Business Innovators Radio - Interview with Andrew Jensen, Owner & Senior Loan Officer at Blueprint Mortgage Group

Episode Date: July 14, 2023

About Andrew JensenAndrew first started in the mortgage industry in 2012 participating in a paid apprenticeship program. Utilizing his background in Education/Business it was a successful match. After working numerous years for different retail lenders, he opened his own brokerage in 2019; Blueprint Mortgage Group. He is currently licensed in both Colorado and Wyoming and has an affiliate Bank that allows him to originate in the remaining 48 states. Andrew takes extreme pride in providing top-shelf service to his clients, and this is evident by the referral-based business he has built.Andrew resides in the Sloans Lake neighborhood just west of the city. He is married to his wife Lauren, who is a top-producing Realtor with MileHiModern. Together they have a 21-month-old boy named Colby, and another baby boy on the way in October. They have two Labrador Retrievers named Baysil and Cedar.Learn more: https://blueprintmortgage.squarespace.com/ or https://www.facebook.com/AndrewDenverLenderColorado Real Estate Leaders https://businessinnovatorsradio.com/colorado-real-estate-leaders/Source: https://businessinnovatorsradio.com/interview-with-andrew-jensen-owner-senior-loan-officer-at-blueprint-mortgage-group

Welcome to the Colorado Real Estate Leaders Podcast, brought to you by Trailstone Insurance Group, bringing you interviews with Colorado's best real estate and mortgage professionals, empowering you to understand the current trends in the housing market, so you can make the American dream your reality. Enjoy today's episode. Well, it's a great day in Colorado, and welcome to the Colorado Real Estate Leaders podcast. Today we have with us, Andrew Jensen, who's the owner and senior loan officer at Blue print mortgage group. Andrew, welcome to the program. Thanks for having me today. I appreciate it.

You're welcome. I am excited to talk with you and learn about what you do and how you do it, but get us started with your story. How did you get into the mortgage industry back when you did? Yeah, so I started in 2011, kind of just doing different roles. I've worked everything from closing into processing, just loan officer assistant stuff. And, you know, eventually got my license in the early part of 2012 and went through an apprenticeship program. And just started doing LO activities and helping people purchase homes from them. Yeah, that's neat that you have that background with packaging up loans and processing,

because that gives you a little bit of insight now when you're setting up loans of what to expect. maybe that can save some steps when you're helping your borrowers with knowing what to submit all at once rather than kind of back and forth and back and forth. Do you find that that experience gave you some good insights that way? Yeah, having a full circle, you know, idea of how loans work and all the pieces and parts that go into it and being able to have worked on different parts of loans throughout my career has definitely helped. You know, from the broker standpoint now, it's really encumbrancing of handling all that stuff together. Obviously, we have help with processors and assistance,

but just knowing that background really makes this process a lot more seamless. And it's beneficial to the borrower, right? It makes it a little bit easier. Yeah, and also, I would suspect, it gives you a little bit more of a leg up and gives you the impression, give them the impression that you're the expert and authority. because when you can speak out of confidence and say, oh, we're going to need to have this because. And, you know, I've had underwriters before question this. So let's get a backup document of whatever.

And I think that it helps to position you then in the mind of your clients and your borrowers where they have that elevated level of trust. No, absolutely. I mean, just just having confidence. I think that's the toughest thing for young LOs that are starting out. It's because it's a foreign language when you start. You don't really know what you're supposed to ask for or what you're. you're supposed to collect. But the more you get familiar with everything, you know what you can do, what you can't do, what you can add. And it just gives you more confidence. I mean, you can speak to underwriters with confidence that you know what you're talking about, right? Underwriters aren't

always right. So a lot of times if you're able to, you know, see something that they're not doing correct or make the process a little bit easier, you can at least recommend, you know, your route that you want to take. And more often than not, they'll hear you out. And, agree with you if you know what you're talking about. So. And I think that also borrowers or anybody, you know, they, they appreciate when someone in business is teaching them, educating them, not telling them, you know, like when they can understand actually how the process works

