Released: September 20, 2006

Confessions of a mortgage salesman

Source: By Douglas MacMillan, BusinessWeek

The Durham (N.C.)-based nonprofit Center for Responsible Lending estimated in July, 2001, that predatory mortgage lending is currently costing Americans more than $9.1 billion each year. Lenders will argue that each one of these dollars represents a legitimate fee stipulated by a legitimate contract, that they are only viewed as predatory by borrowers who overlooked the fine print in their mortgage.

But ask Ted Janusz, who spent an interim period of his career learning the ins and outs of mortgage brokering as a loan officer in Columbus, Ohio, and he’ll admit that what is really going on here is a game of subterfuge being played at the expense of borrowers with low credit ratings.

CONFESSION TIME.  The strategy of lenders, he learned, is to maintain an uneven playing field with their clients. “The average person only gets a mortgage every seven years. How can you become good at something you do every seven years, especially if you’re dealing with somebody who knows all the ins and outs and is doing this several times a day?” he recently told BusinessWeek.com.

After a year of putting up with what he felt was the industry’s lack of integrity, Janusz left the business for good. Still, he felt he was privy to information that the public rarely gets to see. He vented his frustrations—and spilled his guts—in the 2005 book Kickback: Confessions of a Mortgage Salesman.

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