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COVER STORY
THE BILLION DOLLAR MAN Shant Banosian moves the goal posts with over $1 Billion in originations
BY KEITH GRIFFIN | NATIONAL MORTGAGE PROFESSIONAL SENIOR CONTRIBUTING EDITOR
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reg Frost is an industry legend. He’s the first originator to hit $1 billion in total mortgage production. Over the years, he’s been joined by a few other top brokers who’ve also topped that number. But no one’s ever jumped the billion dollar benchmark in just one year. Until now. Shant Banosian is the man who broke the billion-dollar barrier. He set the historical mark in mid-September when he became the first loan originator to hit the $1 billion mark. In the not too-distant past, hitting $100 million was a significant milestone. But no longer. It’s 10 figures or go home. Yet somehow Banosian manages to go home. His billion-dollar success doesn’t come as the result of 80-hour weeks. He can clock out at 6 p.m. on a Friday night and roll into work Monday morning at 8 a.m.
THE NUMBERS Through the end of September, according to Guaranteed Rate, Banosian closed 2,378 units for $1,121,195,087 in funded volume. That’s an average of 8.7 closed units per day. (In September alone, he did 323 units and $162,395,002.) It’s not unexpected that he could hit $1.4 42
billion by the end of 2020. He is Guaranteed Rate’s number one loan officer nationwide five years running with 1,907 closed units and $915 million in funded loans in 2019 alone. In 2018, it was 1,215 closed units for $536,294,703; 2017 was 1,125 units for $457,664,391; and, 2016 was 1,131 units for $432,301,353. Banosian was ranked as the number one loan originator in the United States for 2017, 2018 and 2019 by Scotsman Guide. He was also ranked the number one loan originator (total volume + units) in America by Mortgage Executive Magazine for 2017, 2018, and 2019. He has been the #1 volume loan originator in Massachusetts consistently since 2013 according to industry tracker The Warren Group. He has also been featured on Mortgage Professional of America’s Young Guns list of mortgage professionals under 35 for the last three years: an accolade he could no longer achieve as he recently turned 40. After several years as a Guaranteed Rate President’s Club member, he was named to the Chairman’s Circle, an exclusive club for top producers who exceed $100 million in annual loan volume, in 2015. David Luna, president of Mortgage Educators and Compliance, in Salt Lake City, Utah, speaks to thousands of loan originators as he crisscrosses the
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country training them. “This year top producer teams that traditionally do $100 million a year are looking to do $200 to $300 million in 2020 and this will continue in 2021,” he said. For perspective, appearing on NMP TV’s Mortgage Leadership Outlook, MobilityRE founder and CEO Ben Teerlink said as of Oct. 7, 4,112 loan originators completed over 250 transactions. He says it is not quite double the number of last year; however, it is significantly higher. The dollar volume associated with these transactions is tremendous with 1,700 loan originators having closed over $100 million in volume. Additionally, 41 loan originators have broken 1,000 units. Those numbers, though, were just not as tremendous as what Banosian had achieved.
PURCHASE VS. REFINANCING As of late September, Banosian said his business was trending more towards purchases than refinances. In August, he said, bucking the industry trend, 65% of his business was purchases. By the end of 2020, he thinks it will be closer to 50/50. “Our business historically was always purchase driven,” he said. “We took advantage of the refinance environment, but frankly the purchase market remained hot except in April
