What a good mortgage broker does in twenty minutes that months of research cannot

Did he charge you anything for the twenty minutes? A lot of buyers avoid walking into one of these because they assume the meter starts the second you sit down.

Mine does the same thing on the investor side except half the crossing off is about the property, not me. Condition, unit count, whether it's currently rented and to whom. Watching somebody eliminate four lenders in ten minutes is the single most useful thing I've paid for in this business, and I didn't pay for it directly.

The industry change underwriting rule catches a lot of people. Lenders vary widely on self employment history: some want two full years of 1099 income, others will take one year of it plus a prior W-2 in the same line of work. Almost nobody advertises the difference upfront. It tends to surface only when someone with a rate sheet and a pencil works through the file.

The crossing off is the product, quill. Everything else is paperwork anybody can push. Knowing which four don't work before picking up the phone is the whole reason a broker like that has a strip center office.

The printer running behind him was doing work too, and that is worth remembering. People believe the thing they can see happening.

Worth understanding what's actually happening in a scene like that. Underneath most conventional loans there's a set of agency guidelines, and individual lenders layer their own stricter rules on top, which is what people mean by overlays. Same borrower, same file, different answers depending on the lender. That's the entire reason a broker beats going to one bank. Confirm any specific rule in writing with whoever's actually funding, since overlays get changed by memo without notice.

I've been trying to figure out where I fit in real estate for about a year and this thread is the first thing that made a role sound like a real job instead of a title.

Did he show how he gets paid on each of those six? There's a difference between the lender paying him out of the rate and paying him at the table, and it changes what the two survivors actually cost over the hold. Ask him to lay both out side by side before signing anything. If he gets weird about it, that tells you something.

Watching a broker work through lender sheets side by side is worth the time if the option is available. Crossing sheets off looks like intuition, but it's closer to memorized rules, something like two hundred of them, and roughly a fifth are stale at any given moment. That's why a broker checks rather than quoting from memory. It's a fair ask to have him show the comparison both ways before trusting a single recommendation.