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I was happy to be part of a package, it was bi-partisan, both House and Senate were participating in this package, what it's aiming to do, and when the Governor signs it, what it will do, it will change the requirements for becoming a mortgage broker or loan officer. It's sad to say, but currently, you can just call yourself a loan officer. You can go sell mortgages. You don't need to have any education, any training, any ethics background checks, nothing. And certainly, this contributed, we think to the housing crisis that we've seen and the foreclosures that are just devastating my community in Saginaw. And so what this package of bills is looking at is that issue.

What we've set up is some requirements, some background checks to make sure that we don't have, you know, felons operating in the industry. We want to make sure that the folks who set themselves out to the public as loan officers have some education and some ethics training behind them and that they are registered with the state. This is an important feature because what we found is, over the last decade, every time a bad actor, someone who suckered people into loans and mortgages that they shouldn't have been in, every time that a bad actor was sort of discovered at one company, they would move to another company down the street and no one was ever the wiser, and the state certainly didn't know.

So what this does, is it creates a registry for not just Michigan, but across the country states are participating in this national registry so we can know, if someone comes into our state, and they've been up to no good in Ohio or Indiana or Florida, and they come to Michigan, we're going to protect Michigan consumers. Because they're not going to be allowed to be a loan officer in this state and they're not going to be allowed to put themselves out there to the public as someone that a consumer could trust with possibly the biggest purchase, the biggest investment of theirs life; their home.