Mortgage 101 – Inside the Mortgage Broker’s Office

Clinton Wilkins and Dan Ahlstrand discuss the process of working with a mortgage broker, emphasizing the importance of pre-approval and the role of realtors.

Dan Ahlstrand
Welcome back to Mortgage 101. He’s Clinton Wilkins. I’m Dan Ahlstrand. This is our August edition. It’s summertime, the dog days of summer, as they call it, as people are sitting on their patios, perhaps, or out at the cottage, or at the beach, listening to us on the podcast. Of course, and we’re giving some really good information. I think this month, to maybe get you into the, and we’re doing selfies.

Clinton Wilkins
I mean, why not.

Dan Ahlstrand
Perhaps if you’re looking to get into the market in the fall, or maybe it’s time to refinance, or you want to maybe upgrade, or something along those lines. Clinton, we’ve we’ve we’ve talked a lot about mortgage brokers and why there’s an advantage to speaking with Clinton or members of the team, but what is that experience like? What is it like when I finally make the decision that I’m going to buy a house, and I’m going to go and see Clinton? I walk into your office and what happens?

Clinton Wilkins
Well, you’d make an appointment first because we’re not really set up for walk-ins. I mean, you could walk in, but we probably have to make an appointment for you anyway. Right. So typically, what we do is you talk to our frontline folks, which are client experience people, and they see if you’ve been in the in our system before. We set you up, get your email, your telephone number, and then they ask you some questions. They ask about, like,e your credit. Where are you going to buy? What’s the purchase price? What’s the mortgage amount? So we want to do some screening to make sure that we can get you booked with the best person to meet your needs. Typically, I see a lot of my clients in the office; I’ve seen my clients in Halifax and in Dartmouth. The majority of my clients are on the Dartmouth side. So depending on where the client’s located and where they’re looking to buy, and values and stuff like that, we’ll try to get the tight customer to the right broker because I’m not for everyone. Not everyone’s for everyone. That’s just the reality. So do some screening, and then they send out a generic list. It’s almost like pick your own adventure. So if your situation’s this, you do this. If your situation’s this, you do this, and then we allow people to get their documents together in advance of their call. We also have a secure online portal, and where we’ve it’s one of the only brokerages in Canada. We have our own secure portal where customers have to set up a password and things, and they can do their application directly online. It’s basically like bank-level technology that we have, which is really cool. So customers can actually give us all their information securely, which is really nice. So then we can have the application in advance of the call customers want, or we can just do it the old-fashioned way. Like, I just ask people 50 questions to be like, okay, now tell me about your assets, and I’ll just ask them, be like, okay, do you own a vehicle? Perfect. RSPs, tell me about you. Do you have any other assets, savings, investments, stuff like that? Then depending if the client sent me their documents or not, I’ll review the documents live on them, like live with them on the phone. If they didn’t send me the documents, or maybe if they didn’t send them, send me all the documents that I specifically need, from their pick-your-own-adventure. Then I’ll send a follow-up to say, “Hey, customer, I’m missing this, this, this, and I’ll just wait to get that in before I do my final kind of analysis. Typically, when a customer sends me their documents, I’m reviewing them the same day. So, if a customer sends me the documents up front and we have the application up front, I can give them the pre-approval the same day. Like that’s really how quickly it works. Typically, we can move faster, though, than the customers can. We’re doing transactions all day, every day, and we have a very streamlined machine. As much as we do hold our customers’ hands, sometimes the customers are the roadblock to moving it along quicker. So, but we want to meet people where they are, and we want to meet them at the pace that they want to that they want to work with as well.

Dan Ahlstrand
Pre-approval’s done. I’m pre-approved for X amount of money. I go out. I find a property. I fall in love with it. I come back to you and say, Clinton, I found a property. It’s within my pre-approval. Yeah. Now what happens?

Clinton Wilkins
Well, you want to engage with a realtor. We’ve had realtors on our show before. We had Megan Landry on from The Agency just recently. We’ve had realtors on from Century 21, from Remax, from Royal LePage, and, we we deal with all kinds of realtors all over the place, so we have a very close relationship with many of them. But you really want to engage with a realtor, and you want to sign a buyer brokerage agreement. That’s really, really important. That means that that realtor is working with you. Now you don’t pay the realtor; the seller is going to pay the realtor, so that’s you don’t have to worry about the cost. But that realtor then was going to be biased to you, not to the seller or the seller’s realtor. So super, super important. So many times I hear a customer just calling the listing agent, and that’s who they have on the sign. That listing agent can’t represent you. If you’re going to do a transaction with them, you then have to sign a customer form. So basically. You’re going to not have any agency with that realtor. You’re going to act as a customer, and the realtor that has the listing is basically going to have an agency agreement with the seller. So they’re supporting the seller, giving the seller advice, but they’re not going to give you any advice. You have to make all your own decisions, and then that seller that that realtor is basically going to get paid on both ends of the transaction, even though they’re not giving you any advice, so that’s why having your own realtor that’s not the listing realtor is so important, so so important. This is the biggest purchase of people’s lives, especially if you’re a first-time home buyer. For me, would I allow myself to be a customer? Depends what the situation is. A lot of times, I do need the advice, and I’m probably trying to beat up that seller, and I want to get the very, very best deal. So, nine times out of ten, even for someone who’s been through 20 or 30 transactions personally myself, I would still have a buyer’s realtor on my side because I know how much friction these types of transactions are, and I work in the industry. You wouldn’t say, “Well, not too many people are going to try to give Clinton a hard time. Well, maybe it’s the opposite. Maybe they’re like, “We want to give Clinton an even harder time. He can pay. But they see me living the high life and driving around in my cars and stuff, and they’re like, “Oh, he can afford to pay a little bit more.” No, I want to get the very best deal, just like everybody else wants to get the very best deal.

