Job Responsibilities
About 20 hours per week I calculate potential loan amounts based
on partial information available from loan officers and brokers.
This involves heavy use of spreadsheets which must frequently be
customized to match the deal.
Another 15 hours is spent meeting or conferencing with potential
clients in supprt of our sales staff.
The remaining 15 to 20 hours is spent on writing and research to
assure compliance with federal requirements, to keep abreast of
current financing strategies, and to develop new products.
I attend national and regional conferences for one to two days
each month, where I make personal contact with potential
clients. I speak at such conferences about six times a year--
each of these speeches requires about ten hours of preparation.
|
Job Requirements
My current position requires some graduate education, but not
necessarily a degree. Work experience is greatly valued and
someone with 10 years of experience is competitive with someone
with a couple of years of experience and a masters or higher
degree in finance or real estate.
These two degrees are th most favored, and when I interview
someone I give a lot of credit if they obtained the degree whiloe
working at least part-time.
|
Uppers
I have a great deal of autonomy as long as my choices serve the corporate
mission. My job is not "process" oriented, but is very "results" oriented. I can
work the hours that meet my needs as long as the work is done. That is, I may
take off from lunch until dinner, then work four or five hours after dinner, if
that fits my schedule. There is a great deal of personal contact, and during
those contacts we are usually working as a team to reach some mutually desirable
solution to a challenge-- this is almost always a great time.
|
Downers
I am responsible for the success of an entire division. Economic
realities beyond my control can result in layoffs, losses, or
even failure of the business. Because I deal with federal or
semi-federal agencies like HUD and Fannie Mae, I often am
frustrated by arcane rules or inconsiderate employees.
|
Lifestyle
There are a lot of hours-- seldom less than 50 per week, and often over 70 per
week. However, it is not hard labor, and many of the hours are almost like
social time. I travel a lot (frequent flier miles!) and see a lot of new places.
Usually we are "business casual" but an average of once a week I have to wear
very formal business attire. I meet and work with a wide range of people of
different races and cultures, fom foreign investors to low-income housing
tenants.
There are "crunch times" when all of us work a couple of fourteen hour days in a
week, but these are balanced by slower times when we can catch up on trivial
tasks that have been neglected or even meet a client for a round of golf.
|
Compensation
My package is not typical. Most of those in my position have a
base pay with a bonus based on the overall profitability of the
firm. As underwriters, we are prohibited from receiving ordinary
commissions. Therefore, base salaries run around $60K to $75K,
and bonuses range from 25% to 100% of base pay, depending on the
success of the firm in a given year.
In larger firms, there is usually a stock grant and a stock
option program, but several large firms are privately held and do
not offer these. Virtually everyone has medical, dental,
disability, and life insurance heavily subsidized by the
employer. Vacations are normally only two weeks early in one's
career, but can reach five or six weeks for senior underwriters.
|
Advice to Jobseekers
If you have no underwriting experience, and you are still in
school, take real estate appraisal courses-- they teach you the
skills for calculating most of the kinds of deals you find in
commercial mortgages. The Mortgage Bankers Association of
America has a certification program that you should look into if
you don't have formal education in real estate finance.
The technical aspects of underwriting are being automated at a
fast clip. In the future, I expect there will be fewer support
staff and that underwriters will need much higher computer skills
in database and spreadsheet use. The successful underwriter will
be the one who knows a variety of capital markets, can synthsize
divergent pieces of information and customize business solutions
for their borrowers.
|
|
