What's the Benefit of Using a Mortgage Broker?

Tim Sickinger, Principal, Ladd Financial   

What's the benefit of using a mortgage broker?

When you come to a broker, or when I became a broker, the major reason for that was because I could offer basically a broad, much broader range of products. I mean, lenders have anywhere from ten to fifty products that they offer on their own. Well, if I have forty lenders, I mean, you can do the math. I now have many more products available to any given customer. And everybody's different. You know, some people have great income, some people couldn't show all their income but could show a lot of assets. All the banks had different guidelines. Some of them will accept a higher credit score, some lower credit scores; it really depends on what their appetite is for a particular type of loan.

One of the benefits of working with a broker and working with a variety of banks is that if, for some strange reason, you've locked in a mortgage rate with some bank, and interest rates fall because of a bunch of really bad economic news, it's very easy for us to potentially move that individual to a new lender with a lower rate. We don't like to do that, but, you know, we have to; that's the marketplace. I think it gives customers a little bit of a comforting feeling to know that, you know, they're not just going to one bank and they're not going to be limited to just one choice.

Tim Sickinger is a Principal at Ladd Financial, a mortgage lending firm in Westport, CT.