He shares his top takeaways from 35 years in the industry
Dean Rathbun (pictured) is a master juggler. For the past several years, he’s balanced his responsibilities as a senior vice president at United American Mortgage and as president of Hawaii-based Avis Mortgage.
Rathbun joined Mortgage Professional America in the latest episode of MPA Talk and shared how he has trained more than 100 loan officers and the crucial skills he has taught them.
“I think it’s persistence and doing the basics,” Rathbun told MPA. “It’s hard because when you first get into the business or even if you’re a veteran in the business, sometimes we’ll get away from the basics. And those basics entail follow up calls, returning all your calls before the end of the day, setting up breakfast, lunch, dinner, coffees, socials, events, getting out to realtor events, getting out to possible financial planning events, not becoming complacent, but making yourself relevant by putting yourself out there.
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“We can all sit behind a desk and these days you can do Zoom calls and you can do blogs and you can do different items. But you really have to do face to face – you’ve got to press the flesh and get out there into the community and make sure that you are doing the relevant items that are needed to be in the forefront of your lending community, wherever it is, if it’s local or if it’s national. It’s important to be out there.”
The 35-year industry veteran also reflected on the lessons he had learned from teaching young mortgage professionals.
“Well, I guess I see the passion in their eyes when they start and sometimes it reminds me that you just have to go the extra mile if you ever watch a brand-new loan officer and they’re working on two deals in their pipeline. I mean, they work on those deals every 45 minutes or every three hours right, and as you become a little busier and you have a bigger pipeline you may push it back - but I see the reminder that it is important for those deals to close quickly. [It’s important] to put a lot of attention into those transactions and work extremely hard to make sure they close in a timely manner.”
You can check out Rathbun’s full interview by listening to the MPA Talk podcast here.
