Servicing Issues in the Reverse Mortgage Industry, with Shain Urwin

0:01 Welcome to the Reverse Mortgage Podcast. I'm Bill Gross, your host at Bill Gross Probate on social media. Really excited to have here today the national get this right because he's a big shot. National reverse mortgage director for C2 Financial, one of the biggest players in the reverse mortgage space, one of the biggest mortgage companies in the country, Shain Urwin. Shain, thanks so much for joining us. Thank you, Bill. You're I love the introduction, man. You're a good guy. Thanks. Well, okay. So, let's start from the beginning here. Shain Urwin hyphen CRMP if you watch my podcast I know what CRMP is. We've interviewed many of them but you know a certified reverse mortgage professional from the National Mortgage reverse mortgage association but it's in your title like is that important to you here? You're the national reverse mortgage director for a major company and that designation is important to you. Talk a little bit about what that means to you. Yeah, you know I didn't used to think that way. The CRM destination that's offered up by Nurmla. Nurmla is really the advocacy group in our industry that we need to get behind to support. And I didn't see them as important as I as I should have at the time. And I didn't understand the designation. I really thought, well, why do I care about a bunch of letters behind my name? And I and I've said that for years, but really I didn't know what I didn't know. And when I started going through and studying for the test and realizing, okay, this designation is a lot more than I thought. It taught me a lot about the industry and things I didn't understand like servicing and processing and the back end of the business that I didn't understand fully.

1:33 It gave me a better appreciation of where the reverse mortgage business has been, where it's come from, and kind of where we're headed. And, you know, some of it was depressing in a way to see, hey, we used to, you know, close volume up in here and here we are. And I learned a lot. But that designation is important to me. It's important to our company at C2 Financial. We have just over 10% of all the CRMPS in the country. And a lot of that goes to the former national director was Scott Harms, the position I took. And Scott Harms, he has helped more people pass that test in this country than anyone else. And if people ever want to, if anybody listening to this, you want to get the CRM designation, reach out to us. I'm glad to help you know what to study and help to pass that test and get ready for that designation. Scott Harms has a little like playbyplay manual, if you will, on how to have success. So, we're all about helping people whether you work for C2 or not. I don't care what company you're in, you know. And it's interesting because when you talk to an executive, I've never seen an executive claim a designation before like that other maybe PhD or MBA or something. And it just speaks to who you are as does I saw a video of you on YouTube. I posted in the Facebook group the Reverse Mortgage Podcast Facebook group that you give that you know I asked you from Texas because your accent came out a little bit more there. You come across really to me as like a Baptist preacher with your evangelicizing about the value verse mortgages, the opportunity and I think also the responsibility that one has as an originator of taking care of your customers. It just it comes across in the way that you talk about it. Well, thank you. I like you were we were talking about that actual presentation is called reverse truth. I like to reference everything reverse truth. In fact, my website is reverse truth. I that to me it's like an oxymoron, right? Those two words play off each other. To me, I think we've been taught a myth about reverse mortgages. The world believes a myth.

3:22 The financial industry believes a myth. And we need to learn the truth. And that particular presentation I gave with Dr. Wayde Fowl in San Diego. And speaking of Dr. Wade Fowl, actually he's coming on my reverse truth webinar here on April 1st. If anybody wants to listen in, they're welcome to April 1st and that's going to be at 10 a.m. Pacific time. But Dr. FA, you know, to me, Dr. FA and Dan Hulquist and a few others like yourself, Bill, are out there telling the truth. They're giving people a full picture of what this product looks like and is and who it's for and who it's not for. And I think for us as an industry, we need more people that are willing to kind of take down the party lines, if you will, forget about what company you work for and begin to tell people, hey, here's the truth about how reverse mortgages are, today compared to what they were. So, when we first met, we were talking and I think we really have the same page about really not the origination, but the truth about servicing because it affects reputation. I'm a real estate agent. I launched this podcast on the thesis there should be 10 times as many reverse mortgages done but for the terrible reputation of the product. The ter reputation is based on the prior version of it which has been redone and today is continued by the servicing problems which to me are listing opportunities. Right? A customer gets reverse mortgage dies. The kids call me seven months later. Oh my gosh, the house is facing forclosure. We didn't know dad had a mortgage and what do we do? And that's a nightmare that gets repeated over and over again. So let's talk a bit about the servicing and I had a chance to speak to you and some of your team about I think the responsibility of an originator. So let's talk about what are the best practices of originators in your group or that you coach that you talk to and influence about not just when you get the loan but what you do afterwards to help protect the customer when there's a problem or change in ownership down the road. Well, I start with something I tell every one of my clients, every person that ever listens to me about how to solve one of the biggest problems in reverse mortgages is staying in touch with your clients. I have a saying I say

