METBANK MORTGAGE BOOKED $123 M IN NEW LOANS IN 2005

NEW YORK – The Metbank Mortgage division of Metropolitan National Bank of New York [Metbank], which is in the one-to-four family lending business, reports that its volume of loan applications in 2005 rose by some 15% per quarter. Metbank Mortgage booked $123 million in new mortgages during the year.

“The traction that we’ve gained over the past 18 months is due entirely to the innovative and enthusiastic sales and support team who, individually and collectively, extended themselves for the sake of our growing client base,” according to Metbank Senior Vice President Judah Langer, who has headed up the division since it was formed in August 2004.

“We achieved acceptance in the secondary markets in a timely fashion. And, now we are gaining status among realtors and developers as a Preferred Lender in and out of New York State,” he points out.

“For example,” he says, “we recently became a preferred lender on three different condo conversion developments, one located in Manhattan and two in the Washington D.C. area. And, we are working closely with the realtors and developers on those projects to assist purchasers of these units in their financing needs in a timely fashion.”.

Langer credits his team’s “the-client-comes-first” attitude with his division’s success. “Customer satisfaction is extremely important to us and putting our clients’ needs first is critical to our business model. We always work around our clients’ schedules, often doing closings late in the evening or early in the morning to accommodate their schedules.”

Always on the look out for new ways to serve clients, the Mortgage division recently unveiled an automated pricing engine. “The system has a user friendly interface that allows loan officers to enter the key criteria of a loan, and then does a real-time search of all our mortgage loan programs to find the best program and rate available for a particular borrower. We will soon open the system to the wholesale lending market,” Langer says.

In 2006 Metbank Mortgage will create a Web Status Center that will allow clients to view the progress of their loan applications in real time.

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