“What I focused on is keeping our message consistent with our mission in ensuring the greatest degree of integrity among mortgage professionals,” he said. He described a ripple effect with the educational efforts as brokers and loan originators take the knowledge learned from NAMB offerings and put it in practice in their own communities. “That’s how we attract most of our members because we provide something of value they can take back to their states, their customers and so forth.”
Taking on trigger leads
On the legislative side, he oversaw efforts to fight against so-called trigger leads – a widespread practice among the three credit rating agencies. Trigger leads occur when a borrower applies for a loan – at which point a credit report is drawn, triggering an inquiry. Credit bureaus are then made aware the borrower is searching for a loan and can sell that information to various lenders – often leading to a bombardment of calls or text messages to beleaguered borrowers.
“This year, we had our legislative conference in April in DC, and we were able to get the trigger leads bill, HR 2656, introduced by Congressman Ritchie Torres out of New York,” he said. Another group representing brokers, the Association of Independent Mortgage Experts, has also joined the fight against trigger leads but expressed concern over the bill Jones referenced. In a previous interview with MPA, an AIME representative said the bill seeks to ban the practice altogether even while some leads are essential to the process.
“It wasn’t a perfect bill, and I don’t know how many bills start off as perfect,” Jones acknowledged. “We have been trying for five, seven years to get something started,” he noted. “In order to win you have to show up, and NAMB showed up and we were able to get that trigger leads bill started.
“The challenge the other organization had at the time was that the bill included everything, and there are some brokers and loan originators who use leads in order to get business. We were never advocating that it couldn’t be done; we wanted to have an option that you could opt in without having to opt out.”
Source: mpamag.com