5:25 Every time. I mean it from the bottom of my heart. I say, "Hey, I'm in your life forever if you'll have me. I do not want you to call the 1866 number on your statement. I want you to call the 208 number, which is me. Me and my team want to help you. Whether you want to draw funds out, whether you have questions about servicing, if you're going to be changing insurance companies, anything that may happen with the servicer, let us help you deal with that servicer because the fact of life is there's very few servicesers in the reverse mortgage industry. And in this person's opinion, my opinion, they're awful and they've been awful for a long time. And if I could just stop you right there because I want to I want to hit on the attitude first and the content's important, but the attitude is so true of top producers. This is universal in real estate, in mortgages, in reverse mortgages. If you have a problem, I was trained unless your problem is buying another house or getting another mortgage, call somebody else. I'm here to sell houses, that's the wrong attitude. That's the those deals are now going to the internet people and putting origin out business and sales people out of business. The right attitude is if you have a problem, call me because I deal with these all the time. I'll help you. But that builds the relationship. So I before we go on to the servicing issue, let's talk about that attitude and how central that is in building anybody's business. Well, the attitude is not going to just help you in the servicing issues of a loan, which does bring in extra work. And we'll talk about that in a little bit. But the fact of life is this. It keeps you front and center in that client's mind to know that when somebody's reaching out to them as well, I follow that up and say, "Listen, you're going to get calls from people over time trying to refinance this. Your servicer may be trying to talk to you about refinancing or adding more money to your line. That's something I'm here to help with as well.

7:03 I let them know that always upfront how communication's going to be. I also let them know what kind of junk mail they're going to get about people going to try to sell them home warranties they don't need and furthermore stuff as we know. And there's so much elder abuse that takes place in the United States. I highlight some of the key ones. In fact, I have a little package I sent out when they close saying this is what a statement's going to look like and here's the things that you're going to have questions about in the future. And if you do, we want to be there. You nailed real estate. Being a real estate agent yourself, so am I. I'm a real estate broker. I want people to understand that I'm here, my team are here to help you if you ever need to sell this home in life and or death. So, obviously, they're not contacting me if they've passed away, but their heirs are or the estate, whoever's helping with that. So, Bill, your what you're doing is we won't go down that too much today unless you how you want to talk about that, but I can tell you this. The probate side, what you're doing through people is the biggest missing ingredient honestly in the industry because people that are passing away every day, right? Their heirs have no clue what mom and dad did and they have no clue what to do. And there's nothing they're going to get but scary information at that point. And that's where it's really important to let them know. Let your kids, let your heirs know that I'm the point of contact. Me and my team are here because if they could take one thing away if you watch this whole podcast, you want your clients and their heirs, their kids to reach out to you with any and all questions because you're not just there to help with simple transactions. You're help with what probably the most stressful, most difficult time they're going to travel through go through in their life. And a lot of people, they just lose somebody they love very much and now they're going to have to deal with somebody who likely doesn't speak the best English. I'm not trying to offend anybody out there, but they're likely overseas, their call center, call center, and they likely have a script to read and they don't really know how to deviate from that script very much. So, having somebody that speaks this

9:04 Language that they don't understand is key, right? Yeah. And I think it gets down to I want people to call me my clients on anything to do with real estate at all. And this is where Realtors® lose business. They say, "Well, how do I get probate business?" And reverse mortgage originators ask the same question. How do you get more reverse mortgages? Yeah, you can buy leads. Yeah, you can spend time cold calling and going to network events. But how about the people you already know? We all know, you know, a couple hundred people. If you're married, you know two, threeund people that you could invite to your wedding, your kids' wedding. You know what? Even if you just reached out to them, make sure they knew about your product and that you were there to answer any question with that. When I start, it was amazing in my business was when I started as a Realtor® focusing on probate and told everybody I knew about it, all of a sudden I got phone calls not even just on probate but other real estate because they go, "Well, if he knows a lot about probate, he might know something about this." And same with reverse mortgage originators. You know, they may not know that their cousin's friend got reverse mortgage. Their cousin's uncle, their cousin's father got a reverse mortgage. But if you're talking to your cousin, he might know, hey, you know, uncle so and so is looking for he asked me out questions about it. Why don't you give him a call? That's where the business comes from. Being willing to solve the problems gives you permission to have the conversation. But when you say, "No, call the service center." You're giving away those leads going forward. So let's talk about, you know, the originators who do a great job working with accountants, working with financial planners, working with real estate agents, attorneys. They get the deals and then they turn their customer over to that call center. How's that work?

10:41 That's just foolish and foolish in many ways. We've covered a few of them here. But, you know, it's a daunting task for a lot of people. A lot of people like me and you, Bill, we've been doing this a while. My database is large. I mean, I've closed over 500 reverses in my career personally with me and my team. And, you know, I've been in this industry long enough that you have that. But, you said something that just stuck out to me in your last comments is agent real estate. I mean, mortgage originators, reverse mortgage originators ask all the time like, "How do I get more of these?" Well, you, like you said, they could invite two to 300 people to a wedding in a minute and maybe only 50 of those people, they really want to come. So, let's start with those 50. I mean, the fact of life is all of us have spheres and then we break it down to a tighter sphere. The immediate people that if you called them today, they would pick up and say, "Hey, how are you doing, Bill? How you doing, Jane?" They know you. Excuse me. They know your number. They're your friends or you're really close. They're also maybe people that are raging fans. They try to send you business. They talk highly of you. You don't have to start with the people that are hard to call, right? Start with who's easy to call. They're also nice to you. They're also nice to you. You call them. They want Yeah. So, people always get like this, oh, I can't call five people a day. Sure you can. How about your mom, your like you said, your aunt, your uncle, your cousins, people you know.

