Get work through the commercial loan brokers/officers - the independent ones.  The ones at the banks won't hire you.  Skip the TCs.

As in many things, 20% of the commerical brokers get 80% of the work.  Attend chamber of commerce and networking meetings to discouver who the 20% are.  Market to them directly.

The TCs already handle the closings.  You need to come up with something that makes using you as the closer more appealing to the TC.  Since I am a marketing expert, I offer free marketing counseling and strategic marketing plan design. 

You'll have to come up with your own "hook."  People don't see a professional level difference in notaries.  (People see us like they do taxi drivers: we just do the work - there's no difference between us.)  It's not true of course, but you have to live and work with that perception.  So your level of professionalism won't appeal to him.  You are going to have to come up with something that affects his bottom line.  

What can you offer him that the TCs can't?  The convenience of having closings at his office, perhaps.  He can be making $ instead of driving to and from closings.  (This is known as "windshield time.)  Lots of TCs are suffering now and offer to do remote closings.  Find out if your local TCs do this before you decide on a strategy.

In my rural county, there is one broker that does 90% of the work.  I can't stand him.  He often drunk at business events.  He shows up at every business event, has lived here forever, and has the locals thinking he is the only game in town so he gets the referrals even though no one likes him.  So I decided to skip doing commercial loan work.  I hope you are luckier!

LauraV