December 2020/January 2021
HOUSINGWIRE MAGAZINE ❱ DECEMBER 2020/JANUARY 2021
What’s next for housing in 2021?
I CAME TO ACADEMY FOR... Local control and decision-making. 11:22 am
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What are you most looking forward to in 2021? 4 ❱ HOUSINGWIRE
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Sarah Wheeler
NEWSROOM MORTGAGE EDITOR James Kleimann MORTGAGE REPORTER Alex Roha REAL ESTATE REPORTER Julia Falcon Looking ASSIGNMENTS REPORTER Tim Glaze forward so many DIGITAL PRODUCER Alcynna Lloyd to getting weddings! JUNIOR DIGITAL PRODUCER Victoria Wickham married INTERN Adnan Khan LEAD ANALYST Logan Mohtashami CONTRIBUTORS Michael Fratantoni, Kevin McMahon, Matt Tully HW+ HW+ MANAGING EDITOR Brena Nath MAGAZINE EDITOR Kelsey Ramírez Visiting friends COLUMNISTS Robyn Friedman, Scott Petronis and family CONTENT SOLUTIONS MANAGING EDITOR Maleesa Smith A new baby CONTENT EDITOR Jessica Davis ASSISTANT CONTENT EDITOR Jordan White CREATIVE GRAPHIC DESIGNER Emily Carpenter going to the movies SALES VICE PRESIDENT, SALES AND REVENUE OPERATIONS Jennifer Watson Laws NATIONAL SALES DIRECTOR, REAL ESTATE Mark Adams CALIFORNIA Christi Humphries Live CENTRAL Chris Anderson music SOUTHEAST Tamara Wren sporting events GREAT LAKES Michael Orme NORTHEAST Vernesa Merdanovic BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT Lindsley Harris BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT, REAL ESTATE Amanda Luzsicza DEMAND GEN COORDINATOR Brooke Combs Spending time with friends and family!
HW MEDIA CORPORATE Kids back in school full time CEO Clayton Collins CHIEF OPERATING OFFICER Diego Sanchez PRODUCT MANAGER Matthew Stafford CONTROLLER Andrew Key MARKETING DIRECTOR Caren Karris MARKETING COORDINATOR Katie Galbraith All CLIENT SUCCESS DIRECTOR Haley Hess of our CLIENT SUCCESS COORDINATORS Kambrie Laurent, Talia Quigley events! DIGITAL CONTENT STRATEGIST Alyssa Stringer
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DECEMBER 2020/JANUARY 2021
LETTER FROM THE EDITOR
2021
forecast 2021 is nearly upon us, and economists and
ment of the housing industry: mortgage, second-
experts are already hard at work putting out their
ary, title, servicing, real estate and fintech. And
housing forecasts for the year ahead. And though
the forecasting doesn’t stop there. Turn to page
there are several major unknowns hanging in the
50 for Mortgage Bankers Association Chief Econ-
balance, namely COVID-19, there are some key
omist Mike Fratantoni’s 2021 forecast article,
points that many already agree on.
and to page 22 to see a take on the forbearance
Housing will continue to be a bright spot.
exit options that could emerge in the coming
Although shutdowns have the economy in a
months.
constant state of uncertainty, and it is not known
2021 is set to be a record-breaking year on
when a COVID-19 vaccine will be available on a
many fronts. For housing, the expectation is high
large scale, housing has remained strong. Home
for a successful year, despite the unknowns.
sales surged in April and housing demand is
Forecasters say housing will continue to drive the
expected to continue into 2021 as interest rates
economy in the year to come.
remain low. Homebuying season for the year ahead? There may not be a clear season as sales are expected to surge throughout the year. And Turn to page 24 to read the latest from our own editorial team on what’s ahead for each seg-
Kelsey Ramírez Magazine Editor @kels_ramirez
Tweets From The Streets The presidency, itself, is not a partisan institution. It’s the one office in the nation that represents everyone and it demands a duty of care for all Americans, and that is precisely what I will do. 2.7K
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DECEMBER 2020/JANUARY 2021
The information contained within should not be construed as a recommendation for any course of action regarding legal, financial or accounting matters. All written materials are disseminated with the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering legal advice or other professional services. HW Media does not guarantee the accuracy of information provided, and is not liable for any damages, losses or other detriment that may result from the use of these materials. © 2020 by HW Media, LLC • All rights reserved
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our team is ready to report on what’s ahead.
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December 2020 /January 2021 People Movers
10 First Bank named Scott Gesell CEO and general counsel after serving as CEO on an interim basis.
Local Intel
18 The Danvers, Massachusetts market is highly competitive as buyers look outside of urban areas.
Startup Profile
12 Propy is disrupting the real estate industry by leveraging cybersecurity and blockchain technology.
Trade Desk
56 New NAMB President Kimber White presented his message on what’s ahead for the association.
Event Calendar
14 NEXTWinter21, hosted by NEXT Mortgage Events, looks to develop a community of women executives.
Mortgage
62 Who will reap the rewards of nonbanks going public? Will Wall Street agree now is the time to IPO?
Take 5
16 Vanessa Alvarez, a Latina Nexme cofounder, has come a long way since escaping civil war.
Real Estate
66 The luxury housing market inspires a “total frenzy” as people settle in vacation boom towns.
Inside Agent
17 The New York State 2020 Realtor of the Year, Dorothy Botsoe, has owned Dorothy Jensen Realty since 1995.
Fintech
70 Don’t underestimate the power of your real estate back-office systems, the lifeblood of your brokerage.
Politics and Money
74 What a Biden victory will mean for housing: Industry observers prepare for stricter regulation.
Q&A
78 Why it’s important to make real estate websites accessible to all: 8% of people need accessibility features.
Kudos
80 Climb For The Kids: How one mortgage company finds a higher purpose by hiking 14ers.
Parting Shot
82 Digital Producer Alcynna Lloyd setting up a virtual event at HousingWire’s headquarters.
features
f
24 HOUSING IN 2021 What’s next for housing in 2021? Economists look ahead for each segment of the market. By: HousingWire Editorial team
34
50
TECH TRENDSETTERS
MBA 2021 FORECAST
HousingWire’s 2020 Tech Trendsetters showcases some of the top minds behind the technology driving housing.
The outlook for 2021: Recovering economy, record purchase originations and a drop in refinances.
By: Leslie Collins
2020 housing disruption paves the way for the years to come.
What 2020’s top 3 forbearance exit trends mean for servicers in 2021
By Kevin McMahon
By Matt Tully
20
22 DECEMBER 2020/JANUARY 2021
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By: Michael Fratantoni
PEOPLE MOVERS
Scott Gesell
| Gateway First Bank | CEO
Gateway First Bank officially named Scott Gesell CEO and general counsel after he served as CEO on an interim basis since April 3. He will also join the board of directors of Gateway. Before being named CEO, he was chief administrative officer and general counsel for the bank, and has also held senior roles at Colorado National Bancorp, American Residential Communities and First Nationwide Bank.
Jim Anderson |
Finance of America Mortgage | Chief Marketing Officer
Jim Anderson is joining Finance of America Mortgage as chief marketing officer, bringing more than 20 years of marketing experience to the company. Previously, Anderson led marketing teams at Stearns Lending, Certainty Home Loans, Accenture, CNN and The Weather Channel. Most recently, he led a marketing tech stack transformation at Stearns, including an enterprise customer relationship management platform, digital asset management platform and marketing automation solution.
Cindy Snow |
FormFree | Chief Operating Officer
FormFree promoted 2020 HousingWire Insider Cindy Snow to chief operating officer. Originally joining the company in May 2019 as a product manager, Snow quickly advanced to director of product, where she has facilitated partnerships and product updates that enhance lender speed, pull-through rates and security. Now, Snow will craft efficient systems that elevate FormFree’s performance while directly overseeing business operations, product management, business intelligence, integrations and customer support.
Cathleen Schreiner Gates |
SimpleNexus | President
SimpleNexus tapped Cathleen Schreiner Gates to become its next president. Schreiner Gates, a technology veteran with more than three decades of experience, joined SimpleNexus’ board of directors in April. Between 2015 and 2019, she served as executive vice president of sales and marketing at Ellie Mae. During her tenure at Ellie Mae, the company spent six consecutive years on the Deloitte Technology Fast 500 and negotiated a $3.7 billion purchase by private-equity firm Thoma Bravo.
Chris Boyle |
Roostify | President
Roostify named Chris Boyle president of home lending, where she will bring extensive experience in the mortgage lending ecosystem to the position. In her new role, she will work alongside Roostify cofounder and CEO Rajesh Bhat. Boyle was previously on the executive team at Freddie Mac, serving as chief client officer, and has nearly 30 years of experience across all facets of mortgage lending marketing, including client-facing technology and client experience.
Uday Devalla |
Sagent | Chief Technology Officer
Sagent hired veteran technology leader Uday Devalla as its new chief technology officer. Devalla brings a wealth of industry experience to his new position, leading engineering, digital transformation, information security and regtech strategy in housing for more than two decades. His background includes serving as a technology executive at Bank of America, and most recently, he was chief information officer at Stearns Lending, where he led digital transformation in U.S. mortgage originations.
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Kristin Supancich |
Home Point Financial | Chief People Officer
Home Point Financial named Kristin Supancich to the new role of chief people officer where she will be charged with growing and scaling the company. Supancich brings more than 25 years of experience in the workforce and talent industry to the new position, harnessing her experience to help Home Point enhance its initiatives. Prior to this new position, Supancich served as senior vice president and global chief human resources officer at Kelly Services.
DECEMBER 2020/JANUARY 2021
congratulations DAN CATINELLA | CHIEF DIGITAL OFFICER
2 020 HousingWire Tec h Tren dsette r
“We focus around four key areas: efficiency, conversions, retention, and growth... Every day we come in and look at how we can reinvent the mortgage process.” — Dan Catinella
JoinFAMtoday.com ©2020 Finance of America Mortgage LLC is licensed nationwide | Equal Housing Opportunity | NMLS ID #1071 (www.nmlsconsumeraccess.org) | 300 Welsh Road, Building 5, Horsham, PA 19044 | (800) 355-5626 | Licensed by the Department of Business Oversight under the California Residential Mortgage Lending Act | Equal Opportunity Employer
STARTUP PROFILE
Propy automates the real estate transaction process, through the use of blockchain technology. Propy is disrupting the real estate industry by leveraging cybersecurity technology to automate the home purchasing experience while eliminating fraud. Propy’s team is a combination of 20 fintech, international real estate experts and software engineers. Propy allows agents to automate their processes through tools such as automated offers that can be received and instantly shared with sellers, a transparent interface where consumers can keep up with the process and transaction management tools. The software manages the entire real estate transaction process, including eSigning, document storage and management, tracking offers, compliance checks, secure wire transfer and even commision disbursement. To date, about $400 million in sales have been completed using Propy’s technology.
Things To Know Attempting to Disrupt: Real estate transactions Launch Date: Jan 7, 2016 Funding: Funding partners include Draper Associates Founder Tim Draper, Second Century Ventures’ REACH program, Michael Arrington, Escrow Agent Japan and prominent angel investors Location: Palo Alto, California propy.com
Woman-owned startup
10 hours saved per transaction
Uses blockchain technology to automate real estate transaction process
The disruptor score, unique score and launch size were determined through interviews with and editorial research on the company.
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UNIQUE SCORE:
5
LAUNCH SIZE: FUNDING:
9
$15.5m Pre-Seed
Seed
A
DECEMBER 2020/JANUARY 2021
B
C
HIGH
LOW
DISRUPTOR SCORE:
D
L
SF
HAS BEEN
TRANSFORMED Assurance Financial has implemented 14 technologies with end-to-end integrations in the last 2 years. • arketing perating System • Point of Sale • Lead lert Systems • rtificial ntelligence • Social edia utomation • atings and eviews • - ote • -Closing Docs • nd Counting J
ssurance ortgageL .com
Congratulations to our Chief Digital Officer Katherine Campbell for being named a 2020 Tech Trendsetter!