12:02 And believe it or not, they know people that are in this range, too. If you wanted to just have immediately good response in the reverse space, there's a sphere around you of people that have them. Many of them have had bad experiences. There's people with kids that haven't like loved it, which we'll talk about. But to get on point, if you're trying to get in this business, there's one way to generate business that's really easy, and that's your sphere. I have an annual preview system. It's my review system. I talk about how to re in business and I teach classes on this. But the sure way to lose business, the sure way, let's get on that, is not keep in touch with your clients. You tell them, "Hey, I close your transaction. I'm you're no longer my client." Many loan officers, forward and reverse loan officers, they close a loan like it's a transaction and then it's over. And if they want to never speak to those people again, they might as well at the day of closing say, "Hey, I'm going to forget to ever call you. You're going to forget me." Say it out loud just like that. It's funny. You said, "And we're just we're going to be done with each other." Because that's what most of them live out. They don't say it verbally, but that's what they live out. Or some buy some expensive drip campaign that sends an email out every period of time that's impersonal and clearly not in your language, which just emphasizes, "I care so little about you. I buy some stupid email template to send to you rather than just, you know, send at least a message to everybody that's personal or and I actually record a video and attach that to the email as well that says, "Hey, I can't get in touch with all you individually, but if you have questions, here's my phone number. Here's my email. Call me. I'd love I'll talk to you personally. I'm available." it shocks me. I have a database, an email database of over 20,000 people. I'm posting video and content multiple times daily on various social media. And literally a week doesn't go by, this past Saturday happened at lunch. I was with we have friends over with our family and the guy says, "Oh, let me back up. I started the mortgage business and in 2008 became a full-time real estate agent. I haven't done a mortgage since 2008, even though I'm licensed as an MLS." He go, I thought you were a loan officer all this

14:04 Time. Like, what do I have to do? And the answer is, you got to talk to people like 10 times. They just don't, you know, they're busy. They're not really paying attention to what you're doing. If they need you, they'll call you. I have people call me about mortgages all the time. I have more people still call me about mortgages in my life than real estate. It's crazy. I don't want to cut you off, but that's wonderful. That's not Look, I'm telling you straight up. I do it all, too. I have multiple things. Well, I'm not complaining. I'm just saying. It just shows how hard it is to get the message you want across. Or the other one is I didn't know you have a podcast. I'm like my like my daughter, I don't have a podcast. Like, are you kidding me? You don't know I have a podcast? I'm killing myself every week to do this thing. You don't even have it. But that just tells how hard we have to work to keep attention. We think everybody is bored with us because we contact them so much. It's the opposite. They can barely pay attention to their own lives. They barely are catching anything you're sending them or anything you're mailing them or anything you're calling them. And staying in touch with them does require time, effort, and energy. I do keep in touch with a lot of people and that's where my business comes from, but the people in the periphery, it just takes a lot more. So, you mentioned something I think is great that I, you know, I have not heard this. I do know that borrowers have to fill out an annual form in order to keep the line of credit open on the reverse mortgage. Right. Well, period.

15:24 It's an annual occupancy form on a reverse mortgages or just the lines of credit. All reverse mortgages, an annual occupancy form comes out and obviously the servicer could get delayed and not send it out like they're supposed to. But they should be receiving on their anniversary date an annual occupancy form that says, "I still live in this house." and send it back. If they don't, problems are going to ensue. I would imagine that every mortgage originator, you only done, I mean, I would say only, but 500's a lot, but it's not that many. No. Where that's one or two a day at most. What better thing in life would do you have to do than call one or two people a day and say, "Hey, I did your mortgage two years ago, three years ago, four years ago. You got your annual thing today. Any questions? Call me." Like, that's like the greatest phone call ever. Yeah. You know, there's no excuse not to. No, there's not. No, there's not white. There's no excuse not to. If you if you're if you literally despise yourself and business, if you despise money, by all means, then don't do it. But the fact of life is this. This is a relationship business. I mean, me and you would talk about this not long ago about we're, you know, both been married long time. Tomorrow's my 27th year of being married. My wife is one patient woman. And honestly, she must be, she must be strong. She is. She's the greatest. You know, Rhonda and me have been together a long time. They're thick and thin. And that takes work and time. If I didn't talk to my wife but at once a year, would that be great? Yeah. Hey honey, how's good? Any problems? Call me. Yeah. So, even with clients, it matters the level they're at. So, I break my people into like you, I have thousands of clients from the years because yes, I've only done 500 plus reverses, like 550 something, but I've done lots of fours, way more than that. Thousands. I don't know the exact number. And real estate, been doing it for years. So when I bring all my clients and my sphere and everything, it's thousands upon thousands. Well, those people, I can't talk to everyone.

