Rather than jump on the bandwagon of the negative press regarding the Merit Financial failure(s), I’d like to tell my one and only Merit Financial Story.

One of our agents had a client who was using Merit Financial as their lender. When someone we meet has a pre-established lender relationship, especially a personal relationship…friend/relative, we do our best to support that relationship. Unfortunately, as the newspaper articles have highlighted, the loan rep was a young fellow with no lending experience who had never handled a loan that was a purchase, rather than a refinance. Two weeks into the 30 day escrow, it was apparent that absolutely nothing had been started with regard to the financing. The agent didn’t know what to do and came to me for advice.

I told her to get into the car and I made my one and only ever visit to Merit Financial. We had no appointment. I call it “camping out”, meaning “we’re not leaving until we get someone here to start paying attention BEFORE it is too late.” A young man by the name of Kris Quigley took full responsibility from the time I left that building, until everything was resolved, and escrow was closed. He worked day and night. He was literally working so hard that he made himself sick and ended up with pneumonia. He called me well into the night past 9 p.m. and I’m sure our client was not the only file he was bailing out of a fire.

My guess is that for every 20 people hired, who were mostly all talk and no action, there was at least one Kris Quigley in the background busting their butt to pick up the slack.

Kris…wherever you are…I wish you the best of luck in your future endeavors. I feel badly for people like Kris when I read these articles. Clearly not everyone who worked at Merit Financial was a Know-nothing slacker, as these articles would lead people to believe. Kris, feel free to use me as a reference if you need one. Hopefully you moved on before the $ hit the Fan.