Leading lenders on the recent mortgage rule changes

Readers with delicate sensibilities be wary: There’s an F-bomb in this article

Readers with delicate sensibilities be wary: There’s an F-bomb in this article.

There’s an old allegory about a frog that goes something like this.

Plop a frog into a pot of boiling water and he jumps right out; place him into a pot of cold water, slowly ratchet up the heat and he cooks to death.

At the recent Mortgage Professionals Conference in Vancouver, Jason Ellis, managing director, capital markets, at First National, invoked that very parable when speaking about the recent mortgage rule changes during a lender panel featuring four c-suite lender execs.

He compared mortgage brokers to the frog.

“We’re not the f*cking frogs,” he told the audience.

What Ellis was getting at was that despite the government’s best efforts to place “unintended” barriers in front of mortgage brokers, one policy change at a time, the industry won’t suffer the same end as the ill-fated frog.

The comment was met with a resounding round of applause from the audience. Much to the feigned chagrin of one Boris Bozic, who said he planned on dropping the weekend’s first f-bomb while on stage.

Don’t worry, though, Bozic had his opportunity to have his say.

“You are here because of MCAP, Merix, First National, and Street Capital … we’re in this together,” the erudite head of Merix told the audience.

And that was the overarching theme of the panel.

That these are challenging times, but that lenders have the backs of their broker partners.

“We’re all in this game for the long-term and having good qualifications for borrowers (is a good thing),” Ed Gettings, CEO of Street Capital, said. “We’ll work through. One thing about this industry – we’ve had tremendous change over the past 8 years (and the industry has adapted).”

However, the lenders all agreed the times ahead will be challenging for the industry.

But for their part, lenders seem willing to do what they have to do to continue offering all buyers a viable alternative to the big banks.

“We’ve been working on additional funding sources. We’ll continue to have a full suite of products; that’s the good news,” Mark Aldridge of MCAP said. “There will be pricing differentiation.”