EVENT CALENDAR
MBA’s Accounting & Financial Management Conference 2020 Dec 9-10, 2020 Cost to Attend: $349-$1,099 Presented by Mortgage Bankers Association
ON THE SHELF “Housing Humans: A Vicarious Memorandum” EUGENE JONES
LOCATION: VIRTUAL MBA's Accounting & Financial Management Conference 2020 will focus on the changes across real estate finance that affect both residential and commercial/ multifamily industries. Attendees will receive timely updates for the residential and commercial/multifamily industries such as insights into regulatory changes impacting LIBOR and CECL, pipeline, deal flow, cash management, mortgage servicing and today's MSR market. Participants will also hear from CFOs, auditors, GSE representatives and FASB.
NEXTWinter21 Jan 20-22, 2021 Cost to attend: Free Presented by NEXT Mortgage Events LOCATION: VIRTUAL NEXT Mortgage Events is the creator of NEXT, the mortgage tech summit for women executives. NEXT hosts its flagship event twice each year, in winter and summer. NEXT’s sessions feature several lender executives, each of whom will deliver experience-based intel on a topic relevant to today’s top executives. The company's goal is to develop a community of women executives in the mortgage lending industry through event experiences that provide opportunities to expand professional networks to drive strategic business growth.
As America confronts the unprecedented twin challenges of an affordable housing crisis and the looming risk of COVID-induced mass evictions, this book claims there’s an urgent need for incisive assessments of national housing policy. In his new book released October 15th, Atlanta Housing Authority CEO Eugene Jones provides unique insights drawn from his long career, sharply critiques current national housing policy and argues for comprehensive housing policy reforms – which do not always easily fit into either the liberal or conservative ideological boxes. Jones’ new book makes the claim that America’s affordable housing crisis long predates the COVID-19 pandemic, and the country may be facing a perfect storm that, absent governmental actions, could turn a housing crisis in many cities into a housing disaster, as it says so many tenants are now unable to pay rents, and may face eventual evictions and homelessness. Jones says research indicates that Congress “must provide no less than $100 billion to ensure housing stability for the lowest-income renters during and after the pandemic.”
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Event TIP “When speaking, look into your computer’s camera instead of at yourself on screen. That way, the viewers watching see you delivering your content directly to them, as opposed to looking like you’re reading off of a screen. You look more engaged, and they are more likely to listen.” -Adam Constantine Ace Creatives Owner and CEO
DECEMBER 2020/JANUARY 2021
UPSTATE DOWNTOWN IN THE AIR AT THE GROCERY STORE BETWEEN GAMES ACROSS THE COUNTRY ON VACATION
WORK FROM ANYWHERE WITH THE UWM INTOUCH MOBILE APP. DO MORE WHILE YOU’RE ON THE GO. It’s only been a few months since we launched the UWM InTouch mobile app and we already have some new enhancements below to tell you about. View your pipeline, lock or extend loans, upload conditions and more. Your loans don’t have to stop moving when you’re on the go, or just away from your desk. UWM InTouch gives you the freedom and flexibility to: • Submit and track progress of Change of Circumstances • Upload and review cleared conditions/invoices • Create and manage all Client Requests • Receive push notifications on loan actions • Copy conditions — just click a button and place into an email, text or anywhere else • Filter your pipelines — available to admins and broker owners so they can view just the loans they are the loan officer on Download UWM InTouch today from the App Store or Google Play Store. Not part of our network yet? Join today at uwm.com/join-uwm.
YOU + UWM = YOUNITED | 800.981.8898 | UWM.COM
This information is provided to mortgage and real estate professionals only and is not intended nor is it authorized for consumer distribution. NMLS #3038
TAKE 5
Nexme Cofounder
Vanessa Alvarez
Vanessa Alvarez, a Latina cofounder of Nexme, a Seattle real estate startup, has come a long way since escaping a civil war in Latin America as a child in the 1970s. Raised by a single mother from a young age, Alvarez grew up in Rhode Island, where she watched her mom work two factory jobs to support them. Alvarez worked her way through the ranks in the tech world, proudly representing her Latina heritage and eventually cofounding Nexme in 2019 with her partner, Arian Abdulkader. Nexme is an on-demand real estate platform that offers a home search database and full-service, professional real estate agents. Available in California, Massachusetts and soon Rhode Island, the company claims to save consumers an average of $6,750 by buying a home with Nexme through its no-commission platform. Alvarez gives an inside view of her life by answering five questions:
1. My morning routine looks like... coffee and Twitter for news.
2. My guilty pleasure is... Tiktok 3. Besides my job and family, my greatest passion is... watching the impact that technology has on how we can buy and sell homes in a more simple manner.
4. After I am finished with my career I hope people remember... that I provided an enjoyable moment in their lives.
5. I would tell my younger self...
16 â?ą HOUSINGWIRE
look for mentors who can guide you and have a positive influence on your life.
DECEMBER 2020/JANUARY 2021
INSIDE AGENT
Dorothy Botsoe
Dorothy Jensen Realty
dorothy@dorothyjensenrealty.com 1 Stony Gate Oval, New Rochelle, NY 10804 $889,900 3 bedrooms, 3 full bathrooms, 5 half bathrooms 3,710 sqft
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NAMED the New York State Association of Realtors 2020 Realtor of the Year, Dorothy Botsoe has owned Dorothy Jensen Realty since 1995. Located in White Plains, New York, Botsoe said her real estate career has been fulfilling and a humbling experience. Botsoe said she didn’t expect to be named Realtor of the Year, “because I serve without expectation of anything, you just want to be a part of the process and you want to be part of an inclusive process.” In her market, Botsoe said there is a lot of activity, and things are moving fast, especially if they are priced well.
DECEMBER 2020/JANUARY 2021
LOCAL INTEL
By: Brena Nath
Danvers, Massachusetts
“The Danvers market is highly competitive right now, as the pandemic has buyers looking outside of the urban areas and toward the suburbs, where there’s more space to move around,” Mortgage Network Loan Officer Jennifer Reyes said. Due to the high level of competition, she explained that many homes in the area are attracting bidding wars, with many buyers waiving contingencies in order to get their offers accepted. This impact can really be seen in some of the more desirable neighborhoods where homes are selling for 5% or more over asking price and are spending less than two weeks on the market before being snatched up, she added.
Middletown, Rhode Island
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“The demand for homes has been high in general for Rhode Island,” said Claudia Mobilia, senior vice president of operations at Embrace Home Loans in Middletown, Rhode Island. “We’ve seen a lot of pent-up demand throughout the pandemic and a jump in mortgage applications. The problem is inventory – there’re too few homes for sale and too many buyers, including many out-of-state buyers who have decided Rhode Island is where they want to be. As the work-from-home culture has become the new normal, we’re also seeing people interested in leaving large cities for our coastal communities.” Mobilia added that while increasing median home prices is great news for home sellers, it’s not for buyers.
DECEMBER 2020/JANUARY 2021
Sacramento-Sierra Oaks, California
Jackie Merchant, Realtor at Coldwell Banker Realty in Sacramento-Sierra Oaks, said she doesn’t think her market will be slowing down anytime soon. “The market here in Sacramento is crazy, the residential market is super, super hot and [there’s lots of] multiple offers and properties going way over asking,” Merchant said. Merchant suggested that one explanation for why there’s been a huge surge in demand is more people want to buy a bigger house so they have a home office or want a bigger yard because they have people working from home and kids doing school from home. Merchant added that more people are pouring into Sacramento from the Bay Area and Southern California, and that “everybody seems to be on the move.”
New City, New York, like many others, remains competitive as buyers continue to experience bidding wars amid historically low housing inventory and an uptick in home prices, said Vesna Kanacki, Realtor with Century 21 Full Service Realty. While she said that the election could play a big factor in their spring market, the pandemic is only fueling demand there. “If the pandemic surges up again, I think we’re just going to get busier and busier here, because we are definitely located in the correct position, outside of New York City, where parents can still commute to work and children can have space needed for homeschooling and things like that,” Kanacki said.
Seattle, Washington
“Our market is brisk, and I’m holding about 20-plus active clients at any given time,” said Robin Sheridan, a Compass Washington real estate broker, when asked about how she is staying competitive in her market. “Even with a full-time assistant, it is hard to manage the active clients and the ones who are a few months out from listing and or searching.” Sheridan added that while she tries to treat all of her transactions with a sense of urgency, using a CRM has been a lifesaver.
DECEMBER 2020/JANUARY 2021
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New City, New York
COMMENTARY
2020
housing disruption paves the way for the years to come From transformation to restoration By Kevin McMahon
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2020 has certainly been a year to remember. While we may be ready to firmly plant our feet in 2021, we shouldn’t leave the past 12 months behind without taking a critical look at how the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted the housing market, and how it will pave the way for 2021 and beyond. Before we repress these 2020 memories, let’s dive into how this pandemic has disrupted a number of areas of the housing industry providing us all a nudge toward trying new processes and technologies that we maybe have assumed were still a few years away. Let’s start with a look at originations and delinquencies. We’ve all thrown out our 2020 forecasts at this point as the origination market has screamed to all-time records. According to the Mortgage Bankers Association, mortgage origination volume is expected to reach $3.1 trillion, with the largest refinance market since 2003 and the largest home purchase loan market since 2005 and 2006. Then of course, we have the pandemic, which thrust us into an unexpected level of unemployment thereby increasing delinquencies. As unemployment increases and incomes decline, borrowers refrain from buying homes and the rate of requests for forbearance or some type of homeowner assistance increases, naturally. It’s at that moment that the mortgage industry changes course from focusing primarily on helping borrowers purchase homes to helping them keep their homes. This is not what we’ve seen throughout 2020, though. As an industry, it’s been a challenge
We’ve all thrown out our 2020 forecasts at this point as the origination market has screamed to all-time records.
to wrap our arms around this unprecedented market. Unlike every cycle before it, 2020 brought originations at record high levels at one end of the spectrum and delinquencies at the other end of the spectrum that also are reaching heights we haven’t seen since the crisis. According to Black Knight, the highest government sponsored enterprise forbearance rate was reported on May 29th as 7.2% compared to 4% in the first week of October. Generally, forbearance has been trending downward since the end of May. So, on one end are employed borrowers who are able and happy to take advantage of the low interest rates to purchase a home or refinance an existing mortgage. On the opposite end, there are unemployed borrowers who now have easy access to homeowner assistance programs that can aid them in keeping their homes, including payment deferral and forbearance. WHAT DOES IT MEAN FOR 2021? With all that said, we’re all left wondering where we go from here. How much of 2021 will be a continuation of 2020? Is pandemic life the new normal, or is there a way back to life as we knew it in 2019? We talk a lot at Genworth about our belief statements. We force ourselves, no matter the level of uncertainty, to establish our point of view, assign probabilities to that point of view and then set strategy from there. There are many different paths we can take as an industry, but one belief statement that is increasingly shared across mortgage finance: The forced increased use and implementation of technology to reduce process friction is finally here to stay and will only accelerate. Just one example is the appraisal world. For months now, desktop and drive-by appraisals have been the go-to processes for appraising homes and enabled the mortgage lending process to continue. According to Genworth Mortgage Insurance Chief Appraiser Adam Johnston, the use of desktop and drive-by appraisals have been a necessary adaptation to concerns about the spread of COVID-19, and may continue to be used as standard practice or as a go-to solution should we find ourselves in another situation, similar to COVID-19. While these more virtual and lowto-no contact forms of appraisals are being utilized with increased frequency, they do present a few challenges that must be taken into consideration, one of them being borrower-supplied photo fraud. This type of fraud can take place when the photographs of the home’s interior condition, quality and features are not from
DECEMBER 2020/JANUARY 2021
UNPRECEDENTED SOLUTIONS 2020 has also been another proving ground where this industry shows that unprecedented challenges call for unprecedented solutions. We’ve seen its importance before, when during the 2008 financial crisis, new policies and services and enhancements to existing policies were created. Those policies and services include automated income and employment verification, credit risk transfers from the GSEs to private investors and the Private Mortgage Insurer Eligibility Requirements that strengthened the mortgage insurance industry’s risk and capital standards. Disruption naturally and inevitably clears a path to innovation. In 2020, we were forced to use digital tools such as remote online notary and in-person
electronic notary for closing. Next year, it’ll be imperative to work with state legislatures to complete the regulatory work so these tools can be used in all 50 states, compared to where we are now which is right around 50%. Digital home shopping has also taken off. As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, shopping for a home online has increased and naturally spurred 45% of homes in improvements in the digital tools these past several that give borrowers the same pandemic months experience without stepping foot were sold without inside the home. As shared at a the buyer physically recent Blend conference, 45% of homes in these past several visiting the property. pandemic months were sold without the buyer physically visiting the property. Also, other tools are evolving where a homebuyer may enter a home without a real estate agent or owner present, and tour the home with a virtual guide that points out key characteristics of interest to the potential buyer. Artificial intelligence helps facilitate this process. When it comes to data management, moving AI into that process will help determine when a loan has complete data and is ready for underwriting more quickly; and as it relates to document management, the processor wouldn’t be the one figuring out what’s missing, but the system would and then alert the borrower of the need via a point-of-sale system. As we move into 2021, there’s still quite a bit of uncertainty about the COVID-19 pandemic and what the lasting effects on the economy and the housing market will be. However, I believe this year is that nudge the industry needed to push forward with innovations that lived on whiteboards for years. Successful organizations going forward will be the ones who embrace and leverage these changes to run better businesses in 2021 and beyond.
