When the Mortgage Loan Officer Comes a Callin’

As the holidays draw near and business slows a little bit . . . seems like the perfect time for mortgage loan officers to jump on the horn and start dialing-for-dollars every top producer Sacramento real estate agent who answers her cell. Which means they probably don’t get an opportunity to talk to very many real estate agents in the Sacramento Valley, except for me. Because I do answer my cell.

The story is always the same. They are calling because they all of a sudden noticed that I close an unusually high volume of homes in Sacramento — much more than the average agent — so they figure, I suppose, that if they could align themselves with a winner, why, they would be a winner, too. Because most of these guys and, for some reason, they are almost always men, don’t have enough real estate business. Some of the mortgage loan officers, apparently, are relatively new to the mortgage loan business.

They are smart enough to figure out that they need to give an agent an incentive to work with them, but not smart enough to figure out that the agent didn’t become a top producer without a strong mortgage loan officer or two or three at her side. We’ll give you lots of seller and buyer leads, they promise. Yeah, because they have so many leads right now that they need to call a Sacramento real estate agent and beg for business, right?

Do I look like a person who fell off a turnip truck? Do they even know what that phrase means?

Why doesn’t their manager or mentor explain that a new mortgage loan officer starting out in the business would do better to match himself to a brand new agent? They can pick and choose a promising agent, a hard-working agent, and then go up the ladder with a soon-to-be top achiever, instead of banging their heads back and forth in the door jamb.

Because there is nothing a Sacramento real estate agent likes better than to answer her phone and find out it’s a solicitation call. I wish them Happy Holidays, but I can’t help them. Besides, I am off to the Florida Keys to continue my real estate business from this year’s winter getaway on the water. I’ll chat with clients while flamingoes strut about in the sand, but God help the phone solicitors.