Hyper Mortgage Training

After spending 40 years in the mortgage industry, Margaret White said she “felt the industry wasn’t teaching the basics like they had in years past” and set out to change that with training courses.

“Having been a manager for Wells Fargo and several other companies … I’ve been to many training programs” White told MortgageDaily.com.

White, who operates online at www.MargaretWhite.com, says her resume also includes a stint as one of the first approved Fannie Mae underwriters, membership on the committee that designed the 1003 application and the training of thousands of loan officers and operations teams.

She hired a firm to help her design a mortgage-training course for online users that incorporates auditory, visual, and textual learning to reach each individual based on how they learn best.

“Different people learn in different ways,” said Larry Giesel, who helped White develop the program. “The approach is guaranteed to resonate with everyone’s favorite way to learn.”

Cognitive science research has proven that when both sides of the brain are engaged … the Cerebral Cortex is also stimulated, effectively increasing the learning ‘bandwidth’ and supercharging the learning process,” Giesel continued.

Giesel told MortgageDaily.com that the user purchases a one-year license for the program and has unlimited access to it for future reference, helping to relieve training obligations and time demands normally expected of the company manager.

White, who is the featured speaker in the training program, said she felt the responsibility to train employee’s properly lies in the hands of the lender and pointed out that good training leads a higher retention rate.

White’s training program is unique to the industry in that it covers the process comprehensively from application through reading an appraisal, Rick Ryan, VP of Sales for Countrywide Home Loans told MortgageDaily.com.

“Anybody new or in the business for a year or two would benefit,” Ryan said. “It’s a course that gives you all the basics; there are loan officers that have been in the business for 15 years and (still) not know what an APR is.”

Mary Reilly, a loan originator for Roddel Mortgage Company said she has seen a lot of training courses in her business career spanning 30 years and told MortgageDaily.com she felt that White’s program was “very innovative and creative.”

“Margaret has put together an incredible way to learn that is easy to understand,” Reilly said. “This is a woman speaking from 40 years worth of experience; you actually have someone who is a leader in the industry telling it like it really is — it’s not a canned presentation.”

Reilly said she also appreciated that quiz questions answered incorrectly are followed-up with White reiterating the topic in question so the user can learn why the answer was wrong.

Countrywide’s Ryan, an industry veteran himself, said he liked the fact that the course wasn’t “just a slide show,” and that “you can test yourself and see what your scores are.”

Course progress is monitored and updated reports are e-mailed to the user and also to the employee’s supervisor to ensure the employee is completing the course.

There are 12 modules in the training program that cover everything from loan origination, processing, understanding appraisals, credit reports and title insurance to underwriting concepts and mortgage marketing.

Each segment is followed up with a timed quiz to evaluate the user’s comprehension of previously learned material. Reports are then generated that display which lessons are still due and the percentage correct of those that are complete.

An advanced version of the course, White said, is currently in development.