Kevin McMahon is the senior vice president of customer solutions at Genworth U.S. Mortgage Insurance. Utilizing his consulting, marketing and operations experience, McMahon develops and evolves strategic direction for Genworth as part of the senior leadership team. The statements provided are the opinions of McMahon and do not reflect the views of Genworth or its management.
DECEMBER 2020/JANUARY 2021
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the borrower’s actual interior. When confronted with this situation, appraisers can utilize a thirdparty photo capture tool that has strong fraud controls and capabilities built within, including location validation, photo date and time, internet photo detection and notification controls to alert the appraiser of photographs with suspicious characteristics. Technology has also supported a shift in industry roles. We notice that originators are increasingly continuing to morph into loan counselors rather than paper shufflers. Prior to the pandemic, one in four applications were taken in person or over the phone, and that number has quickly moved to one in seven. The introduction of easy-to-use point-of-sales systems has eased that transition. Processors are becoming loan facilitators guiding the borrower through the process rather than exercising their stare and compare expertise for document-based data entry; and underwriter shortages are driving the use of technology to stratify which loans need what level of review, thereby improving the use of high cost resources. Every step of the process is moving at a much quicker pace. In 2021, we expect to see this trend continue as dead time is removed and the elapsed time from application to close shrinks.
W
COMMENTARY
hat 2020’s top 3 forbearance exit trends mean for servicers in 2021
Servicers will face challenges, but have the tools to overcome them By Matt Tully
Early COVID housing policy helped servicers care for homeowners in these first nine months of the pandemic with fast forbearances and smart deferrals. Now let’s preview how this will play out for servicers, homeowners and the housing economy in 2021. We’ll begin with the top three ways homeowners are exiting forbearance so far.
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TOP THREE WAYS HOMEOWNERS ARE EXITING FORBEARANCE There have been three main forbearance exit trends since June. Each exit strategy provides a different perspective on the borrower experience during COVID-19. 1. Homeowners stayed current on mortgage payments Between June and July 2020, the largest portion of borrowers exiting forbearance were those who never stopped paying their mortgage in the first place. There are a few possible reasons for this exit behavior. The likeliest explanation is that many borrowers enrolled in forbearance as a precaution. Unsure of how COVID-19 would impact their job status, these borrowers may have proactively requested forbearance before things got worse. Then they made their payments as planned, gained confidence that their income and employment situations were stable and eventually exited forbearance. Another possible explanation is that homeowners misunderstood or accidentally requested forbearance. Finally, some borrowers may have never turned off automatic payments after entering forbearance.
DECEMBER 2020/JANUARY 2021
Keeping payments current then canceling forbearance is certainly the most counterintuitive of the top forbearance exit reasons, but it has remained a top exit reason. 2. Homeowners exited forbearance with lump sum payment Another top three forbearance exit reason since June is repaying missed payments in one lump sum, also known as “reinstatement.” There are a couple scenarios that may have led to this. As in reason one above, some homeowners may have requested forbearance as a precaution, then repaid the missed payments when they realized they were stable. Or some homeowners may have requested forbearance after a job furlough, then repaid their missed payments after regaining full time work status. It’s also worth noting that these lump-sum payers clearly saved money while in forbearance status instead of spending on discretionary items or non-mortgage debt obligations. 3. GSE deferrals allow homeowners to repay skipped payments later The final top forbearance exit reason has been the payment deferral programs offered by Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and Ginnie Mae. These programs let homeowners exit forbearance by starting to make payments going forward and deferring missed payments until the end of the loan’s life (which is a refi or a home sale). Ginnie Mae already allowed this, and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac began allowing it as part of the pandemic response. It removes the burden of a balloon payment for missed payments.
The fact that it has remained a top forbearance exit reason shows relief policies are working as intended. Challenge #3: Borrower-first recovery In April 2021, millions of forbearance plans will expire, and servicers will have to guide borrowers through different loss mitigation paths. The silver lining of the 2008 crisis is that servicers are better equipped to handle the challenge this time around. We have government oversight in place to ensure that servicers and borrowers are on the same page. The smart policy decisions that got us here emphasize the importance of a borrower-first policy approach. Servicing technology also has capabilities that simply didn’t exist a decade ago, most notably: • Full systems of record for servicers to track and The servicing industry manage loans has risen to the • Digital self-service options challenge of providing to empower borrowers relief to struggling • Full default management borrowers during for every phase of loss COVID-19...” mitigation and REO, compliant in all 50 states These tools enable borrowers to proactively seek hardship care while servicers benefit from a more streamlined, automated workflow with reduced compliance risks and overhead costs. Finally, servicers can utilize multiple channels to guide borrowers through various loss mitigation scenarios. Modern servicing technology will play a key role in homeowner hardship care, servicer efficiency, investor/GSE transparency, and systemic safety. WE’RE ALREADY ON THE ROAD TO RECOVERY The servicing industry has risen to the challenge of providing relief to struggling borrowers during COVID-19, and is much better organized and equipped to tackle this challenge than it was in 2008. This time around, servicers have both modern servicing technology and smart policy to navigate the pandemic. As servicers continue to work with agencies and leverage the latest tools to guide homeowners out of forbearance responsibly, technology will play a crucial role in making quick, user-friendly hardship care accessible to borrowers in need. Today’s challenges are an opportunity for servicers to prove they’re a partner not just in good times, but also when homeowners need them most.
Matt Tully is the vice president of agency affairs and chief compliance officer at Sagent Lending Technologies. Tully is responsible for overseeing the company’s relationships with Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Ginnie Mae, the CFPB and state regulatory agencies. Prior to joining Sagent Tully was the head of government and industry relations at Essent Guaranty, a mortgage insurance company. He began his career in Washington on Capitol Hill.
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THREE SERVICER CHALLENGES HEADING INTO 2021 Another policy that has helped is the CARES Act allowing forbearances for a year. But there’s a flip side to this: the longer homeowners stay in forbearance, the harder it will be for them to get out of it. Heading into 2021, servicers face three main challenges caring for strained homeowners. Challenge #1: Getting borrowers to take action Millions of borrowers proactively managed their loans in the spring, evidenced by the huge spike in forbearance requests from April to June. Initial forbearance plans spanned either 90- or 180-day intervals, with the CARES Act allowing up to 12 months of mortgage relief – if borrowers requested a forbearance extension. Unfortunately, many borrowers have not requested extensions. Nearly one in five forbearance exits in early October were by borrowers who did not renew their forbearance or put a loss mitigation plan in place. This implies hardships are becoming elongated or more severe after the first 180 days since April. Servicers must expand their borrower outreach programs to prevent homeowners from becoming needlessly delinquent. Enhanced communication efforts should complement self-service technology to give borrowers an easy and effective way to get help. Challenge #2: The effectiveness of payment deferral plans Payment deferrals currently account for more than a third of all forbearance exits, an increasingly popular option since it was implemented on July 1, 2020. But this trend may not hold, as nearly twothirds of all forbearance plans have received extensions, and many homeowners that remain in forbearance may require more serious intervention to get their mortgages current. Payment deferral is only viable if a borrower has recovered enough to return to their prior monthly mortgage payments. Given the widespread economic impact of COVID, many borrowers may require loan modifications to stay in their homes. Which brings us to the third (and most important) challenge of 2021.
W hat ’s next for
housing in 2021? Economists look ahead for each sector of the market
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By the HousingWire Editorial team
DECEMBER 2020/JANUARY 2021
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The housing market has continued to remain a bright spot in the economy, even as other areas continue to struggle amid stay-at-home orders and economic shutdowns. COVID-19 threw the economy for a loop in 2020. In fact, this year seemed to prove anything is possible. From wildfires to hurricanes, the pandemic to murder hornets and a deeply divisive political campaigning season that drove record-setting voter turnout, 2020 did everything but follow its original forecasts. 2020 started a new decade, and at the end of last year, forecasters and economists saw the biggest trends being the growth of mergers and acquisitions, an expansion of the broker community and increased fintech. Many experts, including the Mortgage Bankers Association, pondered the possibilities of a recession, saying it was absolutely a possibility. But they never could have guessed that recession would be due to COVID-19. Fannie Mae said housing would help fuel economic growth in 2020, while Freddie Mac said mortgage rates would stay low, and those have certainly been true. Now, economists are focusing their sights on 2021, and forecasts are more difficult than ever to create. What will happen with COVID-19? Will we have a vaccine? How will the government at state and federal levels handle the virus and the economy over the next several months or even the next year?
And these questions overshadow every forecast as economists put in their disclaimers next to each prediction, warning they are based on certain COVID19 assumptions. Simply put, for some sectors of the economy and even of the housing industry, the best response forecasters can commit to is the equivalent of a shrug emoji. However, other areas are more clear. HousingWire’s editorial team spoke with economists and professionals to determine the next move for the mortgage, secondary, title, servicing, real estate and fintech sectors of the housing industry. 2020 saw impressive changes on the technology front as the industry worked to remain open during stay-at-home orders and social distancing. Meanwhile low interest rates kept home sales at record highs. Servicers worked to keep homeowners from being foreclosed on during a time of unprecedented layoffs as job losses hit a record high of 18.1 million in April, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and servicers put forbearance plans in place to help with loss mitigation. However, as those forbearance programs come to an end in 2021, the future remains unclear. The job losses continue to decrease significantly, but many of those jobs have not returned, making some experts to question foreclosure rates in 2021. As we seek to project the year to come, the HousingWire editorial team details the top projections for the year ahead for every sector of the housing industry in the pages ahead.
DECEMBER 2020/JANUARY 2021
After 2020's IPOs, 2021 might be the year of MSR By James Kleimann
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ith record origination volume stretching capacity and a fresh infusion of capital from the public markets en route, a slew of big nonbank lenders are shifting strategies and declining to sell their mortgage servicing rights, which they’d previously relied on to fund their operations. In fact, roughly $70.8 billion in MSR transferred across the secondary market during the third quarter of 2020. That is the lowest total since 2015, according to Inside Mortgage Finance. Rocket Companies, which went public in August and was valued at approximately $38 billion, disclosed to investors that it retains servicing rights on the vast majority of mortgages it originates in the U.S. It’s part of the company’s strategy to thrive in all market conditions.
