Credit unions in some parts of the country are facing a severedrop in the availability of housing finance professionals and havebegun to train and promote from within to meet their mortgagelending needs, according to credit union executives andconsultants.

“The fact is, [mortgage lending] has become a more highlyspecialized field and the people who are knowledgeable about it andhave the right skills are often too highly priced for credit unionsto get,” explained Alissa Sykes, director of mortgage lending atthe $374 million, 45,000-member SunmarkFederal Credit Union in Latham, N.Y.

Sunmark has a strong housing finance program that Sykesexplained has gone from booking $5 million in housing finance loansin 2006 to booking more than $220 million in 2012 with additionalgrowth expected this year.

But even with all that success and staff (housing finance takesup 25 of the credit union's 175 employees), Sykes said the creditunion recently decided to begin relying on training in-house talentfor its new staff because hiring from outside the credit union hasbecome simply too expensive.

“These days a person with the sorts of skills that are going toattract us can almost write their own ticket, and that is usuallytoo expensive for us,” Sykes said, “but often a larger bank withgreater resources are able to meet their pay requirements.”

TracyAshfield, president of the Ashfield and Associates consultancyin Madison, Wis., said she largely agreed with Sykes that staffingcan be a challenge, but observed that the phenomenon was notuniform across the country.

“I would call this a primarily regional challenge,” Ashfieldsaid. “Some parts of the country are almost seeing a drought inskilled mortgage staff while others areas are nowhere near asbad.”

She recalled the circumstance of a credit union client that shedeclined to name that faces a similar problem. As a leadingfinancial institution in its community, the credit union wanted tofurther expand its housing finance program but had discovered thatdoing so from outside would be very expensive.

Professionals who had the sorts of skills the credit unionwanted were not as inclined to move into the community or make arelatively long commute, Ashfield explained. The credit union hadopted instead to train and promote from within.

Robert McKay, CEO of the 166,000-member, $1.7 billion BCU insuburban Chicago also agreed that finding or training staff to havethe right skills would be one of the biggest hurdles all creditunions which offer housing finance loans will face whenever thecurrent wave of refinancing subsides.

Baxter booked $454 million in fixed rate housing finance loansin 2012, according to NCUA records.

“We really have been nursing along on the refi boom and that isgoing to come to an end eventually,” McKay observed. “Then we willface a test of whether we can continue the pace on purchase loansand not just refinances.”

To make that shift, credit unions will need a supply of trainedhousing finance staff in place, McKay said, adding that it'sunclear that many have yet begun the necessary training orhiring.