Do I Want To Get a Mortgage On My Mobile Phone?

Baby Boomers and Gen Xers may find it hard to believe it’s possible to click around on your smart phone and get a home mortgage now. Most of us remember meeting with bankers and lenders in person, ushered into their elegant, glass-walled offices to humbly request money to buy our house.

We collected reams of bank statements and bills, and delivered them to these lenders in person. Eventually, we began to fax them, and now we scan and email them.

But there was always a point person, a real human being with whom we were connected, one who represented the lender and led us through the process of loan application and closing.

Now we have a phone app. An app is not a person, and that’s disturbing to a lot of people still living on planet earth.

If you are a prospective new homeowner, do you really want to give a phone app permission to access all your financial data for the purpose of an instant mortgage approval?

And if you are on a bank loan committee or working as an underwriter for an established mortgage lender, do you want to completely reconfigure your business to accommodate mobile users?

I’m thinking it won’t be long until it doesn’t matter what we want or how we feel about sharing our credit reports and bank balances with a faceless mobile app. Oh, there may be a face involved, but it won’t be a real, live human being. It might be a cute, talking monkey. Can’t you see it… the friendly, dancing Mortgage Monkey?

I’ve built relationships with human beings for decades, and my networking has been the mainstay of my success as a real estate investor. That goes for locating, buying, selling and financing hundreds of homes, and it’s how I run my businesses and investments today, too.

Humm…. I wonder if I should get somebody to build a Leo Kingston app? Could an app replace me entirely?

Nope. That’s not going to happen.

But it’s definitely happening all around me, in the real estate industry I’ve enjoyed over 40 years. We communicate, shop, bank and get entertained on mobile apps, more of them every week.

Maybe I’ll click around to see how it really works when I use a mobile app to apply for a mortgage. Who knows… it might be a better deal than my lenders are offering, and I can use the information to negotiate with them!