Loan officers are going to Washington

For a hundred years, the Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA) has moved mortgage policy in Washington. Last Wednesday, it brought 50 loan officers with it. 

Loan officers are going to Washington.

For a hundred years, that sentence had not been true.

For a hundred years, the MBA has been the Todd Bookspan spent more than two decades as a top-one-percent originator nationally. In all of it, he had never once set foot inside a Congressional office on industry business:

“This is the first time I actually felt invited to go there and do something.”

Dave Savage, who chairs the FirstHome IQ board, has spent 30 years building producers. He put the shift in the terms he uses with them:

“Historically, loan officers have not been in these rooms. That has all changed. How do we scale it to hundreds?”

Owen Lee, the MBA’s incoming Chair, put the mechanism plainly afterward:

“Advocacy on Capitol Hill is really about education of the lawmakers, and nothing educates them more than a story from the front line back home in their district.”

The CEOs and government-affairs heads have carried the policy argument for a century. The producers carry the witness.

The 50 producers who went to NAC were witnesses.

Matt Adler closed loans for 570 families last year in Troy, Michigan, through Lake Michigan Credit Union. Dave Savage had pushed him to get on the plane to DC. On Wednesday, he walked into four Michigan offices on the Hill: Haley Stevens, Elissa Slotkin, Gary Peters and Sri Thanedar. He talked about buyer fatigue. A story that had become routine for him over the past three years, first-time buyers who had stopped looking:

“They were tired of getting outbid or not finding homes amongst a small, stale inventory. Buyer fatigue is one of the most telling reasons that the average first-time buyer age increased to forty years old.”

He had braced for lackeys. He found staff who took notes. He went home and told his kids he was proud he’d gone, and that he wanted to be an example to them.

In a California Member’s office, Todd Bookspan sat with producer Jeremy Forcier and walked a staffer through HR 1340, the bill to double the capital gains exemption on home sales, a figure Congress set in 1997 and hasn’t touched. In California, where values have more than quadrupled since, the math has turned punitive for anyone who has owned long enough to consider selling. The staffer listened, then stopped them. Her grandmother, she said, had owned a house forever, the one where her mother and aunt grew up. She was hesitant to sell because of what she’d owe. The house was staying off the market. The staffer wasn’t reading a brief. She was telling them about her family. That is what the room sounded like on Wednesday, once a producer was in it.

Across the Hill, Caroline Frauman, tax counsel to Representative Gwen Moore of Wisconsin, kept Michael Creed and the other Wisconsin producers past their 30 minutes, asking questions. When they stood to leave, she asked if she could follow up.

The Owen Lee, who chairs the MBA next year, sees where this is going:

“We don’t have an established avenue to communicate with loan officers, and that’s one thing I’d like to change.”

A fly-in is an event. A standing constituency is a political force. If the cadence holds, producers become a permanent feature of the MBA’s advocacy infrastructure, walking into Congressional offices on the same schedule CEOs and government affairs heads have kept for a century, and carrying what the briefs don’t:

A name. A district. A family. A rate lock at 6:47 a.m.

The producers are in the room now. They are not leaving.

Bri Lees is a fractional CMO and mortgage marketing thought leader.