Top Realtors track the transaction from beginning to end, knowing that the sharpest hairpins in the road are often found in the loan origination and loan follow-through. Those are the curves that can crash a transaction. You can do everything right, but if your timing is off with the buyer or you put your customer in the hands of the wrong mortgage broker with the wrong "paper" loans, you could lose control of the wheel.

Why not keep control and get paid for the work you already do (plus a little more) by becoming the online lender for your buyers?

Becoming an online lender is work, make no mistake. You’ll be learning another specialty and that takes time, brains, and energy. But the rewards are great. Like attorneys who are also CPAs, or physicians who are board-certified, you can command greater compensation - as much as one percent of your buyer’s loan amount more, all while giving him/her better service and forging a closer client/agent bond.

The pros of becoming an online lender

If you are a broker, you may be looking for ways to add more revenues to your brokerage. Old mortgage arrangements used to mean more overhead and personnel, which hardly solved the problem. Some agents and customers are turned off by in-house lenders, preferring to see if they can get the best rate on their own.

Agents and their customers both benefit from "shopping around" because the buyer can "buy more house." But anytime the buyer shops elsewhere you are endangering the transaction from closing. As an online lender, you have the freedom to tap into a universe of top lenders and their loan products, and even reach additional resources of other mortgage brokers.

Adding lending services without adding overhead is simply smart business and puts you closer to being a one-stop-shop. Why should your buyer/homeowners go anywhere else when they can get all their home-related needs met through you?

As an agent, you may be looking for all those benefits, too, but you may feel you can’t pull it off alone. It’s hard enough to be an independent Realtor without being a mortgage loan originator, too. Can you do it? Yes, you can. Here’s how.

Compliance

Just as you didn’t depend on your broker to get licensed, you also don’t need to rely on your broker to become an online lender. You just have to know how to become compliant and remain so with local, state and federal laws.

By its own definition, The Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act (RESPA), www.hud.gov, is a consumer protection statute which helps protect consumers.

If a real estate broker or agent is compliant with RESPA regulations, s/he may originate loans. If that statement sounds too good to be true, like the IRS’s claim that the organization accepts estimates, it is and it isn’t. The key word is compliant. In order to be compliant, the broker/agent must meet certain educational requirements, be willing to offer certain disclosures, and offer the borrower a wide range of choices, which is easy to do online. Nothing is too good to be true - becoming compliant takes time and effort, but the rewards are great.

Make more money

An important RESPA guideline is that you must earn fees associated with settlement. As a Realtor, you are already doing much of the work to assure that your transaction closes, including tracking the loan, but you aren’t earning the appropriate fees. By becoming an online lender, you can earn the loan origination fee on top of the real estate agency fees you have contracted for with your customers and clients.

Keep control of the transaction

There’s nothing worse than that awful moment when you must hand off your enthusiastic buyer over to a mortgage lender and wait. And wait. And wait. Slowly it dawns on you that something is wrong - where is the buyer? Did the lender find out something you didn’t know about the buyer’s credit? Did the buyer stop off at an open house where the listing agent happened to have a computer-equipped lender on hand?

Current technologies enable mortgage brokers to get instant approvals from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and that’s great - if it helps you hang on to your customer. But it’s bad if the same speedy technology enables your buyer to purchase a home through another agent.

When you become an online lender, you can qualify your buyer at your first meeting with the same technologies available to you as the most sophisticated banking institutions.

You can also proceed to faster closings by tracking and nudging the loan along yourself.

Stop worrying about disintermediation

Realtors are being constantly threatened with low-cost online services that promise to do the same job as professionals for less. The more technology improves, the more buyers can do for themselves, and the less they may feel they need the assistance of a Realtor. Yet, online studies show that buyers are more willing to work with professionals online, and that they prefer to stay with the same professional throughout the transaction. This is true throughout all real estate relationships, whether you are selling homes and offering affinity services such as alarm systems or cable installations or offering lending services of your own.

Serve your customers between the moves

One of the biggest problems Realtors face is the constant challenge of finding new customers. Seven years is the average length of time between the closing and the resale of your listing. That’s a long time to wait - if you get the resale listing at all. If you are a buyer’s broker, the wait is longer, while your seller sells first and then employs you to act as their buyer’s agent.

Becoming an online lender allows you the opportunity to stay in contact more frequently, continuing to serve your customer with interim lending needs such as equity loans or home improvement loans.

The Down Side of Becoming an Online Lender

There isn’t one unless you are afraid of labor. Opportunity often goes unrecognized because it is disguised as work. Becoming an online lender isn’t any different.

RESPA regulations do not allow anyone to get paid without performing the appropriate services. If you decide to become an online lender, you’ll earn every penny.

So how do you get started?

Meet OnePipeline.com - the only compliance/technology/education company to enable Realtors to become online loan originators. Never heard of them? You will.

OnePipeline means business, and it is one of the only dotcoms which has the business model of putting money in the Realtor’s pocket. With a host of marquee names on its board or on retainer including RESPA author and attorney Grant Mitchell, former HUD Assistant Secretary of Housing Nicolas P. Retsinas and Russell K. Booth, past NAR president, OnePipeline has the talent to complete the work that no one else was willing to take on.

Less than eight states away from offering Realtor loan originations in all 50 states, (the company promises those are pending approval now,) OnePipeline has created a REALTORŪ Compliance Program featuring a patent-pending Automated Compliance Engine (ACE (tm).)

The system, which assures that the Realtor or broker/owner is compliant with regulations throughout the entire loan origination process, is accessed directly through each lender’s or mortgage broker’s processing software as easily as any automated underwriting system, providing lenders with the means to compensate Realtors and others for originating loans for their customers.

The engine is constantly fed data from a comprehensive network of attorneys, professional and trade organizations, and various media, which flags the system to update itself for validity, generating the most up-to-the-minute compliance menu.

This information gathering is a cumbersome yet crucial task because of the strict guidelines under which real estate agents can receive compensation as imposed by RESPA.

With compliance and continuing education issues in automation, the next question to answer is how to become an online lender, using the streamlined OnePipeline system.

Editor’s note: for more information, call toll free 1-888-222-8419 or click here.

See Part II - How To Become An Online Lender