Best Practices – Communication

I promised yesterday that we would continue with “communicating with the loan applicant,” yet, I’ll take a different approach than you might have imagined. We’ll come back to the returning phone calls, being up-front and honest, and returning phone calls, straight-talk; demonstrate respect, returning phones, etc.

Today, I want to emphasize Best Practices, Communication, and Initial Disclosures. While this will come up again in the near future, today let’s briefly consider how these disclosures are part of the Communication Process with the potential borrower.

So that you don’t think I’m taking too many liberties by bringing this topic into play here, we invariably find disclosure problems along with customer complaints about “what they were told, not told, or thought they were told.”

If you are a loan officer or processor you should know how to communicate effectively with the borrower. You must know which disclosures are to be sent and within what time frames.

To communicate effectively, you must know what constitutes “3” days (if a disclosure has to be sent within 3 days).

To communicate effectively, you must know if the disclosure are to be signed?

To communicate effectively, you must know the definition of “sent.”

At some point in time, your effective communication will be tested by a compliance auditor; Alethes personnel or state or federal. Do you know how they test to insure you communicated correctly?

Communicating all aspects of the transaction effectively is at the foundation of a good mortgage loan. Proper disclosures are paramount to a good mortgage loan.

References materials include:

www.alethes.biz : go to documents and see compliance folder
Various industry materials available at www.mbaa.org and www.namb.org


At the risk of being blunt, I’m not sure why any hard working and honest loan officer would NOT properly give out disclosures. The disclosures reinforce a great deal of what you’ve said to the applicant. These documents should be used to “clarify” your conversations and if there is a misunderstanding that needs to be cleared up, it can get cleared up now before you get too far into the deal and spend valuable time and effort.

Set yourselves up to win.


Communicate well,

Danny