In this article, I will share how you can determine if the loan officer that you’re talking to on the phone because a lot of times you find somebody on the internet and you pick up the phone and you call them how you can tell if they really know what they’re doing and I call it being proficient in the home loan.
So the one thing about VA home loans is that there’s not a lot of loan people who are really proficient at doing them. And I’ll tell you why it’s not their fault, but in the United States,
less than 10% of the US population ever served in the military. And less than 10% of that 10% ever used their VA home loan benefit. So that’s a very small group of people using the VA home loan benefit.
So for a loan officer, the person who’s gonna put together a loan, the opportunity to do a VA loan does not come up very often. In fact, on average, a loan officer will do one VA loan a year. For us, we do 150 VA loans a year. It doesn’t mean that we’re a better company, but we’re more proficient at doing VA because we do them a lot.
I think of it like if you were going to get a car fixed. Honda accord is a car and a Tesla is a car.
But you wouldn’t take a Tesla to a Honda repair facility. They’re both cars, but the Honda guys probably aren’t going to know how to fix a Tesla. Like the loan person who doesn’t do very many VA loans probably isn’t as proficient at doing VA as the person who does them all the time. You want to work with someone who really knows what they’re doing in the world to keep up with what’s going on. It’s very difficult.
They send out these things called circulars. The VA does to update what’s going on with the loans. In 2018 there were over 30 circulars or updates to VA loans. In 2019 there were 33 plus updates. In 2020 there were over 40 and year to date in 2021 we already have 14 updates to what’s going on in VA. So for the person who doesn’t do VA all the time, it’s very difficult to keep up.
So how do you know? You pick up the phone, you call one of those big companies that you see online, how do you know the loan officer knows what they’re doing?
Well, I have a little test that I recommend that people give a call it the proficient loan officer test and it goes like this, you ask the person on the phone a couple of simple questions.
- One of them being if I’ve never used my VA home loan benefit before and I’m going to buy a house, what is my funding fee going to be? If the person on the other end of the phone does not know that the answer is 2.3% off the top of their head, they probably don’t do a lot of VA loans.
- If you want to test them further, say, hey, what happens if I’ve used my VA loan before and in the same situation, what’s my VA funding fee? The answer right now is 3.6%. They should know that off the top of their head.
- You could ask him further, what are my options for paying my funding fee? Off the top of their head, they should know that the funding fee can be rolled into your loan, which is what most people do. You can pay it out of pocket at closing or somebody else could gift you money or give you a credit as part of the loan and pay that funding fee.
- Final question you can ask the person is, how do I get out of paying the VA funding fee? A service-connected disability benefits, if you’re receiving pay from VA then you are not subject to the funding of the and a person who is proficient at VA loans would know that.
So just make sure when you’re talking to the person on the phone, quiz them a little bit, and make sure that the person who’s helping you really knows what they’re doing.
Hopefully, you found this information helpful. Ask questions. Let us know how we can help. Remember I always say the answer’s no if you don’t ask, so just ask.
