Mortgage Specialist Steven Prince Enjoys Helping Clients Achieve Home Ownership

Steven Prince of Ideal Lending Solutions is a people-focused mortgage loan officer. Raised in Wellington, Prince has been a professional lender for the past 20 years. He is confident in his capabilities and enjoys face-to-face contact with his clients.

“I have a really cool profession because I am helping [people] and ushering in that American dream of home ownership — making it possible for people who didn’t think it was possible,” Prince said. “That’s really exciting to me, and that’s why I love what I do.”

The nature of his industry is always changing, and he has to be adaptable.

“Things are changing constantly,” Prince said. “My job now consists of, number one, product knowledge and trying to stay on top of the guidelines. They can be one way today, and by the end of the day, something changes.”

So, Prince is always teaching real estate agents he works with, helping them perform their jobs to fulfill their duties to provide for clients. The clients, of course, being the people who are looking for a home that meets their wants and needs.

Prince said one of the most important aspects about getting a client into his or her new home comes down to the contract.

“It’s all about how you structure it for the underwriter,” he explained. “It comes back to how that deal is structured and how you can get things into the system, so product knowledge is about teaching my agents how to structure these deals.”

Prince had been licensed since 1998, but after 2008, the mortgage rules and regulations changed. “Everyone had to go back to school and get a new license,” he said.  “There was a new licensing requirement that kicked in.”

Prince was required to take a national test and a new state test in order to update his credentials and continue performing the work he had done for a decade at the time.

Unlike other types of lenders and mortgage brokers, Prince said he is unique because he has direct connections to major mortgage loan companies, such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Along with being competitive and confident in his ability to work with his clients, Prince takes great pleasure in the outcomes of helping people find homes that they can afford. “At the end of the day, we as individuals have to take personal responsibility for our finances,” he said.

Prince is a loan officer with Ideal Lending Solutions, based in West Palm Beach. There he is focused on what he enjoys most, working directly with clients. But Prince also has long-term experience training teams of brokers, lenders and agents.

“That’s where I cultivated a lot of my business from — training and teaching agents how to structure their business and how to market their business,” Prince said.

Over the past decade, Prince said the housing market has changed for the better. He said there will always be fluctuations that can cause downturns and upturns in the market as a whole, but he said that the way everything works today has made the overall climate a positive one to work in.

“Today, with the new laws that are in place, which I’m a huge advocate of, is that you cannot get a loan unless you can prove your ability to repay that loan back,” Prince said.

He is confident in today’s housing market.

“It’s a very healthy market that we’re heading down,” Prince said. “It’s very healthy to see we’re experiencing tremendous growth right now. Home prices are up. The beauty of that is it’s real money, and it’s real transactions that are happening now.”

Contact Steve Prince at (561) 719-7474 or steve@lendingbysteve.com. Learn more at www.lendingbysteve.com.