Dec 06 2007
Where Have All The Vultures Gone?
I was at a meeting for the Builder Realtor Council (BRC) in Denver today and they had a presentation on market data. One of the questions was rating the “trust factor” in the marketplace. The most trusted in order were title people, Realtor, real estate attorney, builder and last - mortgage lender. Not really surprised by that news, the truth is, in Colorado we probably deserved to be on the bottom. Until very recently we were an unregistered, unlicensed group. That has all changed and you can read about that in my post on new mortgage laws.
So, the good news is we are cleaning up our act but where are the bad guys going? Two answers: they are staying and just going to do the business illegally or they are heading into the commercial market.
The commercial market is not regulated by RESPA so licensing is not required. I was at a training on Tuesday for a commercial lender/investor that I use. At the training was approximately 75 new brokers in the commercial lending arena who were being trained on how to enter the commercial market. At about 3 hours into the presentation this company did announce that even though they are an industry that is not regulated by RESPA that they were still going to require that all brokers be registered and compliant with the States new laws. At that point all hell broke lose! These people went insane, they were there because they could not or would not go through the registration process. “Other commercial lenders were not requiring this, how could they?”
As I sat there in the training I realized where all the bad people of my industry were going. If you are a commercial borrower or commercial Realtor - BEWARE!