“The company has regularly sold portions of its MSR portfolio to manage its balance sheet and raise liquidity, though additional sales are not expected until after 2021,” ratings agency Fitch pointed out in late October. Historically, UWM hasn’t been a top 10 servicer of government sponsored enterprises loans, but in the third quarter, UWM increased MSR from $924 million to $1.41 billion. Caliber Home Loans, Guild Mortgage and Blackstone Group-owned Finance of America are three additional companies starting their public offerings that have prioritized retaining MSR, which on average yield about 30 bps per year. But servicing is not an easy business, especially these days when there’s a run on experienced, high-quality back-office talent. Managing a servicing book during good times is a risk. Factor in a pandemic and high
When interest rates are low, Rocket can pump out a staggering volume of loans to borrowers. When interest rates rise, the value of MSR increases, which partially insulates the company from a slowdown in originations. (Industry-wide, MSR values have fallen by two-thirds over the last two years, primarily because of historically low interest rates and the effects of COVID-19.) Rocket’s closest competitor in the lending game, Detroit-based United Wholesale Mortgage, is eyeing a similar thrive-in-all-conditions strategy. “As we’ve been growing, we’ve had to sell servicing to continue to bring cash into the business,” UWM CEO Mat Ishbia told HousingWire. “Now I don’t have to do that. I can sell what I want to, not because I need to. Brokers will love the fact that we don’t have to sell servicing. That was the No. 1 question I got if you asked me one year ago what brokers wanted us to do differently.” UWM, which is expected to go public at a $16.1 billion valuation in the fourth quarter once it merges with a Gores Holdings special purpose acquisitions company, has begun to dramatically reduce the amount of servicing it has sold. In 2019, Ishbia’s company sold $75 billion worth of MSR. As of Aug. 31, 2020, it had sold just $25 billion worth of MSR, despite being on pace to roughly double origination volume in 2020. Between September and October, it had sold just $1.2 billion in MSR, according to data from Recursion Companies. And the wholesale giant intends to make it a prominent component of its long-term business plan, even if it isn’t accustomed to managing such a large portfolio.
unemployment, and MSR neophytes could find themselves in trouble, even if delinquency to date has been relatively low. “There’s always a conversation in the industry, whether it’s better to outsource or own the servicer piece,” said Christopher Whalen, an investment banker and author. “I would tell you that unless you’re really, really, really good, you would probably want to outsource it.” Jack Micenko, a housing and mortgage analyst with Susquehanna Partners, said that servicing holds potential for lenders with solid tech stacks. Technology has allowed firms like Rocket and a select group of other independent mortgage banks to refinance their own books of business at 70% or better. More capital from public markets likely will lead to fewer MSR sales. “I think it’s more positive than negative, in that retaining servicing increases your stream of cash flows,” Micenko said. “If I broker a mortgage of 2.75% or 3% and the 10-year goes up 25 bps, 30 bps, that customer is never refinancing away from me. So, they’ll only be on the books longer, which means the NPV value (net present value) of that loan is greater. So, my MSR asset is more. Servicing today is pretty interesting, because number one, you can harvest with some basic technology inputs, identify your servicing portfolio of who may be more likely to refinance than not. All I need is an automated valuation model and what their coupon is... then I’m sending them an email saying, ‘Hey, we think you’re a candidate for refi, click here to get the process started.’ That doesn’t cost me anything.”
DECEMBER 2020/JANUARY 2021
About the author: James Kleimann is the mortgage editor of HousingWire. He joined the team in August 2020 after five-plus years serving as an editor and manager at The Real Deal. Kleimann lives in S h e l t e r I sl a nd , N Y with his wife and family.
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“There’s always a conversation in the industry, whether it’s better to outsource or own the servicer piece.” -Christopher Whalen
The secondary market comes to the rescue...again By Brena Nath
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he secondary market, often an afterthought for most participants in the mortgage process, took center stage in 2020. Think of it as the underdog quickly becoming the hero of the story. It was always there working hard in the background, just waiting for a year as unpredictable as 2020 to come to the rescue. But to understand the stability that the secondary market brought during a world-wide pandemic, you first have to look back at 2008. The country was in the middle of the financial crisis, as the consequences of the deceptive mortgage lending practices from all the years prior came crashing down. Ben Bernanke, the former chair of the Federal Reserve, the central bank of the United States, who served from 2006 to 2014, was tasked with responding to the massive impact of the crisis. To inject some life back into the economy, Bernanke decided to grow the Fed’s balance sheet by purchasing government bonds and mortgage-backed securities, better known as quantitative easing. This unconventional monetary policy is designed to encourage lending and investment, adding money back into the economy and lowering interest rates. The Fed went through three rounds of quantitative easing plans, which lasted until December 2013 when the Fed finally announced a taper, slowly reducing the billions of dollars it was spending. Then, in October 2014, the Fed finally indicated an official end to its third quantitative easing program. That is, until March 2020. “March was an extraordinary period in the secondary market,” said Richard Koss, Recursion chief research officer and former Fannie Mae director of mortgage market analysis. “The market completely froze,” he said. “If you look at what was going on, the stock market was crashing, like 1,000 points a day, and it was reminiscent of the global financial crisis when Lehman failed. It had that kind of a shock to it, and people said, ‘Holy shit, I have no idea what’s going on. I’m going to pull my money out of anything not liquid until I figure it out.’” Everything tanked, Koss explained. Then, one late night in March, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell went back to a program that has a history of rescuing the U.S. economy. He introduced a new quantitative easing program. While he didn’t directly call it that when asked, he said, “What I can tell you definitively is the purpose of the asset purchases. It really is to support the availability of credit in the economy—households and businesses—and thereby support the overall economy. In terms of what it’s labelled, that’s of less interest to me.” Powell’s decision became an anchor for the U.S. economy as COVID19 rapidly spread across the world; his actions stabilized the economy
and fueled what would become a year of record-low interest rates and record mortgage volume. In the words of Koss, “The Fed came in, cannons blazing and bought everything in sight, and everything just collapsed back in and market liquidity was restored. The cavalry showed up, and it did what it was supposed to do. And, it worked extraordinarily well.” Simultaneously, housing officials were also coming up with plans of their own to support struggling homeowners impacted by the pandemic. The introduction of the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act, also known as the CARES Act, a $2.2 trillion economic stimulus bill, included forbearance options for borrowers. And with about 3 million homeowners still in forbearance plans at the end of October, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association, the Federal Housing Administration and Federal Housing Finance Agency extended their forbearance policies for another six months to bring stability. So now the nation has a Fed that is dedicated to not letting the markets freeze up and policies in place to keep borrowers in their homes. This should be great for the secondary market, right? This answer doesn’t change according to who you ask, as much as when you ask. The secondary market has definitely played the lead role in the housing market’s narrative this year, but these unusual and unconventional policies come with a cost, or in this case, a lot of questions. Ralph McLaughlin, chief economist and senior vice president of analytics at Haus, explained it well when he said that in this economic downturn, policy plays a much larger role in what’s going to happen with the health of the housing market than fundamental economics. Will the government extend forbearance policies again? Will the government introduce another stimulus package? How will this administration oversee housing for the next four years? And maybe one of the biggest looming questions, how is COVID-19 going to impact the economy if there’s not a vaccine soon? “From our perspective, this year has been a pretty volatile year, especially early on with COVID-19 and the impact of everything and how that impacted capital markets in our mortgage business in general,” said Alex Elezaj, United Wholesale Mortgage chief strategy officer. But when talking about the capital market, Elezaj said that sometimes things can get overly complicated. Even though there are a lot of unknowns when it comes to the future, Powell’s decision to buy bonds seems to be powerful enough to bring stability to 2021. Elezaj said that Powell’s decision to come out and say that interest rates will continue to remain low, means that they expect to be in the same kind of environment for at least the next 12 to 18 months. “For the most part, we do well right now, we will continue to do well, regardless,” said Elezaj.
About the author: Brena Nath is the HW+ Managing Editor at HousingWire where she leads the premium membership program, which breaks down the “why” behind the daily news cycle through insights and analysis. By keeping a steady pulse on the trends in the market, her role serves as a connection point to help build relationships and spotlight top industry voices. Joining the HousingWire news team in February 2013, she has also served in the roles of digital reporter, content specialist and reporter.
DECEMBER 2020/JANUARY 2021
The shifting role of the notary in mortgage title By Kelsey Ramírez a reliable internet connection,” he said. “So the mobile notary isn’t going anywhere, much to the RON proponents’ chagrin, just because we’re finding out all the little loopholes and the downside risks to this technology.” When artificial intelligence first started appearing on the mortgage scene, many feared it would take critical jobs away from loan officers and other housing professionals. The years have shown, however, that that has not been the case. AI has its place in the mortgage industry, but it is more often used to mine data and use this data to create predictions, help with marketing efforts and enhance the jobs of housing professionals that use it. Most experts now agree that AI will not take over mortgage lending, but instead give lenders that use it a tool to get ahead of their competitors. One expert argues the same will be true of RON for notaries. “I believe that platforms like us are the notaries’ savior,” Notarize CEO Pat Kinsel said. “And I mean that, without us, everyone is trying to get rid of the notary. They’re saying, ‘This is too much friction. I don’t need to go through this process. Why do we need to get things notarized? It’s ruining my business process.’ With us, people suddenly go, ‘Wow, this is super efficient. And you’re right, we should have an independent, third party verifying these documents, and it can be a highly efficient experience and cost savings and things like that.’” Kinsel explained that while he can see why notaries would be skeptical of RON and worried about what it would mean for their jobs, he doesn’t believe this fear is necessary. In fact, the onset of RON could potentially separate career notaries from those who simply have a license. “There’s four and a half million notaries in the country – there are more notaries than teachers,” he said. “There are only 40,000 professional notaries. So what we do as a company, is we take transactions away from notaries who are inexperienced and it’s not their actual job, someone who’s just in an office, and we give those transaction to the professional notaries, and we help them make a living doing that.” If you were closing on a mortgage, it wouldn’t matter if it was 1950 or 2019 — the closing process from a title standpoint was exactly the same, Title ClearingHouse of Jacksonville President Valerie Saunders said. Then, 2020 changed everything. Now, 2021 could be poised to bring even more changes to the title industry. The role of the notary in the mortgage transaction is changing as eClosing options take over the market. But the evidence suggests their job is not going away anytime soon.
About the author: As magazine editor, Kelsey Ramírez spearheads the production of HousingWire Magazine. In this role, she also oversees HousingWire’s ClosingTime newsletter, the company’s title and escrow coverage. Upon joining HousingWire in 2016, Ramírez served as editorial assistant before being promoted to reporter, associate editor and, most recently, magazine editor.
