Closing Purchase and Refinance Loans: Navigating the Bureaucracy Successfully

July 11, 2011 - PRLog -- Max Weber’s insights into bureaucracies in the late 1800s hold profound truths for citizens of the United States today.  His writings seem especially apropos to the American banking and mortgage industries of 2011.  Weber writes that bureaucracy represents the “irrationality of rationality.”  Basically, humans develop bureaucracies to make processes more streamlined (rational).  However, as the bureaucracy grows, it becomes cumbersome.  The client-centric focus is lost, and the overly-inflated mechanics of the bureaucracy hinder the very processes that they were intended to streamline in the first place.

I love working with my clients.  But I find it shameful and disappointing that relationships between mortgage loan originators (us) and lenders/banks (them) have devolved to the extent that they have in the last three years.

In banking today, we have lost any form of collegial environment.  I find myself at odds with underwriters trying to get them to lend money to qualified individuals.  They are often “afraid of their own shadow” and put up tremendous barriers to closing loans because they fear by making a loan that goes delinquent, they could find their jobs on the line as investors require the banks to re-purchase the mortgages.  It’s unnerving that banks and underwriters have lost their rationality in an attempt to please the investors, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.  And it’s equally distressing that legislators continue to pass bills that create unnecessary blockages while only partially addressing the issues that created the “mortgage meltdown” in the first place.  A lack of understanding creates a lack of rational lending which creates a challenging and often unpleasant lending experience.

Why work with CPK Mortgage?  Because we understand the game: we “get” the bureaucracy.  And we’ll fight through it using our knowledge of what can and cannot be accomplished, to close loans for our clients.