Here’s something a little amusing about the lending process.  We are in the midst of a couple of re-finances with some of our preconstruction homes in Tucson.  My husband is doing one in his name, and I’m doing one in my name.  We always alternate who gets the loan to cut down on the number of credit inquiries and mortgages that are on each of our credit reports.  Our commercial loans are in the names of LLCs, so they don’t show up on either, but our small-units and homes are split between the two of us.

This one re-fi my husband is doing is a stated income loan.  He’s self employed and in this case he stated his income, he identified himself as being self employed, and he showed proof of assets that were verified through bank statements, etc.  We’re using one of our favorite mortgage brokers to get the loan and today my husband received a phone call from the lender who’s funding the loan.  She was calling for the “VOE” Verification of Employment.

The phone call basically went like this:

Randy: Hello?

Lender: May I speak with Randy please?

Randy: Speaking

Lender: This is ABC Mortgage calling to verify your employment.  What line of work are you in?

Randy: Property management

Lender: Are you an employee or do you own the company?

Randy: I own the company

Lender: How long have you owned this company?

Randy: 4 1/2 years

Lender: Thank you, good bye

One thing I find so amusing about this whole process is that lending is largely about putting checks in boxes.  The woman called, she read her script, she typed in the answers, and she’s done.  She doesn’t ask anything extra, we don’t volunteer anything that is not asked. 

The other amusing thing about lending is that sometimes they can get super nit picky on the details.  I mentioned that we verified assets for this loan, otherwise known as the VOA process (verification of assets).  In this case we sent in all pages of 2 month’s of statements from our brokerage account.  Each month’s statement is 40 pages.  There is a summary page on the front, and then all the detail is double-sided throughout the rest of the statement.  I tried to get away with sending the summary page, which has all of the account numbers and balances on it, but they will not accept it.  It’s a real pain to make copies of double-sided statements, collate it all, and fax it.  So I at least try to get away with less work each time.  Never works.  So we faxed in all the pages as requested.  This time even that wasn’t enough.  They had to call our brokerage house and have them verify the authenticity of the statements.  Our broker had to fill out some forms saying that the statements are correct.  Of course the broker cannot do this until they contact us and have us fill out forms to authorize them to talk to a 3rd party about our account.  And somewhere in the middle of all of this, our broker called me to ask me to call someone at the lender to fax us a form that authorized the lender to request the info from the broker.  And round and round we went.

You would think that the fact that the broker’s logo and special paper is used in the statement would be enough to satisfy the lender that it’s authentic.  Or maybe a verbal confirmation from the broker confirming the information.  Lenders accept much less in other cases - such as a verbal confirmation that you are in fact the owner of your own company that provides you $x in income for example!