17:11 Neither can you, Bill. We get it. But there is video now and ways to communicate, right? I have my VIPs, okay? I have those people. And that's a group of about a hundred now. Those people are even broken down into a few asterisks. Those aren't people I let go by a year without talking to. Those people are relationships that I have that cultivate and send me business. But we're kind of, you know, we could talk about that a lot. We could, we could go hours on how that works. But really, when you get in this industry of reverse, the problem lies in these people close a loan transaction. When I say these people, loan originators throughout the country close a loan transaction and then they assume, and we all know what that means, we assume that the servicer and the statements that people are going to get are going to be enough for them. And they we assume that the heirs know what's going on. We assume that these people aren't going to have any issues and most of them don't make any payments the at best they're going to require you know they're going to ask for funds and those are type of things that many of us don't even know much about if anything at all. So we kind of stay out of it. The problem is we've now separated oursel from that client for year after year after year and it kind of gets embarrassing now after four or five years you know it's kind of hard to call them now. It's kind of like I haven't talked to them in four or five years and we have this angst to call them and that's something because most originators aren't closing but five or six reverses a year giving you numbers nationally. That's a lot for most I don't think that's the average number of originators it's like one I think that would be for those that actually consider themselves that's all they do. I'm talking like the best of the best of the best might be closing 20 plus a year. I mean there's a small group of those, right? Okay. But these people again, let's just take it even 50 a year. You can keep in touch with that many people. You can have you can let them know. So on this business, if you just want to look at the amount of homes you could help people buy and

19:16 Sell just as the real estate hat or referring to somebody like you who can, oh my goodness, the amount of income that is left on the table just on selling these homes alone is astronomical because every single one of these people, believe it or not, every one of them are going to die. Every one of them, they're going to pass away. No way. Yeah, it's crazy. And they are going to need help with that. And then the other thing I get is you know how hard it is to get referral sources, right? So, you know, the goal I think of many originators is not specifically relationships with the borrowers, but it's really with the attorney or the financial planner or the accountant or whoever can refer them multiple leads on a regular basis. I say, well, what a great phone call that would be like, you know, hey, by the way, Mr. Jones, so this is the three-year anniversary and their verse mortgage and I call them. They check on their servicing paperwork. It's all done. You have to worry about it. But you're now like training the financial planner. Hey, maybe they should call their own customer, too. You're doing these things. I do this with when I send customers for estate planning to an attorney I refer to. I can go online and check public records if they actually deed the property from their name personally into their trust. We call it funding the estate plan or funding the trust. Well, when they do, I take the document, which is public, and I send it to the customer and I send it to the attorney. The attorney loves it and they because they now have excuse to call their own customer. I'm just reminding them or training them to call their customers. I think with and I know that when you have a class if you had a class on I'm selling the magic pill on how to get more reverse mortgages. It's like $2,000 a month but it's a magic pill you take once a week with a glass of water that class would be sold out. But if you said to the same group of people how much has ever you ever did a loan for called them in their nursery and the person referred them to him. Oh, come on, Shain. That's a lot of work. But that solves the servicing problems we talk about because I believe all the servicing problem is the crustiness of the lack of relationship is the percentage they're dependent on the servicing center versus you. And the more they're dependent on the servicing center when they have a

21:18 Problem, the worse off we are as an individual, as a company, and as an industry. You know what's amazing is the magic pill's there. It's actually called a cell phone a phone. This is it. It and it's not even the emailing and the texting that it does, which can be powerful with the right people. You know, I have little notes I put with my people. They like email, if they like texting. Some people I only communicate with text because that's how they communicate. But the phone itself is a forgotten art, right? And here's something that I know I don't want to go down this rabbit hole rabbit trail too much, but I'll tell you this. I struggle with this. In 2019, I closed 39 reverses. And I wanted to break what? The four-minute mile. My goal was to break a 100. And I did in 2020. The first year I broke a 100 reverses in a year. Wow. In that year, the secret sauce was this. I picked up that phone and I connected with old past clients. And this is what I did, Bill. I had that same angst. Like, I haven't talked to some of these even VIPs. I haven't talked to some of these people in a while. And I feel kind of shameful about it because I was busy. I mean, the market was good and I was closing out of business and honestly, my good answer was I didn't have time for that. And that's not something you want to tell somebody, but that's the truth. And I had some of those truthful conversations. But here's what I did do. Most of my clients by 2020, their houses had gone up so much in value, even in the few years between me and their loan. I called them up and I said this, "Hey, you know what? I bet you're, you know, just a total random just like I was doing this year. I'd say, hey, I haven't talked to you, Bill, in a while. I'm sorry." And I ate a little crow. Want to let you know I'm looking at your file, looking at your scenario. I just talked to him plain and say, "I noticed your house has gone up a lot in value. Has your insurance agent reached out to you to increase your coverage?" because if he hasn't, I notic your house has gone up about 300 grand and I don't want to see your house burn down and you I don't have coverage. And I began the conversation with offering value of something I didn't do. And a few people would say, "Are you selling insurance now?" I say, "Oh, of course not." No, I still do loans. I still do real estate. But I've noticed that some of my clients are underinsured. And it was a way for me to reconnect and offer value.

