Are you a golfer?
Some of life’s greatest lessons have been taught to me on the golf course.
Some time ago, I was playing golf with my 82-year-old grandfather. On about the 4th or 5th hole of our round, I happened to notice that right after he would swing his driver and hit his tee shot, he wouldn’t even wait to see where the ball went, he just picked up his tee and started walking.
“Hey, Gramps — don’t you want to even slow down to see where your ball went?” I asked him.
He turned around and walked up to me and put his arm around me and told me something I haven’t forgotten.
“One day when you are as old as I am and you have been playing golf as long as I have, you are going to realize something… that once you actually hit the ball, you can no longer even see where it is going. So the game of golf essentially becomes a game of hit and hope.”
Hit and Hope Becomes Hand and Hope
Translate that story into today’s mortgage business. Right now for many loan programs, lenders are not currently underwriting loans to their published guidelines. One single case in point is that some lenders are requiring appraisals on VA streamline loans while others are not.
What this means for loan officers is that they can no longer “know” what is going to happen with your file — because even though they may have it structured correctly to meet all of the published guidelines, your file could still be denied or suspended at a lender for something that is “outside of the guidelines”.
Which means, in essence… that a loan officer’s vision is *at best* blurry — and some loan officers are essentially completely blind as to what an underwriter will or won’t approve.
And as we learned from my 82-year-old grandfather, just because your vision is blurry or if you can even no longer see, it doesn’t mean that you stop playing the game.
You just hit and hope.
Or if you are a loan officer, you just hand and hope. As in hand your file to the underwriter and hope that the underwriter doesn’t ask for anything crazy.
Fore!
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- Categories: Approval/Qualification Process