DECEMBER 2020/JANUARY 2021
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emote online notarization is spreading like wildfire across the U.S. as COVID-19 and stay-at-home orders forced many companies to look for alternative methods to continue operating amid the socially distanced environment in 2020. But what is in store as 2021 unfolds? Consumer demand for RON only continues to grow. Currently all states but two (California and South Carolina) have accepted some kind of RON or remote ink-signed notarization methods, either through temporary COVID-19 emergency orders or permanent state legislation. Earlier this year, Notarize and Realogy Title Group announced they saw a 200% spike in RON closings in the first half of 2020, as compared to the full year in 2019. So what does all this change mean for mortgage notaries? Is their job on the line, will RON bring a fundamental change to how their job is performed or will it be used as simply another tool that makes their job easier? One HousingWire reader, who is a retired mortgage banker of more than 40 years and a certified signing agent, fears RON will turn notaries into call centers to be called on by lenders. “I found that few title companies or lenders were ready to do RON closings in Illinois,” the reader wrote in to HousingWire. “It seems as though the signing agent must affiliate with a RON platform provider in order to secure any signings. It also appears that the requirements for eVaults, eNotary logs, video records of the eClosing and other requirements are an impediment to independent RON notaries. “It seems as though the successful companies will have an army of notaries licensed in multiple states in a call center environment that have the notary perform six to 12 eSign closing per day,” the reader continued. “I can envision the independent notary signing agent being squeezed out by high cost of getting certified to do RONs coupled by reduced signing fees.” Notaries in some states, such as California, are nervous about the changes RON would bring to their role. “The consumers in the world aren’t as tech savvy as we take them for,” said Matt Miller, the California League of Independent Notaries president and founder. “And most notaries tell me that you have to walk someone through how to use their webcam for the first time.” Miller explained that notaries complain that through the use of RON, many of them end up playing more of a role of tech support as consumers struggle to understand how to use the technology being offered to them. “There’s always going to be the person who just can’t do online notarization just because they’re not tech savvy, or they don’t have
Servicers likely to keep foreclosures low in 2021 By Alex Roha
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fter nearly 40 million people became unemployed by May because of COVID19, the housing industry, borrowers and the Federal Reserve quickly realized that without ample aid, things could quickly
A bout the au thor: Alex Roha is the mortgage reporter for the HousingWire team. Focusing on lending, servicing and policy, Roha is passionate about affordable
housing
and underserved communities. Prior to joining HousingWire in 2020, Roha graduated from the University of North Texas with a degree in journalism and public relations. While in school, she studied foreign journalism and media in Japan and wrote content for several
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nonprofits.
turn sour. However, servicers leveraged the lessons learned from the last recession to help avoid a catastrophe, synergistic technology and a blanket of forbearance large enough to cover the nation kept servicers busy, but prepared. By mid-May, 4.7 million mortgages were in some sort of forbearance strategy, representing 8.8% of outstanding home loans. For many servicers, those numbers are already falling. By mid-October, Black Knight estimated 36% (around 2.3 million) of those who entered forbearance have since exited and continued to perform. But to really grasp what servicing will look like in 2021, Marina Walsh, Mortgage Bankers Association vice president of industry analysis, said not to focus on the population that continued to pay while in forbearance, but on the borrowers in serious delinquency. “There’s this whole group of seriously delinquent plans that really had no place else to go,” Walsh said. “So, you’re talking about 90-plus days delinquent. And they’re just hanging out there because we have a foreclosure moratorium in place right now, but what happens when those moratoriums expire?” Following previous natural disaster recovery patterns, mortgage delinquencies are not expected to return to pre-pandemic levels until March 2022. “If things stay status quo, if the moratorium really does end at the end of the year, and the CARES Act is not extended, then we have a situation where there are potentially more borrowers who have to be put into loss mitigation,” Walsh said. But don’t raise the alarm just yet – with low housing inventory Walsh said it will be in servicers' best interest to keep borrowers where they are, and unlike 2008, borrowers now have the most equity available to them in history. According to Walsh, most of it will be up to the policy that comes from Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, VA and the FHA. Especially the FHA and VA, Walsh said. The pandemic pushed the highest rate for delinquency among FHA loans that the MBA had seen – up to 15.65%. “Even back in February, servicers were concerned about their FHA portfolio,” Walsh said. “We had a situation where the FICO scores were dropping, DTI was rising, LTV was going up, and FHA loans were changing before we even had a pandemic. But the book losses are substantially higher, if you just look at unreimbursed vendor costs, they are significantly higher for FHA versus
conventional. So I think that’s really the key thing is how bad is that going to get? Is it going to get worse?” Bob Walters, Rocket Companies president and chief operating officer, said that in times of both crisis and peace, what borrowers really want is visibility and control. “There’s a profound difference between people who are really changing the way that consumers interact with their servicer versus those who are not,” Walters said. “Whether it be escrows, early stage default or late stage default, there are so many ways to employ technology both consumer facing and behind the scenes to make it more efficient, effective and done, quite frankly, pleasant.” Walters pressed the importance of adapting the technology to the situation – easy interfaces for easy problems, and more synergy in human interaction for the complicated ones. If somebody can sign up for forbearance from their bathtub on a Saturday, they need to also be able to seamlessly call and receive updates if loss mitigation is on the radar. “Servicers need to build a solution for clients that faces retention, meaning you want to stay in your home and then move to non-retention, meaning I can’t afford my home anymore and how do we deal with that with grace?” Walters said. “Because servicing, quite frankly, is done from a technology standpoint that’s pretty antiquated,” he said. “Our industry is on the precipice of really changing. In 10 years, our industry won’t look anything like today.”
DECEMBER 2020/JANUARY 2021
“Our industry is on the precipice of really changing. In 10 years, our industry won’t look anything like today.” -Bob Walters
Don’t expect home sales to slow down in 2021 By Julia Falcon kind of nervous and trying to figure out where things were going,” Bryher said. “But all COVID did was accelerate the market going up.” The amount of historically low housing inventory across the U.S. is clashing with the pent-up demand of homebuyers. And unless properties are in really bad condition or it is priced incorrectly, they’re going very fast in Bryher’s market. No matter what the season is, Bryher said the housing market will keep doing what it’s doing. “Well, usually, things slow down between Thanksgiving and Christmas,” Bryher said. “And now…I think that this is going to be an atypical fall. And I think it’s just going to keep being very strong.” The 2020 market made Long Island Real Estate Agent Jim Manikas throw any typical type of trend out the window. Manikas said that the only time he sees the slightest slowdown in the real estate market is the last two weeks of August, when kids are back in school. But this year, homebuying season turned into homebuying year. The average two-week slowdown Manikas said he sees in August didn’t happen this year, which he expected because of the pent-up demand from COVID-19 and the fact that there are still more buyers and sellers in the market, which Manikas said isn’t going to correct itself by winter. “I expect it to be a very busy winter straight through the holidays and into Januar y,” Manikas said. “In fact, the last three years, [there’s been] lots of studies showing that the buyer market actually begins in January, February now. There’s more online action in Januar y, February, than there is in the typical, what everybody thinks is the big market in spring, which is March, April, May. So that, I’m very confident, will continue through the winter.” As for the rest of 2021, Manikas doesn’t think the homebuyers will stop for anything. “I think it’s just going to go straight through the spring into the summer, I don’t think there’s going to be a lapse, and I don’t think there’s going to be any type of a dip,” Manikas said. “I think it’ll just bleed right through into the summer, [and will probably] see more normalcy, maybe after the spring.”
“We’re working our way through [the pandemic] because we need to make a living, people need housing, and we’re driven to provide it.” -Bill Lublin
DECEMBER 2020/JANUARY 2021
About the author: As HousingWire’s real estate reporter, Julia Falcon covers topics including migration trends, iBuyers and the real estate agent's perspective. Falcon holds a degree in print and digital journalism from the Universit y of North Texas and is pursuing a master’s in digital communication analytics.
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eal estate agents across the U.S. have been busy as a result of the pent-up demand from homebuyers due to COVID-19. From facing uncertainty in March from COVID-19-related shutdowns, to seeing home sales skyrocket through the summer into fall, it looks like homebuyers won’t be slowing down anytime soon, despite the holiday season approaching. Fannie Mae Chief Economist Doug Duncan said he expects existing home sales to ultimately “be up a percent or more in 2021. The new home sales numbers had a big jump in 2020, and [there will be] more growth in 2021, but they’re going to have to rebuild that inventory, because anything that the builders are building today gets sold. So they’re working hard to try to build inventory.” Typically, homebuyers slow down around August, when children are back in school and vacations end. But now, as schools have pursued virtual learning, vacation towns and luxury destinations have become part of the housing market boom as families are working and schooling from home and desire more space not available in the city. New Jersey Centur y 21 agent Bill Lublin said typically there’s a slowdown in his market from Thanksgiving through New Year’s Day, but he said that everyone he has talked to remains busy. Being in the northeast, Lublin said that home buying really depends on the weather. “Depending on how much snow we get, that has to do with what happens,” Lublin said. “But I think people still need places [to live].” As for what he thinks will happen come 2021, Lublin said he thinks the housing market will remain strong, including single-family housing and even rentals. Lublin explained that even during the pandemic, the need for housing remains strong, and real estate agents are driven to provide it. Monique Bryher, a Los Angeles area Realtor and publisher of the California Real Estate Fraud Report, said she thinks because the market is going as strong as it is in Los Angeles, it will continue into the next year. “I keep telling people who [are] in the mindset of a year ago or even immediately pre-COVID, where people were
What fintech does your company need in 2021? By Sarah Wheeler
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020 served as a real litmus test for mortgage technology. Between having to transition whole teams to work from home — in some cases over just a weekend — to dealing with crushing origination volume, companies could clearly see the advantages or disadvantages of the technology they had invested in. For 2021, I talked with Scott Petronis, principal of Xcentric Consulting and one of the architects of HousingWire’s HousingStack ecosystem, about three areas of mortgage technology he’s keeping an eye on in the new year. End-to-end tech vs disparate tech solutions The age-old dilemma of build versus buy has morphed a bit in the last few years, as even companies who do a prodigious amount of in-house development are seeing a need to integrate some outside solutions. Today the conversation is more about whether to choose an all-in-one solution or piece together separate best-in-class solutions. Petronis said that there’s no right answer on this question, it’s just a matter of where a company wants to deploy its resources. “My bias on this topic is to try to build a system out of individual best-in-breed solutions, as opposed to relying on a single vendor to run your business,” Petronis said. “But that advice has caveats. Integrating those best-in-breed solutions typically means you have to be able to do some level of integration yourself, so it’s typically more effort. You have to figure out what best means, identify the best vendors and have the capability to do those evaluations. “Once you layer on the regulatory constraints, you really need an in-house team capable of doing that, or a trusted partner/consultant. It can be daunting if you don’t have the resources, time and skillset. “On the other hand, it could be much easier to evaluate four or five frontrunners for end-to-end solutions and take the bake-off approach. Those vendors are then on the hook to deliver what was sold, and that approach typically comes at lower licensing cost and a lower total cost of ownership.” Petronis noted that many companies start out with an end-to-end approach and then transition as they know better what they need.
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New uses for AI With record origination volume in 2020, mortgage companies are increasingly turning to artificial intelligence to gain efficiencies in their businesses. Although constantly evolving, AI technologies include advanced analytics, robotic process automation, machine learning and blockchain. A survey of 200 mortgage executives by Forbes and Roostify in July found that 55% of the executives surveyed think AI will make their
firm more competitive, and they are relying on it to reduce operating costs, deliver personalized customer experiences, improve customer experiences and reduce cycle times. Specifically, the survey found that the most popular AI use cases were: • Predicting a banking customer is ready to buy a home (58%) • Collecting and pre-filling data on a mortgage application (57%) • Sending alerts to consumers and ops teams on status or progress of the loan (57%) • Combining external databases to authenticate data (55%) Mortgage companies are still figuring out how best to leverage blockchain, but there are indications that 2021 could be a breakout year for the much-hyped technology. Deloitte’s 2020 Global Blockchain Survey found that an increasing number of business leaders — 55% — see blockchain as “a top-five strategic priority and are increasing their investments in staffing and blockchain technology.” Companies like JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, PayPal and Square all made significant investments in blockchain in 2020, and blockchain providers are able to demonstrate tangible benefits. Figure, a company offering the Provenance blockchain, says blockchain could take 117 basis points of cost out of the mortgage process. “There’s been increased talk this year about mortgage blockchain in terms of security and validation and identity, which blockchain could improve. I think we are finally going to see that come to fruition in 2021 and beyond,” Petronis said. The pitfalls of all that data Mortgage companies now collect an enormous amount of data, from property data to consumers’ buying preferences and social networks. Consumers expect personalized experiences but are conflicted about the data collected to understand their preferences. And for all the opportunities that data presents, it also carries a huge risk. “I don’t believe companies have done a good enough job understanding the data governance side of things,” Petronis said. “Have they resolved questions like: Who does the data belong to? What happens if I get an information discovery request? How do I purge the data? What do I do to ensure there’s not a breach and what steps do I take if there is a breach? “Many companies still aren’t prepared, but one thing is certain: When it comes to consumer privacy and data security, the aggressive posture from the regulatory side is going to keep tightening.” An entirely digital mortgage came a long way in 2020, especially considering changes in the closing process. Mortgage lenders and servicers in 2021 will have to find a way to stitch tech together to make an end-to-end process that serves their business and consumers as we head into another year of low rates.