23:19 And what happened was many of my clients were underinsured. Some of them grossly so. Wow. Their house burned down. Let's go back to LA just recently that had those fires. Some of those people will never be able to put that house back. They don't have enough coverage. Lots of people, not some. And so what happened was I began to help fill that gap up and make meetings with my clients. And I built a system called my annual preview. I don't like review because it's like review mirror. I wanted to preview their future. And I was going through questionnaire to help them solid get more solid in their financial picture. And it rained in business. It rained in mortgages of all kind. But especially reverses. And the reason it did reverses is most of those clients had no clue I did reverses because believe it or not, I didn't do them before 2017. So if I had any loans between October of 2017, I'd never done one till then. I wanted people to know what I'm doing now. And so to reconnect, I found that little plug of helping them fill the gap of something that was missing. And you may not have insurance, but it can be other things like you just brought up that great idea that you had with getting the attorneys and sending the information out. Just do something of value that doesn't necessarily point to you and people are gladly going to accept it. You know, and it doesn't have to be a big thing. You know, for example, as a result of the fires, attorneys and insurance companies have talked about the importance of adding a trust as additional insurance. So, you know, Bob and Mary may own the property. Bob may get insurance. They put the property to trust. Legally, you should not need to do this. It's a it's a little contentious, but it doesn't cost much.

24:58 It's either 35 bucks on some insurers or nothing as additional insured the trust that's in your name. Why do you do that? Well, I'm not an attorney and I don't know that you have to, but if attorneys say it can't hurt and it's good protection, then I can share that with my customers. It's just a great excuse to call the customer or the attorney and say, "By the way, the best practice changed with insurance." And I had one say, "Well, can you talk to my insurance agent about that?" Well, yeah. Can I talk to a guy who has like a book of 2,000 customers? Yeah, I can find time to do that. That's not hard. So, by putting myself in the position of solving problems, I don't spend a lot of time generating new business because it kind of comes in because I've already solved the problem. They're already going to choose me because they know I'm going to solve the next problem before they even know it's a problem. That's the goal of being in a position. So, you must still even with all the deals you've done and I and you're more diligent than most, way more diligent than most on your annual previews and such, still people that somehow didn't get the message and have some sort of a nightmare with a reverse. Either the property's facing foreclosure or they didn't have the insurance updated right and now they have a problem with that. And so, those calls come to you. They're not calls you want because you could say to them, "Hey, that's your problem. You know, you didn't really follow the job." I sent you emails. I reached out to you on Facebook. Like I called you a couple times even maybe. But those are difficult phone calls. How do you handle that? And how do you find the courage to make to at least take the phone call so that you know that you're doing your job the best you can as a professional? Well, I like real life instead of talking hypothetical. So, I just had one reason and the heirs reached out to me. It was in Colorado area and I am not licensed as a real estate agent in Colorado. I am licensed as a lender there. But the dad passed away and he was kind of a proud guy and he didn't really talk to his kids about what he did. He's a reverse mortgage and everything. He kind of and honestly I think he looked at as a failure. He's like I'm suing my kids inheritance. And I think a lot of people feel that way which I try to educate people that's just not the case. But that's how he felt. And so he ended up

27:00 Not really talking to his kids much. So his kids were not prepared at all. There was three of them. They were fighting on who's going to even have the right to be the, you know, the person that's going to talk to the judge and all stuff. I mean, you know, you know, technical term believed you, but basically, they didn't have a trust, had a will, outdated, but still, I always tell people, you don't have to have a plan. The state that you live in has a plan for you. But if I was you, I would get a plan. I try to get everybody to get a will or a trust, especially a trust, but not everybody listens. And you know that, I know that. But in this case, they didn't. He didn't listen. He didn't get a trust. The only saving grace is I did talk to one of the boys, one of his sons one time and I told him, "Your dad should get a trust and explain why." Well, this is he ended up being the representative for the boys and he wasn't the oldest. There was a fighting over me. I'm sorry, long story, but here's what happened. He ended up being really slow to contact the servicesers even after I told him not to. And the services started the foreclosure process. And I got involved. I end up getting an agent in the area which I made a quick 25% referral fee on. Wasn't that hard and we got the house sold. I was able to stop the foreclosure with the servicer because I speak that language and I was able to work with the agent, get them the listing paperwork, but this is a perfect example of I tried to keep in touch. I tried to make this happen and it still went sideways and if I wouldn't have got involved, all the nasty grams they were getting about getting foreclosed on were scary. They didn't follow protocol. They didn't give their time frames. But that's a normal scenario because people don't understand the time frame. So in this particular deal, success. Another one I just had recently, not as clean as that.

28:45 Literally, the conversation happened back and forth with the air and servicing. Wasn't good communication. They ended up kicking the door in four days. The servicer did kicking the door and breaking the jam. A house 4 days before it's supposed to close. Oh wow. And is a mess. So these kind of stories, Bill, these kind of things that happen, both of these heirs have a bad taste in their mouth to be reversed. Even though both houses got closed and sold, they were clunky. Yeah. And so because the handoff wasn't well from the parents to them and that there wasn't good communication with the servicesers. Unfortunately, I just had two deals that I'm involved in that I there was a bad taste left in the heir's mouth. And they will tell 10 people about that before they tell one person good. So, in other words, somebody could have a great hamburger. We're going to tell somebody, "Hey, this is delicious. Go there." We have a terrible hamburger place, we're telling 10 people. It's just how we are. And so, the we're having a hard time getting people to come through the door and reverse mortgages. And for every one we're getting in, I truly believe we have 10 going out the other way. 100%. 100. That's why I launched this podcast. There should be 10 times many reverse mortgages. But for the reputation, I mean, I see it as a Realtor®. People buying houses for cash at least get a line of credit or some sort of reverse mortgage to preserve equity and use it for more productive means.

