Resurrecting the Dead

Today, with all due respect, I'd like to talk about the dead: Dead loan proposals that is. I recently had an interesting interaction with a lender in the network.The lender – let’s call him John – is generally very pleased with Lendicom, in that the hit rate on received proposals is very high.That is, he chooses to “Follow Up” on most of the proposals he receives and initially Declines very few.

I was very glad to hear this, because our reason for starting Lendicom in the first place, was to provide a matching system with detailed and accurate filtration, so as to avoid inundating lenders with loan proposals that they simply would not be interested in.John added that 90%+ of the proposals he receives are initially interesting to him.

That is the good news.The not so good news, John continued, is that of the loans that he chooses to Follow Up on the response from the borrower or broker is frequently silence.John said he would hazard a guess that only 25% respond to his initial query.We discussed a little about why this might be, and came to suspect that it may have to do with borrowers and brokers shopping and not being committed to a loan or to a particular path to a loan at the time they begin to test the waters (in this case through Lendicom).Since borrowers and brokers can submit their proposals to up to as many as 4 lenders at a time, it may also be the case that they have begun a dialogue with one of these lenders and would prefer to focus on that dialogue until they have seen it through to its ultimate conclusion.

Where am I going with all this?Oh yes, about the Dead.The real reason John brought the subject up, was that he wanted to know what to do when situations like this occur.He didn't want to mark the loan as “declined”, but it also wasn't really “in process”.

The answer, as I told him, is to change the proposal status to Dead.When a lender does so, the borrower/broker will receive a notification via e-mail informing them that the lender has changed the status to Dead, and that this is usually because the lender was waiting for information they never received.

Now, it is important that borrowers and brokers realize is that receiving such a notice with regard to their proposal submission to a particular lender doesn't mean that the lender is not interested in the proposal.The Dead can be resurrected.

If you are a broker/borrower and you receive one or more such notices, please tuck them away, and if your initial funding solution falls through or the loan becomes active again, consider e-mailing the lender(s) that marked your proposal Dead to notify them that the deal is back on the table and that you'd like to pick up where you left off.Lenders then have the option to change the status of the proposal back to In Process and to pick up the dialogue again.