or why you're asking for things, that education tends to really fall really on fresh years because we all have gotten frustrated with having someone tell us something and we don't understand it. then we're getting frustrated. So talk a little bit about your approach to, you know, educating your borrower so that they really know how the loan process works. Yeah. So my background, my family is teachers, right? So I went to school for teaching and business, started teaching right out of college and just realized it wasn't for me. But I knew that I could replicate a lot of things that I learned, you know, in this industry from a lending standpoint, right? Because

mortgages can be a foreign language to most buyers. So you're teaching them how it works, what the process is and what you can do. A lot of people look at this as a sales job. I don't like necessarily to coin this as a sales job. I feel like what you're doing is your fiduciary advocate for your clients, right? You're giving them advice, letting them pick what they want to do. And I think that's the importance of having transparency with your borrowers so that they fully understand what they're getting into.

They're allowed to custom tailor their loans, make it exactly what they want. And that's what we try to help with. Yep. Yeah, that's a really good point. You know, I love how you came from the background of a teacher. Nothing wrong with being a teacher or not being a teacher, but he's probably that stuck with you. You know, and you're like taking that heart of a teacher approach.

I think that really makes it strong. Talk a little bit about the types of loans that you guys have. Are they just out of the box? Are you able to custom tailor some loans based on what the borrowers need? I mean, yeah. I mean, we're, you know, our call initially with the clients, you know, we're just gathering information to see what options they have, right? Once we're able to kind of digest everything, we have a lot of different options. I mean, we can do arms.

We can do conventional loans, FHA, USDA, VA, I mean, we can do bank statement loans. So we have a vast array of different products. can do. It's just presenting the client and the buyer themselves on exactly what they want to do. So, yeah, I mean, we're comfortable with everything from conventional to FHA to DA. I mean, we even do some USDA loans because we're licensed in Wyoming. So that's pretty common there, a little bit. You could do a little bit of that in northeastern Colorado. But yeah, I mean, we're comfortable just giving them options, letting them pick what they want to do and in utilizing the best option they pick. Yeah. Yeah, what are you seeing in the industry now given what buyers are needing

for their loans? You know, if you work with a first-time homebuyer, are there special programs available for them? Yeah, so there are some special first-time homebuyer programs. Obviously, there's loan pricing adjustments on whether or not you are a first-time homebuyer or not, which can really benefit you in rate. I mean, we do do a little bit of Chaffa, some Chanoa, stuff like that. I'm not a big advocate of first-time home buyer programs. They're good for people that absolutely have no money. But I feel like a lot of these programs, the grant money is built into the rate. And if you do have access to funds to provide money down, there's better options available. Yeah. And I was kind of as with anything, give them options. Yeah. If the risk, if the

risk is higher than the rate's going to be higher. So you put less down, the rate might be higher. And then the more down, but then it just gets back to you talking and teaching and being transparent. If that buyer or borrower needs to have a little bit more cash liquidity, then it might make them feel more comfortable to put less down, even if the rates a bump higher. So it just gets down to what do you need? 100%. Yeah, I mean, I have that conversation with a lot of people, right? So there's a big misconception that you have to have 20%. down to buy a house, right? Yeah. That's not necessarily the option. You know, it's just holding PMI. So after I have a lot of conversations with clients, what's more important to you? Do you want to keep your assets in the bank? Do you want to take money out of your stock account and lose money

on it right now? Or do you want to keep it up there and, you know, put 10% down, have private mortgage insurance for maybe two years that's tax deductible? Or put a higher down payment down, right? So, I mean, there's just options. It's what they want to do with the liquidity of their assets. And I try to give them all their options and let the borrower decide for themselves what they think is most important. Yep. What are you seeing in the market these days? Because I know that, of course, rates are up and down and all around. And it's a buyer's market one time and a seller's market at some one time. And you're going to get 10 offers on one house. You better run, run fast. What are people recently seeing when they're, looking to buy a house given the climate of the market? Yeah, I mean, this has been a pretty difficult market for the last 12 months or so. You know, we've seen wild swings and rates. You know, we can't really dictate rates, like even forecasts that we follow. I'm pretty good at, you know, data analytics on that kind of stuff.