30:13 100%. And it's all it's all reputation, lack of education that the that the financial vendors don't, you know, attorneys, accountants don't really know the product and they heard a thing five years ago about a foreclosure and that's sticks their head. In California, it might be different here. It seems to me that once the do and sale or whatever the process is, you know, the borrower passes, there's a servicer collects the reverse mortgage over time while the person's alive. As soon as they pass in California at least, they sell the servicing rights to a company who's basically just a law firm and they're just a foreclosure mill and they're racing as fast as they can to forclose. No matter what they tell the customer on the phone, they're going to foreclose as quick as they can unless you can pay them off. And I think that customers don't understand that they the service centers that they these companies have are terrible, misleading, and that is amplifying the problem. And on the flip side, the originator never got involved in the first place to set them up for that. Now, you have you have a time period. I have a product we call reverse SOS where call me when there's a face of forclosure. We can expedite the probate process by finding experts in 50 states. We can advance money to start the process. We can in some cases to bring the loan out of a rears or pay it off if that's what's required to save from foreclosure in many cases. So this is a real problem and I and I can I can solve that backside part a bit of it and my reason for reaching out to you is really on the front side. Let's get originators involved in that discussion earlier to give a little more runway to give customers time to solve the problem because I'm sure both your cases had you got the phone call 30 days sooner it would have been a little easier. 30 days later is always a bit harder right?

31:56 Yeah. If I told you those good stories, I got a lot of them. The good stories are when I'm dealing with, first of all, people listen to me on transaction, we get a trust. That's half the battle right there. Next is when I already am dealing with the heirs pre death. Obviously, the heirs are talking like even when mom and dad are getting sick. I've been called many times by an heir within an hour. This has happened more than once of mom and dad's passing. Wow. Within an hour, literally at the hospital or at where at the home at this hospice multiple times. Shain it h you know mom dad passed whatever and we talk about it and it's a very hard time but rewarding time too because you really become a confidant in that family but the fact of life is this when it's done right it's smooth here's a big problem in the industry loan officers say things like this and I used to say this too so I'm blaming myself too oh don't worry about it do this loan your parents have up to a year to sell the home I used to say that a lot and that's letter of the law not 100% it's Not all the way false, but it's false because it's not that way. You have 30 days, 30 days to notify that servicer what your intentions are. Then you have 90 days in that 90-day window to get that done in. And if you don't get it sold or refinance or paid off in that time, the foreclosure process is going to start and you can get out to six months really easy to get that house sold or refinanced. It takes some communication. Been there many times. But after that, if you're going to get extensions, it's going to take you some time to get extensions. You have to have communication and you could get yourself to a year. Now in California, you know better than most.

33:30 The probate process is ridiculous. I mean, it's a year to get to a judge. I mean, my gosh, it takes forever. So, you're going to have to get extensions. You're going to have to string things out unless you got your ducks in a row. And you know that better than me. But when I'm dealing with people, the overwhelming thing they don't understand is how important the communication with the servicer is. They are slow to respond. Slow. They're thinking, "Oh, I don't have a payment to make. Mom and dad didn't have a payment." They find out there's a reverse. There's no payment. It's not like a traditional mortgage that a foreclosure is going to start if the payment's not made. So, when people are inheriting a home with a traditional mortgage, we're programmed to pay debt. All of us are programmed that way. So, bills coming either it's going to get paid or they know it's not going to affect their credit, but because they're not on the loan. The heir is thinking, "But I still know if I don't pay that payment, that payment doesn't get paid. Forclosure is likely going to start on a reverse. They're hazy on how it works. They know there's not a payment, but they don't really know how it works. And what I see over and over is they just do nothing. And it's amazing how many of them sit back and wait for the nasty gram. Then they get this letter says, even though it's not going to foreclose yet, it uses the word foreclosure. Man almighty, you know better than me, Bill. People then start to panic. Hey, what did you put mom and dad in? What did you do? It changed.

34:52 I've literally had that said to me the whole time. What did you do? And I'm now getting like blasted. I'm like, "Okay, I wish we had this conversation before today, but let's go through what the steps are." And it's usually late. You said it. If they called me 30 days sooner, sometimes 60, 90, then the loan was really easy. I don't know. Mom and dad passed. Unfortunately, I don't keep monitors on my clients and I don't have cameras up. I don't know what's happening in their life. If I knew they passed, I would have been proactive. And so this industry we have to do is we have to beg loan officers to get more involved with their clients, more involved with the heirs because the overwhelming black eye of the industry is letting these houses pass on to the 1866 number dealing with a servicer who's programmed to foreclose that house. Well, yes, it seems like I mean based on results, if you just look at what happens, I mean as a as a real estate broker, it seems like foreclosure is part of the program. Now I will say absent an originator who stays in touch, catch the prom as soon as possible. And also, you know, I love the annual review or preview. The other one is I feel as a real estate agent and I think originator is well in the same boat. We responsibility to get our customers to evaluate estate planning options. We're doing the deal at that time is the right time to do it because if you change get a trust when you get when you buy your house or when you sell the house and buy a new one or when you refinance into a reverse or establish a new reverse if you do it then it's insured transaction. You get title insurance on that deed in the trust versus the attorney, you know, moves it into a trust. It either gets recorded, they forget to record it's not insured, somebody can contest it. At least it creates some opportunity for problems. And so I think that I've been

