[David] Alice, let’s get over to you. Good to have you here as you have been for all 19 years of us doing this thing. Hard to imagine. Or it’s coming up on 19, I think. Sorry to hear. Anyway, Alice, what you have for your report?
[Alice] Since we’ve talked about a few other things, I’ll just the only thing I’ll update folks on today is since we’re in the weeds on underwriting requirements, which believe it or not, even if you’re a consumer or you’re someone who doesn’t deal with this every day, it does impact you. It impacts our business, how much paperwork we have to get, we keep talking about trying to minimize regulations. The loan process has to become easier. It’s done nothing but get more complicated. And I do wanna add one more point back on our discussion on jumbos, and that is, get your loan officers involved. If you’re having a problem in shipping, it’s good loan officers care about the whole process, they absolutely do. I’ve seen this you get them involved with, look, if we’re losing money here because you didn’t get a form, or we’ve gotta, like Allen said, we’ve gotta add this piece of technology that you’ve gotta learn in order to make sure we have a really clean file right from the start. And they start to realize if we’re losing money on the backend, guess what? That impacts the company’s P&L and that impacts your bonuses, right? They go, okay, I get it now. Half of it is, they’ve never seen that part of the business process and they just don’t know ’cause no one’s told them before. So I would, that would be another tip I’d say as far as jumbos, get your salespeople involved. They’re, I’m sure the good ones, we’ll be glad to help. But in order to ease up the process. Freddie Mac did have a memo come out this month, earlier last week. Regarding construction to permanent. They really started to align better with Fannie Mae on documents, but I think they went a little bit further on the good side. So what Freddie is saying now, for those of you aren’t familiar with a one-time close construction to permanent. As a consumer, I want one closing to finance the building of my home, and I wanna roll into my end loan for my long-term financing. I don’t want to have to close twice for a lender. This is higher risk because I don’t get to sell the loan and send it to Fannie and Freddie in the pool until it’s converted. So I have interest rate risk during that window while you’re building. I also have documentation risk and Freddie Mac just aligned more closely with Fannie Mae in moving to that documents can be valid for 540 days from the time that we make that closing, which is huge, that you get huge, that window that I don’t have to reverify that you’re still at the same job, that you still have the same credit. Eight months later when the house is finally finished. So, I do think that Freddie Mac did a great job here. They also said that for assets you don’t need to update them unless there’s a change in funds to close. So I thought it was a good announcement. New construction is one piece of the onion of all the layers that it’s gonna take for affordability and making it easier for lenders to take on the risk. That’s an important step. So that was the latest piece today was Freddie Mac’s memo. Just wanted to give that little tip out there for those of you who are interested in building your new own home.
[David] Yeah, that’s it. That hopefully more and more people are gonna be doing that. More inventory is good. Excellent. Very good.
Alice Alvey, Master CMB
She handles development of their World Class Training program designed to support UHM partners and organizational effectiveness.
Prior to UHM, Alice served as Senior Vice President at Indecomm leading the Indecomm-Mortgage U division, Internal QA and Compliance and SaaS technologies. Indecomm acquired Mortgage U in 2013, where Alice was President/Co-founder, providing training and consulting since 1996. Prior to MU she served as SVP of Operations at a national bank overseeing operations for wholesale, retail and correspondent from underwriting through servicing, and compliance.
She has been in the trenches of mortgage lending operations from application through servicing for over 30 years. Her authoring work in training content, policies and procedures and the FHA/VA Practical guides illustrates her ability to bridge regulatory requirements with day-to-day operations.
Alice has been a weekly contributor to the Lykken on Lending show since its beginning in April 2009 and has made her weekly contributions to 450+ episodes!