At the beginning of the year, I wrote a column about helping your loan officers plan for 2023. While the concepts are still valid, we need to acknowledge how hard it is to plan in this industry because the future is so uncertain. For example, we expanded our staffs exponentially in the period from 2019 through the first part of 2022. If someone could spell the word processor or underwriter, we hired them and paid quite a premium.
Everyone knew that eventually, these good times would end — and they did. Few predicted they would stop on a dime as they did. Thus, we spent most of the rest of 2022 shedding those hires. Lean and mean has become the key phrase of 2023. Yet, now rates have come down a bit (a few times) and the Spring has brought some buyers out. With staff pared, pipelines are quickly filling up. Should we start hiring again?
Hard to know what the answer is when you can’t predict what is going to happen next month, let alone next year. Certainly, the average employer is gun-shy at this point. And if it is hard to predict what we should do, how do you think our loan officers feel? Should they bring back their assistants? Will you help them? What if things die back in the summer?
Changing Forecasts
We are now over one-third of the way through the year, and you can see the forecasts that came out just a few months ago are already being revised. For example, Fannie Mae predicted a recession to start in the first quarter of this year. After the economy produced 800,000 jobs in the first two months of 2023, they shifted the forecast to a slight recession during the second half of the year.
