Pros
The people - I unfortunately had to leave some of the best coworkers I’ve had the pleasure of working with.
Cons
- PAY: you are severely underpaid for this position. Lower hires primarily inexperienced loan officers who have never worked for another mortgage company, so people come in not knowing they could make far more money elsewhere. LOs make 40-50bps per loan and both come with a cap of $2,500 per loan. Keep in mind industry standard commission for LOs is 100bps. - DRAW NOT BASE: $40,000 draw, no base pay at all. They try to act like this is a base pay because it’s guaranteed even if you don’t meet your draw, but believe me when I tell you that NO loan officer makes $40,000. That’s not what this field pays. The fact that they try to act like $40,000-$60,000 a year is normal pay for loan officers is an absolute joke. Most LOs make $100K+. - MANAGEMENT NOT CARING: the only exception to this is my AVP — he is too good for Lower and the reason myself and others stayed as long as we did. - NO BACK END SUPPORT: you are told processors handle most of the back end and they are responsible for reaching out to the borrower for additional items needed throughout the process, yet loans end up dying left and right or take forever to close when you do this. I unfortunately learned this the hard way. Myself and other LOs have lost literally THOUSANDS of dollars in income due to negligence of processors. I have no issue stepping in and helping processors, however about half the processors are terrible at communicating and are clearly either overworked or improperly trained. The amount of times I’ve had processors tell me we need “one last thing” and as soon as I take care of it for them, they then come back “great, we also still need this other thing”…. if you have a bad processor on your file you can basically assume that loan is not going to close. - NOT A PLACE FOR EXPERIENCED LOs: because they hire almost entirely people with no previous experience, no one comes in with standards for how things should be done. I personally came from another mortgage company and was one of few people in the entire Maryland branch with experience. I am absolutely appalled at what Lower tolerates and tells people is normal when it comes to how a mortgage lender operates. It is a complete mess on the back end. If you work in purchase, you’ll probably be okay Ops wise but any other department will have you in tears over the loans lost by other people’s negligence. They don’t care that so many processors are ineffective at their job — they just want you to stop complaining and deal with it. The fact that literally half of the loans you put into your pipeline die speaks volume. - LOW QUALITY LEADS: every person you talk to is shopping with other lenders, so there is a lot od competition. Lower’s rates and costs are not competitive with major lenders. - HELOC PROGRAM: this program is terrible to sell. The pool of borrowers this program benefits is shrinking everyday as rates continue to rise. Most of the time this program results in a higher mortgage payment and rate. The only people this makes sense for still are people with massive amounts of high interest debt that needs consolidated or people who want a HELOC that’s more than their mortgage balance. I was told multiple times that Lower doesn’t need to adjust the leads they buy, yet most of the of the transfers you’ll get you just don’t even want to pitch because you know the program doesn’t benefit them. It reached the point where I just resented taking transfers. It got to points where I wouldn’t even call borrowers back for the pitch or I would just straight up tell them it doesn’t make sense. More and more credit unions/lenders are offering HELOCs despite Lower trying to tell you that it’s a unique product that other lenders don’t offer. It’s not as competitive/beneficial of a product as it was when rates were really low. - LACK OF COMMUNICATION - NO TRANSPARENCY