About the Author: Sarah Wheeler is HousingWire’s editor in chief. She joined HousingWire in 2013, where prior to her current role, she served as managing editor of content solutions, content editor and magazine editor. In 2016, Wheeler won Folio’s Top Women in Media: Director-Lever Doers award. Before her time at HousingWire, she held marketing and editing roles at several ad agencies and healthcare companies.
DECEMBER 2020/JANUARY 2021
It's a wrap
took center stage in 2020, and will continue to lead the way into 2021. In a market as unpredictable as we have seen this year, the secondary market players are ready for anything, and have kept the housing market thriving. Overall, increased technology has been a driving change for housing, and consumers won’t expect any less in 2021. From remote online notarizations to the overall digital closing experience and even AI, fintech saw a significant jump forward in 2020, and experts expect that trend to continue for the foreseeable future. Fintech companies are now collecting more data than ever before, and that data is now being put to use to drive housing. 2021 looks to be a positive year for the housing industry overall, and all signs point to it continuing to be a major industry helping hold up the overall U.S. economy. And while we’re not there just yet, technology is trending in a positive direction that, someday, we may just get to say, “Alexa, get me a mortgage.”
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A slew of big nonbank lenders are shifting strategies and declining to sell their mortgage servicing rights, which they’d previously relied on to fund their operations, capitalizing on a thrive in all market conditions strategy. That’s because 2021 brought a surprising turn of events to housing and to the economy overall, and 2021 could be even more unpredictable. Servicers themselves could be set up to receive another wave of forbearances, foreclosures or even need to go through multiple mitigation efforts. But despite these potential struggles, housing has been and will likely continue to be the bright spot for the economy for the foreseeable future. Real estate agents across the U.S. have been busy as a result of the pent-up demand from homebuyers due to COVID-19. From facing uncertainty in March from COVID19-related shutdowns, to seeing home sales skyrocket through the summer into fall, it now looks like homebuyers won’t be slowing down anytime soon, despite the holiday season approaching. And interest rates are expected to remain low – confirming the belief that home sales will continue to surge in 2021. The secondary market, often an afterthought for most participants in the mortgage process,
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DECEMBER 2020/JANUARY 2021
In just its second year, HousingWire’s 2020 Tech Trendsetters showcases some of the top minds behind the technology that is driving the housing industry. In a year that demanded the housing industry produce tech options at an unprecedented level, these experts lead the way, innovating through dark times to sustain housing throughout a global pandemic and econmic recession. Through their amazing accomplishments and leadership, these
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Samir Agarwal Paul Akinmade Jeff Allen Paul Anastos....................... Lindsay Bhandari Mark Birschbach Lori Brewer Charlotte Brown................. Katherine Campbell Dan Catinella Brent Chandler Court Cunningham............ Kallol Das Jesse Decker Brian Donnellan Jeff Douglas.......................... Charlie Epperson Sean Faries Jack Friend Justin Glass.......................... Andy Higginbotham Tracie Hunter Marc-Olivier Huynh Briana Ings........................... Kyle Kamrooz Pat Kinsel Harsha Kommanapalli Alex Kutsishin......................
Jane Mason JJ McCarthy Dan Mugge Charles Myslinsky............... Olivia Nicholson John Paasonen Brian Pannell Jim Portner............................ Suzanne Powell Joseph Puthur Perry Rahbar Jason Regalbuto.................. Nile Roberts Patrick Sells Henry Smith Andy Taylor........................... Todd Teta Nick Thomas John Tobison Ginger Wilcox....................... Guy Wolcott Brian Zitin Mary Ann Azevedo..............
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tech leaders are revolutionizing housing.
Samir Agarwal
Paul Akinmade
Wolters Kluwer
CMG Financial
Samir Agarwal has more than 20 years of experience at an executive level. He is a strategic financial services leader who delivers exceptional results. At Wolters Kluwer, Agarwal has tapped his extensive banking product development experience to create a group of offerings that assist local and regional banks to more effectively scale their operations and processes in support of their consumer-facing offerings. Most recently, his leadership has been dedicated to the development of a technology that facilitated aid to small businesses accessing critical Paycheck Protection Program funding, allowing them to retain more than 1 million jobs. Agarwal is focused on helping banking institutions with less than $10 billion in assets navigate risk management and compliance decisions. He oversees technology and product development, operations, vendor and procurement, sales operations and risk management – and keenly understands the predicament smaller institutions face. Despite the proliferation of mobile and online banking channels, local and regional financial institutions often lack the resources, expertise, and infrastructure to obtain modern digital solutions. Looking to bridge that digital divide, Agarwal spearheaded development of Online Loan Applications, purposefully designed for smaller lenders seeking to extend their online and digital reach – and provide a better customer experience for online lending inquiries.
Paul Akinmade joined CMG Financial in 2016 to lead the expansion of the company’s marketing department ahead of a major staffing initiative. Within four years, Akinmade and his team have built a robust, automated marketing platform, which is driven by investment in technology, to give retail loan officers a competitive edge. In the past year, Akinmade moved from chief marketing officer to chief strategy officer as he launched a new business intelligence department and assumed responsibility for the existing IT department to continue leading the organization’s digital transformation. In his role, Akinmade is intimately involved with many of CMG Financial’s technical and consumer initiatives with hands-on involvement in designing the experience, managing development, training, marketing and ensuring a successful deployment. During Akinmade’s tenure, CMG launched HomeFundIt, a digital down payment gifting platform, and enhanced the service with iterations like UpIt. HomeFundIt enables family and friends to give the prospective homebuyers gifts online. UpIt, the cash-back shopping feature, allows homebuyers to earn pledges toward their down payment savings account when they or anyone in their network shops online at affiliate stores. This year, UpIt surpassed 1,000 affiliate partners including big brands like Home Depot, Target and Walmart with contributions averaging 5% to 9% per purchase.
Jeff Allen
Paul Anastos
Clear Capital
Gateless, Guaranteed Rate
Jeff Allen brings more than 15 years of real estate valuation, data and analytics experience to the Clear Capital executive leadership team. Now leading Clear Capital’s mortgage collateral modernization programs, Allen is reimagining and re-engineering how home valuations are manufactured and partnering with major lenders and GSEs to bring greater efficiency and speed to the consumer. Most recently, Allen led the inception and introduction of an in-house innovation lab at Clear Capital to solve challenges presented to the real estate and mortgage industries, with the goal of leaning deeper into innovation in a more accelerated way through focused research, testing and development. Through his role as executive vice president of innovation labs, Allen has played an integral part of spearheading solutions such as OwnerInsight, a free, consumer-friendly mobile tool that the copmany launched this year amid the COVID-19 pandemic. OwnerInsight enables safe social distancing in the appraisal process by empowering homeowners to securely provide high-quality information and images of their homes without having an appraiser onsite. As part of the Clear Capital leadership team, Allen envisions a future with same-day property approval on new loans and a seamless process from the initial real estate transaction all the way through to secondary market decisions.
Paul Anastos has been on the forefront of innovation within the housing industry for over a decade, specializing in developing technology solutions and transforming businesses into industry powerhouses. Anastos has worked with some of the biggest names in the mortgage industry and is now CEO of Gateless, an independent company formed by Guaranteed Rate that serves as a laboratory of cutting-edge technology for the entire industry, continuously innovating the way mortgages are conducted. Backed by a team of innovative mortgage and technology professionals, Anastos leads this company as it develops transformational tools, arming the housing industry with leading-edge technology solutions for loan officers, real estate agents and borrowers. In his role as chief innovation officer at Guaranteed Rate, Anastos focuses on differentiating Guaranteed Rate from its competitors by enhancing the company’s suite of proprietary technology and developing contemporary marketing solutions to promote its brand and mortgage professionals. As the COVID-19 pandemic forced every industry to adapt to new ways of conducting business, Anastos, alongside Guaranteed Rate’s leadership, played an integral role in making sure that the company’s loan officers and referral partners were utilizing Guaranteed Rate’s technology to ensure borrowers were able to close on their loans or refinance and lower monthly payments.
Vice President and Segment Leader, GRC Community Banking
Chief Strategy Officer
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Executive Vice President, Innovation Labs
CEO, Chief Innovation Officer
DECEMBER 2020/JANUARY 2021
Lindsay Bhandari
Mark Birschbach
Fannie Mae
National Association of Realtors
Lindsay Bhandari is a strategic problem solver with a proven history of delivering high-value, complex technology solutions that align business and technology goals. Bhandari knows how to connect people and technology – driving a culture of empowerment where each person has a voice and space to innovate – and ensures the organization is meeting its strategic goals. In her role overseeing capital markets and treasury technology, Bhandari leverages her ability to bring people together with the right technologies to drive innovation at Fannie Mae. She is responsible for the technology delivery and strategic development of Fannie Mae’s trading, conduit, pricing and structured transactions technology platforms. These systems support Capital Markets and Treasury in providing liquidity to the mortgage market, raising funds for the company and handling the enterprise’s cash transactions. Bhandari stood up the MBS Trade Portal which automates the online trading of MBS securities and has increased revenue by $20 million and saved 63 hours per month in the trade confirmation process. The portal received a 2020 Stevie Award for Top FinTech solution. With a focus on continuous learning and improvement, she believes “Nothing is a failure, rather it is a learning opportunity.” Bhandari uses these opportunities to improve the products Fannie Mae delivers to its customers and improve their user experience.
Mark Birschback and his team seek to drive innovation in the residential and commercial real estate markets and benefits to the National Association of Realtors’ members through strategic relationships with a broad range of business and technology players. In his role at the association, Birschbach is a key thought leader and innovator in real estate. He has recently substantially expanded NAR’s innovation efforts through several key initiatives including launching NAR’s Emerging Technology group to identify and research emerging technology with potential to enrich or disrupt the housing industry and create relationships to influence their development in a way that benefits real estate professionals. Birschbach is a founding team member of NAR’s award-winning REACH technology program. He also leads Second Century Ventures, NAR’s strategic investment arm, investing in technologies that are transforming the real estate industry and NAR’s Big Tech Initiatives, a team that creates relationships with large cap tech companies and collaborates on technology and innovation ideas that can impact the future housing market. Additionally, Birschbach launched NAR’s Innovation, Opportunity, Investment Summit, an annual conference that connects innovators, capital investors and leaders in the real estate community to identify and create opportunities among the groups and drive innovation in the real estate industry.
Lori Brewer
Charlotte Brown
LBA Ware
Qualia
LBA Ware founder and CEO Lori Brewer is an accomplished entrepreneur and technology leader, having dedicated her career to developing innovative business process optimization tools for mortgage lenders. She conceptualized and built CompenSafe, a mortgage-specific incentive compensation management platform, and has gone on to release LimeGear, a turnkey business intelligence platform for mortgage lenders. Brewer founded LBA Ware in 2008 out of a desire to address mortgage lenders’ needs for custom technology solutions that automate traditionally manual processes. Many products her company has built are unique, first-of-their-kind solutions. When Brewer set out to build CompenSafe, there was nothing else quite like it on the market. Most lenders were using spreadsheets to manage the complicated LO compensation, with mixed results. Brewer worked very closely with multiple branch managers, who would send ideas of what they needed from a compensation solution. Brewer took those loose descriptions and transformed them into intuitive dashboards that enable managers to tie compensation and bonuses directly to specific loan activity. To this day, CompenSafe is the only compensation management platform with the power and flexibility to handle complex compensation plans, and the only platform that integrates with loan origination systems.
