According to a new JD Power survey, consumer trust in the mortgage industry has fallen slightly after years of incremental improvement. To what do you attribute this change?

Flodin: After the sudden spike in mortgage rates late last year, I think it’s to be expected that people might wonder if lenders are trying to charge them more. In reality, mortgage rates are a commodity, and every lender has to go along with the market. If you go online and search for rates and you see a 1 percent lower rate than everyone else, then that’s likely to be too good to be true. Bait and switch is still out there. If someone comes to me and asks me about a rate they saw online, I can go through the fine print and see what’s really happening. My job is to be a trusted source of information and use my experience to help people gain further clarity. We want our borrowers to make the best possible choices in each situation and end up with the best program, rate and lowest costs possible.

Ali: I believe the main reason is the amount of regulation that keeps hitting the mortgage industry. Many lenders don’t have the platform to deal with the changes. It ends up creating unexpected delays and issues that impact the client. It’s going to yield a bad experience and a lack of trust and result in them potentially losing out on their earnest money or any other factors.

When the industry is growing, the big banks hire a lot of inexperienced loan officers. What happens is they are more like telemarketers and aren’t as well-educated on the guidelines and regulations. It’s hard for that loan officer to articulate to their clients based on what their expectations should be.

If our client has been pre-approved somewhere else, I’m going to break the process down and explain every step to them and what it includes. I push my team and myself to educate our clients. We’re not here just to get a deal done. We want to educate the client and make them understand what they’re getting themselves into and understand the risk layers that are involved with it. From a business-to-consumer perspective, it has been very successful because the clients are trusting me at that point. They understand that my motive is not just to close a loan but to help them and put them on a successful path to becoming a homeowner.

Brouwers: When you look at consumer trust in the mortgage industry and why it’s fallen slightly, it’s because of lack of trust and lack of expertise in the area. Consumers’ perception is maybe a little jaded. If you have a bad experience, whether on your own accord or not, it’s very easy for someone to point fingers and not accept ownership. The whole reason the TRID came into being is to eliminate the finger-pointing so that everybody has to take ownership of their part of a transaction. Lenders aren’t really allowed to make mistakes anymore. They have to own their mistakes from a financial and regulatory perspective.

Consumers are well-informed before they go to the closing table. They’re putting down multiple signatures so that they have a certain level of accountability as well. There were a lot of people who fell victim to their own circumstances or to circumstances that were created for them, so a lot of things are put into place to eliminate that.