You call the lender for a status and get a sentence about how everything is moving along fine. Their origination system has already sorted the file into a timed compliance bucket, and knowing the six buckets by name turns your vague check-in into a question that has only one true answer.
This is a product demo of a loan origination system, and the part worth an agent's time is the dashboard the loan officer looks at every morning. Beside their task list sit the timed compliance modules, each one holding files at a specific stage:
The 3-day module — application taken, disclosure not out. "You have 3 days to send the LE."
The 10-day module — "Your 10-day module, this will house files for which the LE has been sent and you're just waiting on the intent to proceed to be completed by the consumer."
The 30-day module — the credit decision clock, where "you need to make a decision a credit decision within 30 days of application."
Prepare CD — "Your prepare CD module, this will house any files that have a scheduled to close date but you have not sent the CD."
Track back CD — "This will monitor files for which you've sent the CD but you have not received the CD back from the consumer."
And the one nobody volunteers: the stale module. "this module will house any files that are not in a closed or finalized stage and have not been modified within the last 30 days."
The file view is color coded on the same logic — "green is good, yellow you may want to slow down and take action, and then red you definitely want to stop to take action."
“You have 3 days to send the LE.”
Every one of those buckets is a fact about your deal that exists whether or not anybody tells you. Has the loan estimate gone out. Has the borrower given intent to proceed. Has the closing disclosure been sent, and has it come back signed. Those are the four things that actually decide whether your closing date is real, and each one is a yes or no.
So stop asking how it is going. Ask which module the file is in, or ask the four questions in order. A loan officer who can answer instantly is on top of it; one who has to go look is telling you something too. And if a file of yours has genuinely not been touched in thirty days, there is a screen somewhere that already says so.