Having Fun Yet?

by: Bill Dolan, CMB, AMP

There’s no question that there are multiple challenges facing the mortgage industry these days, with lenders dealing with lower volume and higher rates while vying for the same homeowner’s business. Simultaneously, costs to originate, close and service a loan continue to escalate with far tighter profits. This upswing in mortgage costs has been fed by compensation, benefits, compliance costs and technology, leaving everybody in a fairly tough situation.

As many of you begin to schedule your off-site strategic planning meetings and address just what the 2023’ balance sheet will look like, it inevitably comes down to taking a hard look at expenses and lowering costs.

The question everybody should be asking these days is: How do I scale up my business while cutting costs and attempting to remain viable in an extremely competitive marketplace?

One possible answer may very well be: Why not replace some of your fixed staff overhead into a variable cost outsourcing several mortgage functions that don’t require a 40 hour per week salary to perform, and outsource those services to SCA to perform the following:

• Monthly HMDA Reviews

• Pre-Funding Quality Control

• Credit and Appraisal Reviews

• Post-Closing Quality Control

By outsourcing these functions, you:

• Eliminate hiring costs, interview time and cut overhead

• Allow your key players to focus on core services to let them do what they do best, and it allows SCA’s experienced and knowledgeable mortgage professionals to do everything else.

• Gain access to a specialized skill set that may not exist in house.

Another area that can be a real sore spot with institutions is the need to hire outside consultants. If your organization is on the fence between hiring an expert mortgage consulting firm such as SCA or managing and implementing a project using your internal resources, here are a few things to consider:

• SCA’s consulting teams have multiple fields (Compliance, Servicing, Marketing, and Technology) of experience and expertise within the mortgage banking industry and can be deployed when needed for a particular project, systems implementation, or any type of review or assessment including upcoming regulatory exams or GSE audits within these areas.

• You may also want an outside eye when making tough decisions. SCA can provide a perspective that having worked with many clients throughout the country on what we have seen work (or not work) before. And given this experience, SCA can bring new and innovative ideas to the table that clients may not have seen on their own.

• Furthermore, some of the problems our clients need solving are extremely important, but they oftentimes, don’t have the manpower or time to focus on them as they’re required to focus on day-to-day operations after all and many times new projects require having to reprioritize their employees key job responsibilities.

• Perhaps the most common reason that our clients hire SCA mortgage consultants is to gain access to a specialized set of skills that might not exist in house and using our consultants, allows your company to bring in that skill set when needed and not have to hire highly specialized personnel that would be expensive. And as a company, you might not have enough work to keep that skilled employee busy year-round.

Why not address these challenges now rather than hearing it from your Board, the Auditing Committee, the GSEs or your Regulators and Examiners. 

For a free confidential consultation, please feel reach to reach out and contact Bill Dolan, Director at (617) 694-2617 or email Wdolan@scapartnering.com