Peace, Love, and Traditional Mortgage Lending

(The following was a post on my Inside-The-Box blog back in November, 2008, and I was reminded of it today and thought it still very appropriate)

Peace, Love, and Traditional Mortgage Lending was the title for this year's Texas Mortgage Banker's 58th Annual Educational Seminar and Marketplace.


Peace......Love......traditional....mortgage...lending....!

LOL. I'm a product of the 60's and 70's and that brings up some serious contradictions; while some were sitting around peacing and loving with their favorite bong in tow, others were fighting for it (the peace, not the bong nor the love). Overseas and on the campuses across America. Peace and Love......and fighting for it along the way. Ahhhh - the good old days.

But what about "traditional mortgage lending?" What is traditional mortgage lending?

Just because we are back to FNMA, FHLMC, VA, and FHA let's don't fool ourselves into thinking there is anything tradional about our industry. Not with automated underwriting, neighborhood watch, credit scores, mimimum credit scores, Uncle Sam's intervention, fraud detection tools, identify theft prevention, HAWK alerts, pulling transcripts from the IRS during underwriting, AVMs.....

Traditional? Not after 7 years of unchecked greed from Wall Street all the way down to main street, people turning their heads all along the way. The blindness and head-turning taken on by many is like the homeless guy, or the beaten pedestrian that everyone turned their head to ignore.

Tradional? I'm not sure we would know traditional if it bit us in the butt, but we are not back to "tradional" (no offense to TMBA). Traditional to some of us include typed 1003s, carbon paper, and a world without emails. Heck...tradional mortgage lending would have to include a time without computers. Now there's an idea - NO EMAILS!!!

If there ever has been a traditional, we have to do much better than traditional. We have to rise way above TRADIONAL. Here in Austin there's an old saying..."Onward through the Fog."

Let's break from the fog. Let's rise above the clouds hovering around us and get a clear vision of where we are going and how we're going to get there.

Peace and Love? Ok, but let's get our heads out of..the sand, and fight for it - that's traditional.