As the director of product at Qualia, Charlotte Brown has consistently been at the helm of pushing digital real estate product innovation forward in the mortgage industry. Most recently, in light of the pandemic, Brown led product development efforts centered around supporting contactless home closings and remote work capabilities. These innovations are enabling real estate professionals to continue to conduct business remotely and safely through economic shutdowns, and are also empowering millions of homebuyers and sellers across the U.S. with a choice in how they want to complete their home purchase. This includes whether they want to review and sign closing documents in person with proper social distance protocols in place, or if they would rather conduct the closing from the safety of their homes. In her four years at Qualia, Brown has guided the expansion of its title and escrow software nationwide and been instrumental in growing the product and engineering organization by more than 300%. Brown led the team that launched Qualia RON, a title and escrow software platform with remote online notarization capabilities built directly into an end-to-end cloud-based software platform. Brown’s team also built Connect Video Chat, which can be used for remote ink-signed notarizations during home closings. Her team also built the ability to access remote online notaries directly through Qualia Marketplace.
Vice President, Capital Markets and Treasury Technology Management
Senior Vice President, Strategic Business, Innovation and Technology
Director of Product
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Founder and CEO
Katherine Campbell
Dan Catinella
Assurance Financial
Finance of America Mortgage
Katherine Campbell spent 20 years in the financial services industry in San Francisco, helping to evolve numerous companies and products into a digital revolution. For the last two years, Campbell has worked to select, implement and adopt more than 14 technologies for an end-to-end digital mortgage solution including an MOS, POS, and COS, collaborative operating system for BI data across all tools. Personifying the digital platform with “Abby,” users will soon be able to “Ask Abby” with their adoption of artificial intelligence in 2020. As the chief digital officer at Assurance Financial, Campbell runs the new consumer direct division, marketing and IT, which complement each other in several areas including lead generation, communication and technical integrations. Campbell quickley recognized the growing adoption of an online mortgage in the consumer market. Forging ahead under these notions, she was one of the first in the country to establish a two-way integration between systems in order to avoid clients having to deal with multiple technologies. This allowed marketing automation opportunities for excellent communication. Additionally, she also worked to develop a single-sign-on experience so users only felt they were doing business with a single company, Assurance Financial. The company stated that it firmly believes it is Campbell’s expertise that enabled a seamless journey for both the borrower and the internal sales and operations teams.
Dan Catinella is a forward-thinking leader who prides himself on giving Finance of America Mortgage a competitive advantage through the use of technology. In his role as chief digital officer, Catinella devotes his time to understanding business problems or opportunities to make his company, mortgage advisors and broker partners more efficient, more intelligent, more economical and more productive. Catinella has repeatedly integrated the latest technology and marketing tools into Point of Sale, loan origination and marketing platforms to increase efficiency, productivity and production. He realizes that every tool does not fit in every advisor’s tool belt, and therefore he has worked to equip Finance of America Mortgage with a vast array of technology to suit many, if not all, of its advisors’ needs and skill sets. But not only does Catinella introduce this new technology, he also trains company advisors to use that technology to benefit the individual needs within their roles. In fact, Catinella has now built a robust training team that guides the Finance of America Mortgage advisors along the way through the use of extensive recorded training videos, pre-scheduled live training sessions, or a la carte one-onone and group training sessions. Connecting and communicating, and helping systems communicate is what Catinella does best. He strives to make the business more efficient and its sales force more successful.
Brent Chandler
Court Cunningham
FormFree
Orchard
As Brent Chandler leads six-time HousingWire Tech100 honoree FormFree, he continues to drive industry innovation by leveraging blockchain infrastructure to give consumers and lenders better access to real-time ability to pay information. Chandler started FormFree from his basement and grew it into the company it is today. Chandler is the architect behind FormFree’s flagship product, AccountChek, which disrupted an industry by introducing automated asset verification to the home lending space. AccountChek streamlines the mortgage underwriting process for both borrowers and lenders, resulting in quicker decisions. Currently, Chandler is working to bring FormFree’s Passport all-in-one verification service to the blockchain. By enabling on-demand access to consumers’ tokenized ATP information, FormFree hopes to make mortgage underwriting even faster while improving access to credit for low- and middle-income families in accordance with the OCC’s Project REACh. Chandler has been instrumental to FormFree, signing more than 31,000 lenders and partners, including over 650% of the industry’s top-50 lenders. FormFree has accepted over 41 million AccountChek Asset Report orders and verified more than $2 trillion in borrower assets for lenders to date. Lender clients have benefited from FormFree’s ability to reduce average time-to-close by up to 10 days or more.
Court Cunningham’s vision for real estate is to provide a fully-integrated, one-stop-shop for homebuyers and sellers. Through the founding of Orchard, Cunningham pioneered the “buy before you sell” model for the company, which solved the conundrum that plagues the majority of homebuyers: having to sell their home before buying a new one. Under Cunningham’s leadership, Orchard is fundamentally transforming the home-buying process from online home search, to managing listings and showings online, to an all-digital closing, similar to what Amazon has done for retail, or what Carvana has done for car buying. Orchard’s customer-first model means every development Cunningham leads has been to directly help homebuyers and sellers. Orchard’s customers receive the benefit of having access to Orchard’s advanced technology and an experienced licensed agent, all for the same fee as a traditional broker. Some specific examples of how Cunningham’s vision has helped Orchard, and therefore its customers, include: Cunningham’s leadership in the decision to recruit from a diverse set of backgrounds has led to a diversity of thought which helps to deliver the best possible customer experience, Cunningham’s “startup within a startup” mentality, and his emphasis on a customer-centric culture that understands that the customer experience can make or break a business.
Chief Digital Officer
Chief Digital Officer
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Founder and CEO
Cofounder and CEO
DECEMBER 2020/JANUARY 2021
Kallol Das
Jesse Decker
Blend
Sagent Lending
Kallol Das is focused on creating and building technology that supports the future of consumer banking. His role is vital to the process of thinking through creative solutions that Blend’s bank customers face, as well as the company’s role in propelling the $40 trillion consumer lending industry into the digital age. Das joined Blend in 2018 with a mission to bring the software revolution to financial services. As the head of engineering, he’s grown his team by 32% and empowered engineers to build innovative technology to allow financial institutions to offer personalized, digital lending and consumer banking solutions to their customers. At Blend, Das has played an instrumental role in helping the company launch pivotal products that move the lending industry forward, from the company’s configurable digital consumer lending platform that enables banks and credit unions to launch financial products in days – instead of months – to a digital closing solution to enable consumers to close on a mortgage or HELOC remotely and safely during the pandemic and beyond. When COVID-19 hit, Das acted quickly to shift Blend’s product roadmap to meet changing customer needs. Within 72 hours, Blend spun up a digital portal with M&T Bank to enable lenders to accept Paycheck Protection Program applications from small businesses through the CARES Act. Blend’s platform funded nearly 100% of the requests it received (32,273 loans totaling almost $7 billion).
Jesse Decker joined Sagent, a fintech software company for mortgage servicing modernization, as head of customer success just as millions of pandemic-impacted borrowers deluged lenders with hardship requests. Her role on the front lines helping banks and lenders navigate this environment positioned her to both redirect and accelerate the company’s product roadmaps. The result has been delivering, in just months, borrower self-serve for hardships while also enabling instant human advice at any point in the process. After pioneering mortgage originations modernization as head of customer success for two of the industry’s top fintech firms, Decker is now bringing that same consumer-first modernization to the servicing industry. Decker leads with this mantra: If originators are the finders of loan customers, servicers must be the keepers of customers. To Decker, this means servicers must provide the tools for homeowners to manage their entire homeownership lifecycle from their phone, plus engage consumers with smart human advice whenever they want. Because of this goal, Decker is now attempting to position servicing technology as the future of banking and lending – saying it powers the lifetime customer relationship, and may one day be the single system for originations and servicing. As the pandemic accelerated lender needs to integrate these capabilities, Decker understands bank/lender strategy, customer experience and software solutions to get it done.
Brian Donnellan
Jeff Douglas
Bright MLS
Wyndham Capital Mortgage
Brian Donnellan is the leader of Bright MLS, a novel concept in the multiple listing service space as it represents a truly regional multiple listing service with an expansive footprint. As president and CEO, Donnellan ensures the delivery of top technology, data and customer service to Bright MLS’ subscribers. Donnellan and his team understand their role in helping the real estate professionals of the Mid-Atlantic navigate their rapidly-evolving industry and provide maximum value back to their clients. In March 2020, as COVID-19 spread across the U.S. and stay-at-home orders began, Donnellan and his team took quick actions to launch the Bright Steps initiative to provide subscribers with technology, information, training and support during the pandemic. Tools like virtual showings kept the market moving forward and weekly real-time data, provided through the power of the consolidated MLS behind it, allowed agents to share the most up-to-date market trends with clients. Agents within Bright’s footprint were able to continue doing business, while moving real estate markets forward, providing a springboard for a significant summer recovery. The v-shaped recovery resulted in a record-setting summer across the Bright footprint, including top markets like Philadelphia, Washington, DC and Baltimore – and optimism exists for a strong close to the year.
Jeff Douglas has brought to the mortgage industry the idea that with intelligent automation, deep data utilization, a perpetual marketing operating system and a strong corporate culture, Wyndham Capital – and the mortgage industry as a whole – can bring themselves into the next stage of home lending. From application to close, Douglas has had a hand in bringing all aspects of the loan process up to the 21st century. Capitilizing on speed and efficiency driven by robotic processes behind the scenes, Douglas has driven Wyndham Capital’s investment robotics, bringing the company into the forefront of efficiency, speed and growth. Currently, Wyndham Capital is processing loans almost 30% faster than the mortgage industry average, with nearly three times the number of loans per full-time employee. These robots work 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year in order to eliminate the “stare and compare” tasks of the past, which wasted time and effort for everyone involved with the loan process, and brought on delays in time and increased costs to the borrower. As robots take over this process, originators are then freed up to take on more mortgages and close quicker. Douglas continues to set Wyndham Capital up for scalable, sustainable growth in the future through technology-driven solutions while having an eye on changing the industry at the same time.
Head of Engineering
Executive Vice President of Customer Success
CEO
DECEMBER 2020/JANUARY 2021
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President and CEO
Charlie Epperson
Sean Faries
Evolve Mortgage Services
Land Gorilla
Charlie Epperson is one of the founding fathers of the eMortgage movement. As the chief technology officer of Evolve Mortgage Services and SigniaDocuments, he has built technology to support millions of loans through origination and due diligence fulfillment. Evolve has grown exponentially over the last five years and that would not have been possible without Epperson and his team. Epperson’s technology allows Evolve to be adaptable to the changing needs of the industry and clients without missing a beat. As Epperson’s talented and diverse team grows, he is able to keep the focus of being cohesive, adaptable, reliable and seamless in everything he designs and delivers for his customers. Under Epperson’s leadership, Evolve’s tech team creates new and innovative ways to serve their customers. His team is constantly pushing to increase throughput while keeping data security and integrity at the forefront of all decisions. Epperson’s team has built and incorporated software into systems covering the entire loan origination process from initial processing, document generation and underwriting, to closing, funding and delivery, QC and due diligence. In cooperation with the Property Records Industry Association and the Mortgage Industry Standards Maintenance Organization technology workgroups, Epperson has also co-authored many real-estate industry national data standards, including the MISMO Title Insurance Request/Response, Multiple Services and more.
Land Gorilla founder and CEO Sean Faries is relentless in his pursuit of technology innovations that drive efficiency while simultaneously reducing risk in construction and renovation lending. Sean’s commitment to listening to all project stakeholders ensures that Land Gorilla provides an exceptional, integrated customer experience and remains at the forefront of the construction lending industry. Faries believes technology should enhance digital experiences for all project stakeholders. Technology, however, should never get in the way of the relationship a lender has with its customers. With this in mind, Faries led major enhancements over the past year to the branded web portal experience. This tool allows lenders to provide project stakeholders with a digital, fully integrated way to request draws and disbursements and monitor progress that feels seamlessly connected to their brand. Lenders can now create dynamic experiences with new enhancements through Land Gorilla, including in-app messaging, automation and integration capabilities for critical steps in the draw process including inspections and title updates, configurable workflows for stakeholders and audit trails on the loan and user level. The branded web portal simplifies the process of communicating and exchanging information between lenders and project stakeholders and provides a faster, safer and more efficient process to manage all loan activity.