36:55 On a mission to try to get originators to say look at the customer how they're holding title. That's your job. And the opportunity of that is so let me help you pay for the job. Every customer doesn't have a trust. Ask them have you considered why don't you? Now, in California, I say it should be almost automatic. In other states, not. So, I get it. If your house is more than 500,000, it should probably be automatic in other states as well. Generally speaking, consult your own attorneys. But you should have that discussion with them because if they have a trust, you avoid the probate problem. And that solves a lot of the hiccup in the beginning that cause the forclosure because at least somebody's in charge on paper and ready to go. I agree. If you are in the state of California, especially because of the probate length of time you're going to go through, if you're a homeowner, you should have a trust. Yeah. In most states, neither one of us are attorneys and we don't play one on TV. We're giving business advice, not legal advice is what I was saying. Yes. Common sense advice. If you're a homeowner, you should be considering it. Like I said before, I mean, I live in the state of Idaho. Idaho, we have a plan for you. You don't you don't have to have one. You if you die, you know, you're gonna stand in front of a judge and go through the process. The point is that's really not the problem still with the reverse mortgage industry because you and I both know you could die without a will, without a trust. You can still sell a house and have no problems.

38:13 It still comes down to communication. Yeah. It still comes down to understanding that you have a loan that's due. See, you haven't been used to making payments because there wasn't required payments. Reverse mortgage payments are optional. You get a statement every month. If you want to make a payment, make one. If you don't, the balance is going to go up. On a regular mortgage, it's not a statement. We call a regular mortgage a mortgage statement, but it should be called a mortgage bill. It's not a statement. It's not a ledger. It's here's your bill. Pay it or we're going to take your house. On a forward mortgage, that's how it works. Reverse mortgage is optional. Now, on that optional payment, it doesn't become optional anymore after death. Right? Now, the payback terms, that's the term. The terms now are saying, "Okay, optional payments are out the window. Your kids have some time to sell this home. They're not required to send us a monthly pay bill just like you. They are required to pay us right now, but here's the time frame to pay us. So, that part, step one, I would say, problem solving. If somebody listen this long to this, step one, this is what I'd tell you to do. Don't sell and sell this loan wrong anymore. You don't have a year. Tell your clients you have 30 days after you pass away for your heirs to have 30 days to notify the servicer. If they don't and they find out it's going to really be a faster process. 90 days total really to figure out selling. So that doesn't mean 90 days later listed. Get it listed in that 90 days. Get it listed. Get it for sale.

39:38 Then they're going to give you a little process to sell it. If you get past six months from that death from when the when the borrowers passed, you're gonna have to go through some processes to ask for extensions. You can get two of them out to a year. So, a lot of salesmen just say like myself used to say this a lot. You'll find recordings of me saying it. I was wrong. And this I learned in my CRMP test. Let's circle back to the beginning of this call. I learned this that I was doing it wrong for years. And I tell people now, no, we got really about 90 days. So when somebody passes away, let's get this thing listed and sold. And that's the most common. They don't have to list and sell it. They could pay it off with proceeds they've received in the inheritance or their own funds. They could refinance it into a traditional or reverse mortgage depending on age. But these are things people need to understand. We don't cover it well. So problem one, sell the truth, the reverse truth. Tell the whole story. Don't tell part of it. Problem two, solve this. Pick up the phone on an annual basis at least once and talk to these people. Yes. Let them know you're there for them to help them. And if they wouldn't let you talk to their heirs during the process of doing loan, encourage them to let you have a conversation with their heirs. Now, that's going to pick you up listings. That's going to pick you up conversation. It might even pick you up another reverse mortgage because many cases when these people pass away, their kids will be reverse eligible. Yeah.

41:00 Might pick you up a forward mortgage even. But the point is at least once a year do that. I would follow Bill's advice. Use video. Send at least four to five times a year a communication with video that goes out to them and give highlights about what could happen. Maybe tell a story about how it not went didn't go right and tell a story how it went right. Video is powerful and I do a lot of that. So keep in contact. And the last one, the last takeaway I'd say this. So again, number one, number two, number three. Number three, if it was me, and this is what I do, is build a system that allows you to work with your client more than as the loan officer. I want them, Bill brought this up earlier, people reach out to him still for loans. He hasn't done loans since 2008. I want people to look to me as a financial resource, not a loan officer, not a real estate agent, which I'm both. I want them to look to me as a financial expert. Somebody that's in their overall financial plan. Now, I went to school to be a financial planner. I used to have a series 63 and seven. I used to work for LPL when I got out of college. I'm not a financial adviser anymore. But I'm not saying I'm a financial adviser. I'm a financial professional. I'm a financial professional that helps people navigate different financial decisions they need in their life. That includes connecting them with financial planners, attorneys, realators, insurance professionals for maybe long-term care for their homeowners insurance, things like that, property casualty, all of those. I consider myself more of a quarterback on the team, trying to push people where they need because my annual preview system and everything I do is trying to get people to the help they need. And I don't want them to call somebody else to get that. So, I'm happy when somebody calls me about a trust and a will. They fully well know I'm not an attorney.

