All Forum Posts by: Sham Soomer

 Being a mortgage broker specifically, rather than a retail direct lender (Guaranteed Rate, loanDepot)? 

Not a huge advantage, for what you are looking for. I'll break it down by loan type.

Gov't loans, FHA and VA: mortgage brokers have a significant advantage here in turntimes and rate/fee. But these are owner occ loans only, so not for rental properties.

Conventional conforming stuff, FNMA 30YF: This is your bread and butter cashflow rental property product line. There would be some advantage here, a non-trivial pricing advantage but that's not really where the 'action is' for landlord loans. 8 different lenders can read the exact same Fannie Mae underwriting guideline, and interpret it 8 different ways. That's super niche stuff, probably not applicable to 85% of what crosses my desk. But, yes, an independent mortgage broker is kind of forced to learn "what are the eight different possible interpretations of the word 'is' in the mortgage context." Back when I was a retail direct lender, I had to learn only 1 definition of the word "is." But this is really marginal, retail direct lenders can still get it done most of the time (I know, I was one for 5 years).

Subprime 2.0: If you want the wonky stuff (DSCR loans, no tax docs, etc), retail direct lenders have the same basic non-qm stuff, not really any pricing advantage either way either. I get more spam from folks trying to do illegal loans as a mortgage broker than I used to get as a retail direct lender, but you don't want to touch any of that trash anyways, so no difference.

Fun fact. You quit your job and become an independent mortgage broker tomorrow? Boom, newly self employed! You yourself cannot qualify for a Fannie Mae loan for 2 years! I'm in that purgatory personally at the moment. 

EDIT: no, you can't be your own loan officer. That's the next question that's always asked.