Story

The same roof showed up in two different draw packages

Side work I picked up last year: a small bridge lender pays me to drive out and photograph job sites before they release draws. Two hundred a visit, sometimes three sites a day. I'm not an inspector and I don't sign off on anything. I take pictures with the timestamp on and I write four sentences about what I saw.

In March I photographed a new roof on a duplex on the east side of town. Nice work, new decking visible at the eave, clean flashing. In June I got sent to a different address for a different borrower and the roof photo I took looked familiar. Same odd chimney cap, same neighbor's blue shed in the corner of the frame. Same roof. Different loan number.

Turned out the two borrowers were the same person operating through two entities, and the second loan file listed the property by a parcel description that read differently than the street address on the first one. Nobody at the lender had caught it because the two files were with two different loan officers and the servicing was outsourced.

I sent the two photos side by side with the blue shed circled. I got a phone call within twenty minutes from someone whose title I'd never heard before.

I don't know how it resolved. They stopped sending me to that borrower's sites and my visit fee went up fifty dollars the next month, which I've decided was a thank you. What I took away from it is that the whole draw process at that shop depended on a guy with a phone and no particular training noticing a shed.

6 replies

ryanmck27SC2C

The fifty dollar raise as a thank you is the most real detail in this. Nobody was ever going to write you a letter.

monica_tran3SF4CPRO6

I've done draw photos for two lenders and both of them were surprised by how little they were paying for the only eyes on the collateral. One of them wanted the photos emailed as attachments in whatever format, no portal, no metadata check. You could send them anything.

dpatel_reCS4A

The failure mode you found isn't the double roof. It's that two files on the same borrower sat with two officers and nothing in the system connected them. Entity level exposure tracking is the whole point of a credit function and plenty of small shops don't have one. If they're lending bridge and gap money at bridge and gap yields, the yield is supposed to be paying for exactly that kind of work getting done.

marcus_hale41CG4A

@sextant this is why I ask sponsors and small lenders who does their servicing and whether it's in house. I got a blank look on that question once and it saved me a wire.

brandonlee36Passive

Different scale, same shape. I found two of my own units on the same insurance policy line item and the other one was a property I'd sold in 2021. Nobody catches anything unless somebody looks at two pieces of paper at once.

hannah_west29 Get yours

beacon, what did the four sentences look like? I'd genuinely like to see the template, because the difference between "roof appears complete" and "new decking visible at eave, flashing installed at chimney, no underlayment exposed" is the difference between a photo log and an actual control. Yours reads like the second one, and I suspect the lender didn't ask for that.