Aug. 15, 2007 - Do real estate professionals really understand this market?
An incident this week has me wondering. Unless you have been living in a cave for the past 6 months you know that the lending industry is in disarray. The freewheeling mortgage qualifications are gone and we are back in the button down days of 20% down and full documentation. That is just the start. As lenders try to conform to underwriters changing requirements there is going to be a lot of strange requests and cautious double checking.
But from the attitudes I have witnessed on a current transaction you would think that buyers are pulling lenders in from outer space. A lender asked for documentation on a trust and the escrow officer and sellers agent were so insulted that the deal almost fell apart. Where have these people been? Have they not seen the mortgage fraud issues and understood the fall out of the sloppy documentation that has resulted in some of the sub-prime debacle? Have the past few years of easy money in the high flying real estate market made us nothing more than paper pushers?
If we want to help this industry get back on its feet we had better explain to our clients up front that this is a new era and many things will be asked of us that were not thought of even a few months ago.
Education for our clients and now it seems, for our associates is going to be critical. That means understanding more than just our local market. We all knew that the role of the real estate agent was going to change in the future. I think the future is now.
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