Crystal Ball: The Next 10 Years in the Mortgage Industry
Back in September, the editor of the mortgage industry's "The M Report" publication asked RPM's marketing director if any of our company's loan advisors might want to take a shot at looking 10 years down the road and charting the course for our industry. I was honored to be asked to contribute and the article that follows is the unedited/properly edited one that now appears in December's issue, which can be found online at the link to follow. The feature starts on page 29:
http://digital.themreport.com/i/615609-december-2015-fortune-tellers
I knew the day would come. In fact, I had rehearsed it several times since my mother passed away, far sooner than any of us expected. The contents of the ragged manila folders, pried from the clutches of the family home’s basement and given unceremoniously to me, not so much signaled a passing of the torch, but more a passing of “the stuff.” Reduced to trifles, everything bundled therein mattered, touched and communicated in its own time and place, perhaps even powerfully or historically so. But now, with a glance, I knew what my Pop wished to convey, ‘…Rob, these documents obviously meant something to your mother and me and the time has come to see if they have value to anybody else.’ Not expecting a whole lot, I later succumbed to the obligation to leaf through the cracked, yellowed pages.
A supposed former Gen X singer would have reminded me right about then that “life has a funny way of sneaking up on you,” and out of the collection of abecedarian homework assignments and Camelot-era newspaper clippings fell some mortgage and title paperwork, dated May of 1941. It pertained to my mother’s childhood home, 771 Fulton St. This was the “giant leap” in our family’s mankind, the first real estate owned by a first generation immigrant. I sat there for a few minutes staring at the documents. I could hear the manual typewriter clacking them out, even though it’s unlikely their reader would ever understand many of the words. Just as today, where we assault borrowers with a tangle of incomprehensible disclosures that might as well be written in a foreign language, these documents, to my grandfather, literally were. I tried to envision what his interaction with the bank might have looked and felt like back then. Was there a cold chasm of disparity between mortgagee and mortgagor, or, if we could have turned back the clock, would he have found in his future grandson a caring and diligent, optimistic and informed loan professional? All notions of time travel aside, what he knew then was that buying that first piece of property changed everything for the shoemaker from Eboli, Italy. Whatever insecurities or challenges he’d faced before or during the process, they paled in comparison to the importance of realizing the goal. I picture him at the bank, fountain pen at the ready yet himself starkly out of place, taking control of his destiny by inking a few grave signatures, forking over his down payment cash, then walking out of South Brooklyn Savings Bank a newly-minted first time homebuyer. Mind you, he was also walking out into a world about to tilt on its axis. Just a few weeks back, his second child, my mother, turned one. A few months forward, America would abruptly enter WWII.
Flash forward to 2008. Employment and the broader economy are in a free fall and the housing market is peering into the abyss. Homeowners, having “bought at the top,” throw in the towel. Pessimism abounds. Chinks in the standard-of-living armor begin to appear for my generation and even the Boomers before me. The children of the Great Depression nod silently as if to say, “Told you so.” Real born-in-the-USA Americans lose their jobs and their homes in the span of a few months. In just a few short years, the wisdom of owning your own piece of real estate, even if “they ain’t makin’ any more of it,” rings hollow. To boot, Wall St. and the banking system fail us extravagantly. Stated income, neg am option ARMs, NINJA loans and 100% CLTV --- what appeared too good to be true really was, and guess what? Now we knew better. While some would fare better than others with the prosperity whiplash induced by the Great Recession, all would eventually contend on their own terms with the lessons of the recovery. Which of them was I going to internalize? What would cross my thought/reality barrier only to pervade client interactions from then on? When the conversation between my ears turns to money, I can still catch myself slipping into the impenetrable Calabrian dialect of my Depression-era ancestors. When generations are defined by events; economic, political or global, they color not only filmstrip in one’s mind --- the “where were you” moment --- but also one’s attitudes and beliefs that get passed down one generation to the next, for better or worse.
