How Not to Get a Deal Done

In my experience, people throw others under the proverbial bus for one of two reasons:

• They themselves don’t know what they’re doing so they blame someone else
• They don’t understand the intricacies of a situation so they look for an easy scapegoat to give a client an answer and make themselves look golden

Either behavior has no room in today’s mortgage loan and home buying business. Now more than ever before, everyone involved in a real estate transaction from the buyer to the seller to the Realtors to the Title Company to the lender to the mortgage broker have to roll as one because otherwise the deal with go south as sure as I’m sitting here.

Timing and disclosure are everything in the wonderful land of Oz with its new HUD; a sense of urgency must prevail above all. If you wait for a house to fall from the sky before you wake up and work the deal, your clients ain’t going nowhere. It is just not the climate for emails in lieu of direct phone calls and for not picking up the phone after 5PM when a deal is in progress and deadlines are looming.

And whether every industry professional wants to admit it or not, there comes a time when for example, the act of trying to balance the HUD sheet can make one’s head hurt. That’s because there’s a new HUD in town and new rules and it makes for learning curves that can complicate getting the parties to the closing table, so people have to help one another out to literally fill in the blanks and get the job done right for the client. At the end of the day, it is the client that matters most, not ego and attitude.

Every one of us is doing everything we can under extraordinary circumstances. There are a thousand things that can happen:

• Sometimes the lender’s software is not setup to handle the recognition of certain fees under the new disclosure rules
• Sometimes something needed by 4:30 on a Thursday arrives at 4:28 allowing for no margin of error
• Sometimes a fee that the mortgage broker is willing to absorb winds up showing as a borrower’s cost when it should not

When stuff like this happens the team behind the buyer just has to get it to work, it is not necessary to draw attention to the man behind the curtain who is spinning all the wheels racing against time.

The buyer doesn’t need to see all the machinations; the buyer has enough on his or her mind. The buyer just wants to buy their home, we are responsible for facilitating the process. Isn’t that what we tell them at the onset, that we are here to make things work smoothly on their behalf? When did it become about us and placing blame the other guy?

We are professionals; we just have to fix things and not point un-informed fingers at anyone. We stick together and we’ll get it done. At the end of the day, save the drama for your mamma.