Dan Ahlstrand
Typically, once you get all that stuff done and you make an offer, how long does the process take on your end of things? That’s a good one to get the money.

Clinton Wilkins
This is a good one. So, commonly, I would say we usually get like seven days for financing. I like 10 days. I like 14 days because sometimes things come up, or sometimes there’s more friction with the transaction, especially during the peak time, which is like April, May, June, July, August. Sometimes appraisals can take longer, so if you need an appraisal of the property, sometimes that takes a friggin’ week just to get that done, and sometimes the customers are not as organized as other customers, even though we’re asking for these documents and we’re chasing, chasing, chasing them around. So for me, longer is better. I never, never, never like coming back to a realtor and saying, “Unfortunately, we need an amendment.” Typically, I know upfront when I get an agreement, yeah, we can meet this time frame. But sometimes when I get it, I say, I think we need an amendment. I’m not going to get an amendment now. Let’s just see how it goes. And if it moves quickly, we’re great. And if it doesn’t, well, we’re going to have to be that bad waiter and come back to the table and say, hey, we need a little bit more time. So I never like getting amendments, but typically I know upfront when we need one, and oftentimes it may even be a negotiating tactic. I don’t know. I can’t. I’m not in the mind of a realtor, but sometimes they do a short time frame, and then they say, “Oh well, we just need a little bit more time.” And they usually will then amend something else, like maybe it’s for the well or septic or inspection or something like that. So for me, I don’t like doing amendments. I like to meet the time frame. I always I’m like, I can meet every time frame without an amendment as long as that client can move. Oftentimes, though, these amendments are caused by delays that we’re waiting for the customer to get us stuff.

Dan Ahlstrand
Mortgage is done. Transactions ended. When do we hear from Clinton Wilkins again?

Clinton Wilkins
Ooh, this is a good one. And did I fully answer the previous question? I might not have. So let’s say maybe like seven to 10 days for financing, but we typically can fund within another like seven or 10. So like it’s usually like three weeks from when you make an offer. I would say typically it’s a quick closing. Sometimes these closings, though, are like 60, 90, 120 days out. It’s really what the buyer and the seller want, but I would say on the quick side, usually three weeks from offer to closing is typically what we see. When are they going to hear from us? They’re going to hear from us really all along the process. They’re going to know when their file is complete when we issue that financing letter. They’re going to hear from us before closing to see if they have any questions, and they’re going to hear from us at closing to say, “Hey, as an FYI, your lawyer has been funded. They’re going to be in touch soon because we know typically when these lenders are advancing funds, and sometimes the lawyers are the holdup too. Like sometimes the lawyers aren’t organized. Like we had a transaction the other day; they got the funds at like 5 o’clock, but the lawyer messed up three of the documents and had to resend them. I only found out at like 3 o’clock there was a problem, and the lender’s like, “We have a problem here.” I’m like, I had no idea. Nobody told me, and I could have helped earlier in the day to kind of solve that issue. But it was an issue on our end. It was just between the lawyer and the and the and the lender. And this lawyer wasn’t really a real estate lawyer. It wasn’t a lawyer that’s dealing with real estate every day. And I think that’s another huge callout. You need to deal with a lawyer that this is their only practice. And there are a lot of law firms around here, even small boutique ones, that are just doing real estate. Even the big firms, they have teams that are just doing real estate, and I think that’s important. In the more rural areas in Nova Scotia, there’s a lot of what I’ll call general practitioner lawyers. Yes, they can fumble their way through a real estate deal, but that’s not their bread and butter. Some real estate transactions are obviously more complicated than others, and some lenders are more complicated than others. So I would recommend going to a lawyer whose primary focus is real estate. Listen to me, and what? We have lots of lawyers that we deal with every day. The lawyer is the last point of contact, and sometimes they can make it the best transaction ever, or they can make it the worst transaction ever, and oftentimes it’s a deal with the skill set, but it’s also the staff and the paralegals because this transaction is just so paralegal-driven. So there are lots of lawyers that we deal with every day that are great, some that are more challenging, but I really recommend, obviously, dealing with a lawyer that’s doing real estate transactions every day.

Dan Ahlstrand
Filling your toolbox for the upcoming fall season, when things get busy out there. You’re listening to Mortgage 101. We’re back in a couple of minutes.