While I’m twiddling my thumbs waiting for my Utah mortgage lender license to show up in the mail, I figured I’d make a quick post regarding one of the delays at the State office. You see, Utah recently introduced a new rule that all loan officers must work under a Principal Lending Manager (PLM). The PLM must take a state exam and possess the required education and experience. Now consider this:

The deadline was May 1st, and with 2,200 licensed entities in the state, there were only 68 licensed PLM’s as of March 27th. (more here)

Two possibilities arise from this scenario, each of which is holding up the processing of my licensure with the state. First, there have been many, many PLM applicants (try 1,000+) over the past 30 days, with each application being processed by the same people that are eventually going to process my application (a total of two people). Second, there have been many loan officer change requests, which are also processed by the same people who will (hopefully) process my application soon. The loan officers are submitting change requests (required by state law) because they want to be in compliance as of May 1st, and if there is no PLM at their current institution then they must look elsewhere.

So, this is all resulting in a longer-than-typical processing time for new applicants. It’s a bit of bad timing that I submitted my application while all this was going on. Anyway, two or three additional weeks isn’t that bad. It could be worse, I suppose.

Overall, the PLM requirement will be a good thing because it should help to reduce the amount of mortgage fraud in Utah over the long-run as a natural result of tiered personal responsibility.