this American Community Home Lender (CHLA) Monday Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) Director Rohit Chopra urged the agency to more vigorously track trigger solicitations. To solidify this point, CHLA refers to this type of solicitation as “spam calling,” echoing the language of the agency’s campaign against “junk fees.”
The letter lists three specific practices it wants the bureau to focus on, which the bureau and its members believe are “abusive, anti-consumer and potentially illegal.” The first was concerns that mortgage brokers were triggering tenders for potential clients, which was a nuisance for the organization because they “did not have the mortgage banking capabilities to complete the loans”.
CHLA said that because the law requires that triggering a lead tender must be a “firm credit offer,” it “does not know how a mortgage broker could meet the ‘firm credit offer’ requirement in this case.”
Second, CHLA said its members are aware of “potential solicitation efforts through spam calls that either misrepresent or falsely imply that they are calling on behalf of an existing mortgage lender with whom the borrower is currently working,” the letter said. “It’s unethical, anti-consumer and potentially illegal.”
Finally, members believe it is “problematic” that in some cases individual loan officers made lead-trigger calls without the consent of the companies they worked for, the letter said.
CHLA says this is because hiring lenders “are unable to appropriately monitor the language and practices used by such loan originators.”
In terms of what it would like to see happen, CHLA said it wants the CFPB to encourage consumer reporting that triggers tip solicitations.
“CHLA requires the CFPB to: encourage consumers to submit complaints about abusive trigger lead solicitation, clarify which practices are not allowed,” identify “mortgage brokers or lenders who regularly engage in impermissible conduct,” and “take action against brokers for such Action” or appropriate lending institutions to prevent such conduct. “
Earlier this year, members of both parties United States House of Representatives A bill targeting “abuse” of mortgage triggers has been introduced as a companion to a previously introduced bill United States Senate. The issue was referred to the House Financial Services Committee, but no further progress had been made as of July.
Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA) President and CEO Bob Broeksmit announced the organization’s support for the measure as well as the previously introduced Senate version.
