I have been in the mortgage business for more than 20 years and am a bit of myrmecologist in my spare time. A myrmecologist is someone who studies ants, if you did not know. One day, I read about the famous myrmecologist, Ernsto Compli, who had discovered a new breed of ant. I had to have an ant farm of them for my office.
I must tell you about the time they got loose and almost destroyed my business. First, they got into my paperwork. They ate certain words on the template. After that, all my documentation had Compli-ants problems.
Then, I got a call from my local regulator who told me he heard some of my paperwork had compliance problems. I said, “You’re not kidding me, ALL my paperwork has Compli-ants problems!” He said, “I will be right over, it will be fine.” He was not kidding, once he was done, I had to pay a whopping fine.
Compli-ants problems are not just making sure your paperwork is in order. Once loose, Compli-ants problems can quickly spread to other systems. Certain procedures set in place often breakdown, and you don’t know they aren’t working properly it is too late. Let’s take the Good Faith Estimate (GFE) as an example.
We had automated our GFE on our loan origination software (LOS). When the tax rate changed in our jurisdiction, no one was monitoring the system while those pesky Compli-ants started infesting it. Only when we started paying “tolerance cures” did we notice the problem. It would have been cheaper fixing the problem early on, if we had been paying attention.
Now that all my Compli-ants problems are over, I have joined the Williamsburg Ant Society Protectorate. I have started advertising to our membership. Our motto is “Come get a mortgage if you are a WASP.” What could go wrong?
Eric Weinstein worked in banking, on the commercial real estate side until 1991, when he fell in love with residential lending. In 1995, he started a small mortgage company in his basement called Carteret Mortgage Corporation, which in 2003, grew to one of the largest mortgage broker companies in the United States. These days, Eric is semi-retired, doing mortgages by referral only. As he likes to put it, “He is either saving people money per month or helping them buy a new home. What a great job!” He may be reached by phone at :(703) 505-8692 or e-mail
[email protected].
