RISMEDIA, December 18, 2006—One of the biggest challenges we see in many underperforming in-house mortgage operations is a lack of quality people and/or overcompensated individuals who care more about their personal returns than the companies they support.

Without a great manager on board, the operation will always function with a severe handicap: recruiting quality loan officers will be difficult, leadership will be limited, integration with your office managers becomes more difficult, training and coaching are often ineffective, and the accountabilities noted above are unmanaged.

The following are some key best practices to implement within your operation:

1. Staff appropriately with experienced personnel who embrace your company’s culture and objectives

2. Hire the loan officers that match the culture and needs of each of your respective offices

3. Align compensation to incent the correct behavior and ensure that the loan officer is not the only one making money

4. Continuously train your loan officers on captive lending and relationship building best practices

5. Ensure the accountabilities noted above are implemented at all levels of your organization.

Equally important is ensuring that you have a tremendous amount of cultural synergy between your organization and the company with which you form a partnership. It is just as important as establishing a good culture. A lack of synergy between companies is typically a red-flag for downstream challenges that lead to a partnership’s challenges and demise.

It is essential that both companies’ strategies, core objectives, operational methods, communication styles, etc., are aligned or when the inevitable challenges are faced, they become insurmountable.

The key to your loan officers consistently winning the referrals from your real estate professionals is not through bringing lunches to meetings, it is through building trusted partnerships with them, one at a time. Many of the best companies have begun to successfully grow their business by providing the real estate professionals and their customers’ guarantees for closing costs and on-time closings that are backed with financial penalties paid directly to the customers. This strategy ties directly into the culture and related best practices noted above.

Jeff Mandel is the founder and president of Prism Professional Solutions (Prism). For more information, please e-mail jmandel@prismprosolutions.com(www.prismprosolutions.com).

Source: Real Estate magazine, December 2006

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