Pros
Worked remote Manager was a good guy
Cons
Too many to list, but I will try: - leads come in through a gift card they mail to prospective clients. These people have recently closed on a home loan and the gift is sent to them for $100 and it says call to activate. Needless to say most people are calling in to inquire about the money so right off the bat you are playing defense because these people think it is some kind of scam. It is now your job to make an app out of this lead. Dont get me wrong, these are still leads, but people are already hesitant with this information and the process in general and now to throw in the added component of trying to convince these people we are not scamming them makes things a little harder. - At a regular mortgage shop, closing rates will vary but generally you are safe if you are closing between 10-15% of leads given. ICG expects the same numbers. There is one huge difference though between ICG and most other places, ICG does not have a junior team that is dialing out all days and warm transferring. So at most other shops, if you get 10 leads, you can at the very least say you spoke to 10 human beings that have least heard the word refinance one time before agreeing to be transferred to you. So in this scenario you assume it makes sense that you should close one, if not two, of these leads. Now take ICG, if you get 10 "leads" that is 10 phone calls coming in for the gift card. On average 3-4 of those will be dead airs. Lets say there are 7/10 remaining, out of that 7 lets say 3 just want the gift card (which is being optimistic) that leaves 4 people who may be willing to speak with you. Out of these 4 you are still going to ask your qualifying questions, so if they have a low rate and no equity there really is nothing you can do. You can pull credit if you want just for numbers sake, but its really just a head fake. Lets say you pull credit on 2 of those 4, you better be closing one of them. Long story short, if you can pull an app, at ICG more than any place else you REALLY need to close those apps to have a chance at making money, because getting 10 leads does not mean 10 potential customers. Realistically/optimistically it means around 2-3 potential customers. - Pricing and rates are not that competitive. Dont get me wrong they are not insane but if you are competing with another shop, odds are not in your favor. My team was doing mainly streamlines and IRRRLs and so especially on IRRRLs you need to meet the recoup. I have never been at a shop where they will not lower the costs the necessary amount to make a loan pass and fund. I had a handful where we needed around $1000 off the closing costs and secondary just came back and said they could not do it. Especially if you are going to focus on government streamlines and IRRRls, you need to be ready to lower costs to make loans work, otherwise why even advertise if you can not close loans. On a VA IRRRL, you can expect closing costs to run between 2-5k. I have not done a lot of IRRRLs and streamlines before ICG but that seems high. -processing is ATROCIOUS. This is something that was really hard for me to understand because when I originally got hired we had morning phone conferences with the team and a few times, one particular SVP jumped on the call and said how they are making "tremendous" improvements in processing. This sounded good to all of us. Fast forward three months. Each loan that gets submitted sits in a bucket before being assigned to a processor. At this point, technically, the loan is out of the LOs hands since we have sold the deal, esigned, and sent in the stips. But for some reason a loan might sit in this queue for a week or so. I thought maybe there was a shortage of processors and so they didnt want to give processors too many loans to handle at once, which is totally fair. I never did figure that part out. Moving away from that, fast forward to approved with conditions. This is what really starts to get ridiculous, I had three loans in March sitting in approved with conditions (all of them were approved prior to 3/15), two of them the processor was nice enough to send a welcome email with no further follow up, and the other one (according to the borrower) there was no communication whatsoever from processing. Once Covid-19 hit around mid April fico requirements go up and those 3 loans still have not closed. Because they have not been touched in 3 WEEKS!! All 3 end up dying because they are now below the new fico requirement and that is that. You can make all the "tremendous" improvements you want, but if you cant have processors work on files that are approved, you might want to start there before implementing different strategies. These are steamlines and IRRRLs, they should only take 3 weeks to close, not 3 weeks sitting in an approved queue with no one touching it. - When I mentioned this to my manager he said that he knew processing was having difficulties but there really much we could do about it. My manager's a good guy so I dont blame any of this one him but its pretty challenging when these very basic issues are happening day in and day out and it doesnt seem like there is anything you can do about it. - Last thing. This isn't even a big deal in the grand scheme but I think it sums up the processing behind the scenes pretty well. I was going over my pipeline one day and I noticed a few loans that were sitting in CTC and they had been sitting there for a a few days (around 5 days) I saw who the processor was (and it was the same on both files) so I emailed and asked if we need anything else before we can push this to docs. She replied and said I need to call them to figure out when the notary can come to their house?! First off, I've been an LO for about 5 years, I've never had to schedule the notary. Second, if I had not have emailed asking about this file, how long would the processor let it sit there? At that point, the loan is basically at the one yard line and we still cant get it in the end zone. I called and had the it scheduled in about ten minutes for both files. But the bigger issue for me is just, can they really not call the borrower and figure that one last part out? Is that really so difficult? I dont know, maybe.