42:52 They know that, but they know that I'm the person that can help them get the trust or the will or vote. Yeah, that's what I'm those are three things I would say to do. Yeah. You know, I don't cut grass, but when people ask for a gardener referral, I refer them to a gardener. And the guy that I use is really good and cost effective. And I think that's we have to look at all this is you have to be a quarterback or the head coach and you put the people into the play that are going to get the job done. And every play requires different types of players and your job is to find the right one for your customer. Not the one that gives you business, but the right one for your customer. Look, Shain, obviously you are the national director of a major reverse mortgage company. You know, we could talk more in depth about originating. We talked more in depth about coaching and such. And hopefully in future episodes, we'll get to we had a great deep dive on servicing, which I think a lot of people kind of poo that at first glance, but really to me, this is the magic pill that gets you business. You solve this part of your business, the rest will fall into place. Is you won't have to spend time originating loans because you're going to have more people calling you with referrals because they're going to give you their problem and you'll help solve it and some will naturally end up as a piece of business for you. So Shain, on behalf of everybody who watches this and listen to us, thank you so much for your time today. I do want to refer people to your podcast reverse truth training. I'm not sure how does somebody get to that spot. I know I'm signed up. Yeah, that link right there. I mean it can be shared. We can get it out. But that link right there, you one time you register, you can come to any of them. So they're available. If you register one time, you can register and come and you know, if somebody wants to reach out to me anytime, they can also just send a general email to reversec2financial.com. That's reverse the letter C number two financial. And they can request, you know, look, my training, everything is not for my company only. I work at C2 Financial. I run the division there, the reverse division. But that doesn't mean I want to just help there. We need to go past party lines. So, my reverse truth calls are open to everyone in the industry.

44:47 I'm trying to help you raise the bar, if you will, but we need each other. See, we need to change how retirement is being done in America. And to do that, we got to work together company to company, loan officer to loan officer. Don't hold things to the vest. Last year, Bill, there was about 34,000 reverse mortgages closed. Okay. Just back in 08 and 07, back when you were doing loans. Need you back, Bill, because back then we were closing about 110 120,000 a year. Okay. And those are bad. Those were not as good as a product today. They're not. They're Think about this. We sold a worse product. Yes. And we're four times more sales than they are today. So, we're going backwards. And the servicing is a lot of that, right? Servicing is a lot of the reason why we're going backwards. But nonetheless, we need each other. The education that's out there is teaching people the wrong information. And that's why I call it the reverse truth. I think people need to hear the truth. And we need more of it. And if we can get the traditional loan officer, and I'm going to get on that Baptist preaching box real quick. The Bible says this. It says, "Take the plank from your own eye before you take the speck from your brother's eye." And you don't have to have the same faith as me. That's pretty simple to say, listen, get your own self in order. Quit judging everybody else. And this is the truth.

46:06 We as an industry need to fix what's going wrong with us first. Quit looking at everyone else. We want to look at the financial advisors, the CPAs, the attorneys, and all the different people that we need to teach about reverses. We need to get all the agents and realators to understand it. The fact is that'd be great, but there's hundreds of thousands of loan officers out there that still think that mom and dad are going to lose their house with a reverse mortgage, just like I used to think. There's tons of them that think all the misinformation about reverses are true. And hundreds of thousands of loan officers are not looking at a reverse mortgage as an option. These forward mortgage loan officers throughout the country are not even taking the time to look at this product. They're saying, "No, it's expensive. They take people's houses. They've heard all the stories and they believe it to be true." I would love to see more forward loan officers, regular traditional loan officers, come on my webinar, come on Bill's podcast, watch these and learn the truth. This is a great product that can transform lives and help people. But if we weren't willing to learn the truth ourselves, how are we going to tell others? Well, I was on the one you did last I was a guest on two weeks ago. I was on this week's and I and I think I told you this before we started. Some of the best sales training I've heard in a while because it was the truth. It was about the importance of doing the hard work, doing it every day. You know, communicating with customers. It that's true whether universe mortgages, forward mortgages, selling houses, selling anything. You've got to do the hard work and some of these fancy solutions are just accelerate and you really lay it out and you had a top producer as well.

47:41 So, it's great training, the reverse truth training. I listen to it. Thank you for offering that. Thank you for your time here today, Shain. Look forward to having you back again to talk about both kind of your coaching as well as the origination tips. I appreciate you, my friend. I love what you're doing for our industry. We need a hundred more build grosses. Well, I'm happy being one, but thank you. And for the rest of us, this was the Reverse Mortgage Podcast. We do this every week. We interview top producers, originators, vendors, executives. In this case, we had a deep dive with a guy who's both an executive and a producer. You continue your conversation on Facebook. The Facebook group is the Reverse Mortgage Podcast. Actually posted a video that Shain did. In fact, let me show a picture of it right here. This is a picture of a video he did a year ago. Fantastic. This is like evangelicizing, if that's the right word. I'm Jewish so I don't know the right word there. Being an evangelical for the reverse mortgage and shall people step up. So go on to our website on Facebook, Reverse Mortgage Podcast. We do this. We issue new episodes every week. I'm Bill Gross Probate on social media. If I can help let me know. Put a comment in. Like this, don't like this. Subscribe. Love to have your comments and what we can do better.