But a lot of the trends that we're used to following aren't projecting what they should do to mortgage bonds and securities, right? So it's tough. It's a little bit tougher to navigate. You know, there are people on the fence, especially first-time homebuyers because we went from, you know, mid-toos to high twos to sevens. And it felt like it happened overnight. But at the same time, we're still seeing appreciation and properties in Colorado. So the longer you wait, the $550,000 house that you wanted to buy this year is probably going to be $600, $625 next year.

So it's just the cost of waiting and explaining that to borrowers and letting them know, hey, you know, we're going to, going to get an opportunity to refinance later. The economy just needs to settle down and we need to get inflation under control. Yep. And it kind of gets down to kind of what you were saying before, which is the appetite that people have for risk or can they deal with a little bit higher rate knowing that the tradeoff is you got your tax write-offs, talk to your accountant. And if the appreciation goes up a nice amount, then it's better that you have that in place.

for one to two years here and maybe the rates will settle down. So again, it just gets down to planning and testing and seeing what people need. No, absolutely. And I always tell people, you know, real estate is probably the best investment you can have. I'm a real advocate and it myself. I have multiple properties. I've made more money off of real estate than I ever have even thought of making it in the stock market. So it's just risk-based. Do you have clients now that? that are buying investment real estate. And I've heard that, you know, of course, everybody's different, but I've heard that sometimes people are buying investment properties

specifically for short-term rental, like the Airbnb kind of a thing. And that can tend to be more lucrative than straight up. Let's rent this property for a year, two, three years. So what is your experience that way? Yeah, so I do both. So I have three properties. I do Airbnb with one. do a long-term rental with the other. So it kind of comes down to, you know, what kind of cash flow you

need, what kind of return on investment you want. If you want to make a lot more money, short-term rentals is probably going to offer you that, but you're going to get a lot more damage to the property, just wearing there, right? As if you have a long-term renter that's renting it, you're making a couple hundred, maybe $1,000 a month, but they keep the property in good condition. So it's just kind of, you know, weighing your options and like what you want to do. do you want to make more money or do you want to, you know, have someone that's reliable and not damage your property is basically what I would say on that. Yeah, that's a really, really good point is if you're willing to deal with a little bit of

that, you know, hassle, but you've got the higher profit margin and cash flow, then you better be disciplined to stick a little bit of a side each month or each quarter so that you can go in and, you know, improve or correct the property. So yeah, it's just, you know, also if you have a rental property, are you going to be the one doing everything? And now you get tired of doing that. But in reality, maybe the good choice is get the one of those property management companies to help you out. And then, yes, it costs a buck or two to hire them. But then the benefit is you don't have to do it yourself. Most definitely. I mean, and that's just kind of, you know, looking at your financials and seeing what kind of cash flow you have, what you can give to a property management

company, because it will make your life easier, right? Some people just like to go do that. You know, they like to build those relationships with their renters, right? So we do a little bit of bulk on our end, but, you know, it just comes down to what you want to do. Do you want sense of ease? Do you want to make as much money as possible and do the fixes yourself? But there's a lot of different options and a lot of different companies that you can seek out in Denver for that at this point of time. Yeah. Well, Andrew, it's been of a pleasure talking with you.

If someone is interested in learning more about blueprint mortgage and reaching out and connecting with you, what's the best way that they can do that? Yeah. So you could visit our website. That's what will be posted on here. I think that would be the best way to go about it. You can inquiry. And it'll send an email to us and then we'll reach out to you directly.

And we can kind of start the process from there and see what we could do to help you out. Excellent. Well, thank you so much for coming on. It's been a real pleasure talking with you, Andrew. Perfect. Thank you for having me. Have a good afternoon. Thank you for listening to the Colorado Real Estate Leaders podcast, brought to you by Trailstone Insurance Group. To learn more about the topics mentioned on today's show or listen to past episodes, visit www.com.com.