Outside the Box Home Loans

Home Loan Outside the Box?

Not Easy Enough

One of the biggest challenges you will run into while applying for a home loan is when your particular situation is not easy enough.

You cannot listen to a podcast, radio station or watch a TV show without some lender telling you how easy it is to qualify for a home loan with their groundbreaking, state of the art this, that or the other thing. The problem with these commercials is that they don’t tell you the “whole story”.

If you have worked at a big company for a long time, have one bank account, and have perfect credit, getting a home loan should not be a difficult task.

If your loan isn’t easy enough or falls outside of the strict qualifying guidelines for an advertised mortgage, it’s not that you can’t qualify, it’s that you fall outside of their box.

The Box Has Changed

Most big box lenders can only help people that fit into their strict interpretation of what they will accept as a loan loan application.

In order to offer automatic approvals or overpromised simplicity, the lender has to eliminate any qualifying scenario that falls outside of the strict qualifying guidelines that will allow your loan to get approved using their process.  They’ve changed the box.

There are many advances in the lending world that make automated approvals possible as long as your situation is easy enough.

Unfortunately when big companies spend even bigger bucks to advertise their “easy” mortgage process, this new hands off approach often results in many borrowers not being able to meet their strict qualifying criteria, and ending up on the phone with someone in a call center somewhere, trying to figure out what went wrong.

Big Box Call Centers

In order to support the big box lending model, they rely on a very high volume of lead forms and phone calls.  All that advertising is EXPENSIVE! The only way to run that kind of big box lending model is to use call centers to answer your questions.

These phone centers are often staffed with customer service folks, and not necessarily experienced loan officers with a lifetime of experience from which to draw from when trying to find answers to your questions.

Without naming names, I can tell you that most of these companies that you see commercials and advertisements for are using call centers to answer your questions.

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Not all big lenders work this way, but certainly the most popular ones do.

When you spend money to hire professionals, you do not have the types of budgets or profit margins needed to maintain those huge advertising budgets.

Getting Past the Sales Person

If you qualify for one of those super simple automated home loans, that’s great.  If you don’t fit into that box, you want to speak to an expert!

It surprises me how much bad advice is given out to folks with legitimate questions with real financial repercussions if you receive the wrong answer.

Granted, I have a unique perspective because of this website.  I tend to only hear the horror stories of people getting connected with a call center somewhere and being given the worst advice I’ve ever heard.

I am shocked at how it is possible for someone to call themselves a loan professional, and so many in this industry don’t have enough experience to answer simple questions, or enough integrity to say that they don’t know, and they have to look up the correct answer.

You have to get past the “sales person” to someone that has the experience and integrity to genuinely help you through your situation.  Is that too much to ask?  It shouldn’t be.

Answers you Can Trust

All lenders are not created equal.  Most of the readers that find this site because they’ve been researching solutions to challenges, and have been told 10 different things by 10 different loan officers.

We’ve created this resource to help you sift through the endless opinions and articles that may, or may not directly answer your question correctly.

There are several ways to ask questions, and get expert opinions on this website.

  • Submit a Question:  On the bottom of this page, you’ll see a prompt that allows you to ask questions.  These questions come directly to me, and are answered very quickly.
  • Leave a Comment:  Below every article is the option to leave a comment or question.  We see these comments and questions in real-time and the always answered, usually pretty quickly.

In addition to researching your questions and providing you with expert advice, I can also introduce you to a lender friend that I know has experience with your specific situation and can help.

About the Author

Scott Schang

A 20+ year veteran of the Mortgage and Real Estate industry, I am passionate about educating and empowering consumers. I have been writing about consumer protection issues and making sense of complicated real estate and mortgage topics on this website since 2007

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  • Michele Carr Warren says:

    Thanks for sharing your knowledge with us. Keep the articles coming…I read every single one.