Over the past couple of years the mortgage industry has spent many a waking hour trying to figure out how “The Millennials” are going to get their housing on. It’s almost as if we envision our slick, targeted marketing efforts waking up these hip, young A.L.I.E.N.S., having them rise, en masse, from their parents’ couches and queue like zombies to fill out 1003’s. We keep playing out this HUD-inspired Dawn of the Dead as a single event and not the culmination of a series of small, nearly imperceptible forays that they make into this still redoubtable undertaking. But just because this new set of buyers has more computing power in its cell phones than the sum total of all the Apollo missions doesn’t mean they’re trying to evade human interaction. On the other hand, I’m not sure they want us crying on their shoulders about the intricacies or inconsistencies of TRID or Dodd-Frank, so at the outset we have to be careful not to rain too intensely on their growing desire to put down roots. Nowadays, I’m less and less surprised to find that even before contact has been initiated I’ve been vetted online. Do I have a history of responding in a timely fashion? What’s my stance on today’s very real concerns about burdensome student loan debt or housing prices that some feel might be precariously close to slipping off another corniced summit? When we, and I mean loan officers, processors, servicers, etc., respond on every level, can we relate to this next generation on their terms? Can we detect the pulse of preconceptions and prejudices that flow from all they’ve seen and heard over the last decade? What is our tone and does it inadvertently convey our own inner sense of sarcasm and cynicism about what’s become of our industry? Or, do we do a good enough job to genuinely conceal our trials in the name of their best interests?
To be “in the trenches” in the mortgage industry these days leaves little time for reflection. Instead of focusing as we’d like on customer service, we spend far too much of our time navigating a circle of regulation-by-enforcement Hell that Dante himself would have lacked the malevolence to conjure. That said, we’ve been left no choice to but to interface with Gen Y, even if we are an aging industry dying to attract new blood. What’s going to save us? I believe it’s the very personal commitment to excellence by many who remain, and every day I witness incredible resourcefulness within our ranks. In a world of fewer options and more restrictions, I see the pros in my company doing more with less on a routine basis. From the taking of an application through to post-funding, real people are going the extra mile to see that those we serve have a great experience. Note that I didn’t only say “get a qualified mortgage.” I believe that 10 or even 75 years down the road, our borrowers will not remember their TIP, but they will remember the tips we shared as real people. Quarks of valuable insight, perspective, and personal attention that dissolved their apprehension in the face of all they have been led to perhaps incorrectly assume. As a veteran salesperson, I can read inflection in a borrower’s voice on the first syllable of a call. I’m keenly aware that no disclosure reassures like a few words that convey that I, like my parents and grandparents before me, have walked in their shoes and that home ownership changed our lives for the better. I can confidently assert that while every buyer’s risks and concerns are real, regardless of their generation’s circumstances, so too is their intent pure, their logic sound and the mechanics of their financing entirely in line with what they expect when they go to make their own quantum leap into ownership with us as their lender.
It’s 2015, and in the last ten years alone, both borrowers and industry personnel have witnessed tectonic shifts in the mortgage experience. It could just be that we’ve been so busy adapting to change that we haven’t stopped long enough to recognize what we’ve transformed for the better all around us. Ten years in the future, I’m banking on the fact that this will be self-evident AND it may even become our legacy. The “Darwin Generation” will prevail, as will housing’s powerful momentum. Until then, I don’t see a lot of us sitting around waiting for an evolution. Today, for one, I am going back into that bank, no matter how foreign a place it may be or become, and I am again putting my signature behind a better future. Tomorrow, for all, that’s always been the real American Dream anyway.
Forza!
Rob Spinosa
Executive Loan Advisor
NMLS: 22343 CalBRE: 01297944
Cell: 415-367-5959 Fax: 415-366-1590
rspinosa@rpm-mtg.com www.rpm-mtg.com/rspinosa
1058 Redwood Highway, Frontage Road, Mill Valley, CA 94941
RPM Mortgage, Inc. – NMLS#9472 – Licensed by the Department of Business Oversight under the Residential Mortgage Lending Act. Equal Housing Opportunity.
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