Management by Educated Guess

It was W.H. Auden who wrote in his poem Archeology, “Guessing is more fun than knowing.” Given the extreme volatility of the refinance era, guessing was often the only thing there was time for.  But managing a business with guesswork, even educated guesses is a big mistake.

We wrote about this recently in an article entitled, “Taking the Guesswork Out of Lending Performance.” It came out of a white paper focused on the 2018 Mortgage Cadence Benchmark Study that you can download now on our website.

In the article, we explored the concept of guessing about a lender’s performance and how it is unnecessary since deriving performance information from readily available data might not be the easiest exercise, though it is possible, and we are doing it.  After all, high performance lending comes from knowing, not guessing.

One thing we all know is the cost of making a mortgage has never been higher. We’ve watched it more than double over the last ten years. At the same time, productivity, the closest performance indicator cousin to cost-to-close, has never been lower.

So, what’s the answer? When it comes to the high-performance lending equation, we’ve done the math and we have the data. We’ve been educating our clients on this for the past 6, soon to be 7,  years through our Annual Benchmarking Study.

Download our new white paper today to learn more.