Whose Job Is It Anyway?

In my mortgage brokerage practice, we spend about 50% of our time taking loans through the normal approval process. The other 50% is spent solving problems, most of which are "cleaning up" the messes created by others with whom we must interface. 

In every deal in addition to me and my loan processor, there is a listing agent, a selling agent, a transaction coordinator or two at the real estate offices, an appraiser, an escrow officer and an assistant, a title officer, a loan coordinator at the lender, an underwriter, a document drawer, and a funder.

Do you want to guess how many of them are better than average?  50%, and the other 50% are worse than average. The first half are great, but those in other half don't do their jobs well.  They forget to do things or misunderstand something and do it wrong, or take too much time, or forget to tell others what they have done. 

All of those impact the transaction and they all need to be fixed.  You can't say, "Sally didn't do her job, but that's OK." Someone has to get Sally to do what she was supposed to do, and of course Sally is now in a bad mood because she doesn't like to be told she didn't do her job right.

If you get enough of these worse than average folks on the same deal, it can be a disaster. Those people account for most of the horror stories you hear about at cocktail parties. We can fix thing because we are looking out for our clients and we identify future problems before they happen. But on some deals I hear about, there just isn't anyone around to fix things in a timely manner.

When you are selecting professionals to work with you are really selecting a whole slew of people, many of whom you know nothing about. You ought to take great pains to get a good team. If you do, your deal will close on time without all the anxiety experienced by those who didn't understand the importance of competence.