How Many Deals Are You Turning Away?

By DJ Christofferson

After being downsized in 2007, DJ shifted from corporate America into real estate and ultimately found his true lane in mortgages. He built his production on one core principle: be the kind of partner to Realtors he wished loan officers had been for him. Be valuable.

Let me ask you something as a loan officer: how many deals have you turned away this year that you could have actually closed somewhere else? The pre-approval you couldn’t quite get done, the borrower who didn’t fit the box, the scenario your company just didn’t have a program for. Most loan officers have more of those than they realize, and every one of them is lost income and a lost relationship. So let me show you why that happens, and how much of it is fixable.

I’m DJ Christofferson, executive partner at NEXA Lending. Before I stepped out of production to help other loan officers grow, my last full year I closed almost 300 loans, and I can tell you that the difference between a good year and a great year often isn’t more leads, it’s closing more of the leads you already have. That comes down to one thing most LOs never think about: the size of your product mix.

Here’s the problem most loan officers don’t even know they have. When a deal falls apart or you have to tell a borrower “I can’t help you,” it’s usually not you, it’s your company’s overlays and limited product menu. An overlay is an extra rule your lender adds on top of the actual guidelines, and it quietly kills deals that are genuinely closeable. If you’ve ever had a loan that should have worked but didn’t, there’s a good chance an overlay somewhere was the reason, and you may never have known it.

Let me give you a real example. I’ve closed multiple VA manual underwrites with FICO scores in the 520 to 530 range. A lot of loan officers can’t touch those, not because the loan can’t be done, but because their company has an overlay that won’t allow it. Same borrower, same file, one company says no and the other says yes and closes it. When you have access to lenders with no overlays on those agency products, deals that used to be dead ends suddenly close.

Now multiply that across every kind of loan. At NEXA we have the largest product mix in the country, over 300 different lenders you can send loans to. On the agency side, conventional, VA, FHA, USDA, that means we’ll always have lenders without the overlay that’s blocking you. But it goes way beyond agency. Non-QM is where a lot of LOs leave deals unclosed: bank statement loans, DSCR, stated income. And here’s the thing, those programs aren’t all created equal, because the lender who owns the program makes their own rules, so having many options means far more flexibility than the one or two non-QM sources most LOs are stuck with. On stated income alone, I can pull up a dozen different lender options.

And it doesn’t stop there. We’ve got reverse mortgages, and I’ve seen loan officers make 800 to 900 basis points on a single reverse deal, in a niche most LOs never even explore. Hard money. Commercial, and I don’t mean a five-unit that technically counts as commercial, I mean if your client wants to build a hotel, we can do that loan. SBA loans. Once you actually have these products in your back pocket, you start noticing how many of these opportunities were around you the whole time, you just had nowhere to send them before.

Here’s why this matters beyond your own pipeline. When you can close almost anything, you become far more valuable to your referral partners. You can sit across from a realtor and say, honestly, “Send me one hundred percent of your leads and you’ll close more business, because I can place the deals other loan officers turn away.” That’s not a sales line, it’s just true when you have the largest product mix in the country behind you. You stop being one of their loan officers and start being the one they can’t afford to lose.

So back to my original question: how many deals are you turning away that you could actually close? If the honest answer is “probably more than I’d like,” that’s not a you problem, it’s a product-access problem, and it’s fixable. The loan officers who close the highest percentage of their pipeline aren’t working harder, they just have more ways to say yes.

Here’s what I’d genuinely invite you to do: send me a scenario you couldn’t place, a deal that fell apart, a borrower you had to turn away, and let me show you how we’d close it at NEXA. No pitch, just a real answer on a real deal. Call or text me at 262-751-3415, email me at DJ@NEXAmortgage.com, or visit DJChristofferson.com.

Let’s see how many of your “no” deals could have been closings.