Jack Friend
Justin Glass
Insellerate
United Wholesale Mortgage
Jack Friend consistently demonstrates the ability to create vision, strategy and consensus-building for a wildly divergent group of mortgage industry stakeholders on complex technical topics, and has developed and executed large-scale technology projects that enable lenders to operate more efficiently to grow and improve their lending organizations. His ability to design and deliver innovative solutions has been used to fund billions of dollars of transactions in the mortgage marketplace, significantly impacting the mortgage industry. Friend has applied his extensive career experiences to improve the mortgage process through the use of innovative technology solutions. He is directly responsible for creating sales center technology, utilizing the best-known practices to capture and convert sales through a sales automation system platform. He developed Insellerate’s three-stage system that includes sales force automation and lead management, real-time sales dashboard reporting and an automated personalized email marketing platform for the mortgage industry. In the last year, he has delivered innovative solutions with the Insellerate engagement platform, which automates intelligent engagement with prospects, borrowers, past clients, and real estate agents and referral partners through multi-channel communication and marketing.
Justin Glass has a unique ability to marry his innate knowledge of the mortgage business with today’s technology. As the senior vice president and chief digital officer at United Wholesale Mortgage, he is always innovating systems to operate more effectively to create a broker experience that is unparalleled in the industry. His passion for continuously improving tools and technology that UWM can offer to mortgage brokers looking to drive their business has helped establish UWM as the No. 1 wholesale lender in the nation. Since joining UWM in 2006, Justin has continuously revolutionized tools, technology and ways UWM can help independent mortgage brokers grow their business. And his unique ability to blend mortgages and technology make him a huge asset to the entire broker community. Glass is a problem-solver and genuinely takes into account how UWM can create technology that works for the broker in a way that makes their business more efficient and effective. By looking at technology through the eyes of the broker, Glass has been able to continuously propel UWM forward with his drive to make each new launch a success. With each technology roll-out, Glass and his team have been able to drive innovation and improve technology in the housing industry, which has transformed UWM into a leader of financial technology in wholesale lending.
Chief Technology Officer
CEO
40 ❱ HOUSINGWIRE
Chief Financial Officer and Chief Operating Officer
Senior Vice President and Chief Digital Officer
DECEMBER 2020/JANUARY 2021
Andy Higginbotham
Tracie Hunter
Senior Vice President and Chief Operating Officer of SingleFamily division
Managing Director, Production Business Technology
PennyMac Loan Services
Freddie Mac
Andy Higginbotham is one of the top innovation leaders for both Freddie Mac and the entire housing ecosystem. In his role overseeing the single-family division, he drives what the Freddie Mac IT team focuses on and, just this past year, took on ownership of the customer experience team. Higginbotham is a game-changing leader who, during this past year, leveraged Freddie Mac technology to keep the industry liquid and moving while helping lenders and borrowers save time and money in the most efficient ways possible, despite the challenges brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic and stay-at-home orders. By working with clients to understand their needs and pain points, Higginbotham prioritizes what’s most important, which has led to major adoption of Freddie Mac tech tools across the origination and servicing continuum. In the past year of unprecedented challenges, Higginbotham influenced and encouraged Freddie Mac leadership to make bold decisions while leading and empowering his teams to meet the demands of the rapidly changing market. Specifically, Higginbotham has driven innovation and improved technology in the housing industry through his leadership and focus on providing value, his innovation with origination and his success with servicing. He is the driver of technology innovation through best-in-class tools like the HousingWire Tech100 award-winning Loan Advisor and new Servicing Gateway.
Industry superstar Tracie Hunter lives at the intersection of technology and business strategy in her role as the managing director of PennyMac Loan Services’s production business technology group. Hunter’s approach to technology is not simply innovation. Hunter focuses business solutions where both PennyMac and its clients and partners can both succeed.Overseeing more than 200 PennyMac teammates, Hunter has been the mastermind of PennyMac’s omni-channel mortgage technology platforms that have delivered process and production innovation, as well as accelerated the company’s business growth strategy and leadership position. Hunter leads PennyMac’s production business technology group to deliver solutions in a highly collaborative model based upon the Agile methodology. She sees technology and business as an opportunity to deliver winning innovation that fuels business strategy and growth. Her highly engaged approach is founded in a deep understanding of the business – PennyMac’s correspondent, broker direct and consumer direct channels – combined with her ability to speak tech. Highlights of her work include the PennyMac POWER Platform for the broker direct channel, a seamless end-to-end experience for brokers with a self-service delivery platform, enabling exchange of data and information for loan originations with a focus on transparency to the mortgage broker as well as superior loan quality.
Marc-Olivier Huynh
Briana Ings
CoreLogic
Snapdocs
Marc-Olivier Huynh is senior leader of software development and technology at CoreLogic, a provider of advanced property and ownership information, analytics and data-enabled services. With more than 25 years of software programming experience, Huynh has become a respected industry inventor, recognized for his innovative approaches to software development which have always been centered on stakeholder collaboration and open processes that remain future proof. His career highlights include pioneering a collaborative cloud-based model for insurance products that has revolutionized solutions and, consequently, Software as a Service models within the industry. As homeowners continue to experience challenges that trigger home insurance claims, Huynh works to bring exciting solutions that simplify the process and leverage mobile, consumer UI and AI to the housing economy, specifically in property insurance. Today, CoreLogic offers technological innovations, unique property data and insights that provide professionals with powerful intelligence and digital customer experiences at critical touchpoints throughout the housing journey. CoreLogic enables the dream of homeownership by helping millions of people find, buy, and protect the homes they love. Huynh’s innovative mindset is key in the development and enhancement of CoreLogic’s property and casualty insurance software.
Briana Ings spearheads the development and design of Snapdocs’ industry-leading digital closing platform, which powers more than 2 million digital mortgage closings each year. Her focus on building modern, intuitively designed products that are easy to implement and deliver results quickly has made lenders and their settlement partners incredibly successful with digital closings. Snapdocs’ lender clients have been able to close 10% or more loans with the same headcount, shorten the closing process by an average of two days and provide borrowers with either a quick in-person closing or a completely remote closing that’s less than 15 minutes. Ings has set a precedent that there should be one seamless mortgage experience for borrowers, while giving lenders the freedom to choose and change their tech stack. In leading Snapdocs’ product vision and strategy, Ings focuses above all on the user’s experience. For her, digital closings go beyond simply digitizing paper. Ings is reimagining what the closing should be like for lenders, settlement and borrowers, while making sure the tools Snapdocs offers are purposefully built to make digital closing adoption as easy as possible. This is particularly important now as COVID-19 forced lenders to adapt to remote work and provide borrowers with a safe and quick closing. In 2020, 96% of borrowers eSigned when given the choice.
Director of Product
DECEMBER 2020/JANUARY 2021
41 ❱ HOUSINGWIRE
Senior Leader of Software Development and Technology
Kyle Kamrooz
Pat Kinsel
Cloudvirga
Notarize
Kyle Kamrooz is the cofounder of Cloudvirga, a fintech firm. Today, Cloudvirga’s point of sale solution and digital mortgage platform are being used by 10 of the top 40 mortgage originators and are originating more than $100 billion a year. Kamrooz is a serial entrepreneur and innovator, and over the course of his career has started a successful direct-to-consumer mortgage company, been a key factor in the growth of Skyline Mortgage (now Finance of America) and developed the technology platform behind Cloudvirga. Kamrooz launched Cloudvirga as a standalone company in 2016, and has since guided and grown it into one of the housing industry’s top fintech players. Cloudvirga’s digital mortgage platform enables mortgage lenders to originate and close loans faster, reduce costs and risk, all while delivering a quality customer experience. Since 2016, Kamrooz has led Cloudvirga through significant growth, including leading the company through multiple rounds of investment funding, setting the vision for its flagship POS systems, forging partnerships with leading mortgage service providers and signing major clients such as Fairway, Supreme Lending and Envoy Mortgage. This year specifically, he has led the development and launch of a new platform – Cloudvirga TPO – to significantly accelerate wholesale lending. Cloudvirga’s new TPO platform is transforming the way large TPO lenders will work with brokers.
Pat Kinsel knew back in 2015 what the entire world now knows in 2020 – that there needed to be a simple, easy digital way to notarize documents online from the comfort and safety of someone’s home in just a few short, simple steps. Kinsel has led Notarize through an incredible growth trajectory of 600% growth in 2020 alone, and he’s been on the forefront of increasing security surrounding real estate closings through his work across a multitude of industries. Under Kinsel’s leadership, Notarize has completed the country’s first legal online notarization, online real estate closing, online mortgage, online will and online auto sale. Kinsel led Notarize to become the first platform approved by Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and countless title underwriters and national banks. Kinsel and Notarize have chaired the standards-setting groups for the Mortgage Bankers Association, American Land Title Association and others. He’s been on forefront of creating meaningful policy change for remote online notarization legislation, even driving state-to-state in the early years to meet with individual lawmakers and lobby for the bill. Over time, Kinsel has driven the passage of RON laws by 29 states, with more in the works, including a ground-breaking bill at the federal level. With the federal bill, driven largely by Kinsel’s team, Notarize hopes to enable a 50-state solution for RON transactions that would create online notary legislation across the U.S.
Harsha Kommanapalli
Alex Kutsishin
Tavant
Sales Boomerang
Harsha Kommanapalli is disrupting the traditional lending process with an analytics-everywhere approach that can be witnessed across Tavant’s suite of products and client engagements. His philosophy, coupled with his extensive business knowledge and experience has positioned Tavant as a pioneer and leader in regards to AI deployments in the mortgage industry. Kommanapalli has helped top lenders across the country gain a better understanding of and ultimately adopt a more advanced approach that leverages AI and machine learning to obtain real-time metrics and automatically mine insights from data including origination volumes, loan throughputs, lead conversion rates, best sales performers, pricing insights, listings funnels, sentiment analysis and propensity to sell and buy. Kommanapalli and his team of techies have helped these same lenders dismantle and replace archaic processes and legacy systems with best-in-class components, sophisticated data and ML platforms, cloud data warehouses, data lakes and streaming services. Kommanapalli’s agile approach to ML engineering and ML operations has accelerated and expedited Tavant’s ability to develop and deploy modern, advanced products and features that can scale effortlessly and enable lenders to not only remain competitive, but also deliver better products faster that meet and exceed consumer expectations.
Alex Kutsishin is an enthusiastic innovator and entrepreneur who coined the phrase “No Borrower Left Behind” in the lending industry. He founded several companies over the past few years before settling in to his role at the helm of Sales Boomerang. And now, in less than three years under Kutsishin’s leadership, Sales Boomerang has attracted hundreds of the top lenders in the mortgage industry that have discovered more than $20 billion in missed loan volume. Kutsishin has turned Sales Boomerang into a utility for any company in the mortgage industry. He is laser-focused on improving the lives of customers and has created a culture of service, encouraging his team to always give more value than you get. For example, Kutsishin recently learned that early payoffs were forcing clients to pay penalties and lose everything they earned on a loan. Within just one month, he rallied his teams to release EPO Watch, a new alert type that notifies a lender when one of its borrowers might have an early pay off. True to his passionate spirit, he even created a rap video to get the attention of lenders that there is a solution to their pain. Kutsishin is even known to show up to conferences dressed as a farmer to emphasize how lenders are “farmers” of their own database. Kutsishin’s passion is infectious and he has cultivated relationships with partners across the industry.
Cofounder
Founder and CEO
42 ❱ HOUSINGWIRE
Director of AI and Analytics
CEO
DECEMBER 2020/JANUARY 2021
Jane Mason
JJ McCarthy
Clarifire
HomeLight
Jane Mason is the brainchild behind Clarifire, an application that uses intelligent business rules to automatically distribute work and automate straight-through processing of critical information and documents to all types of users. Over the past year, mortgage servicers have leveraged Mason’s creation to achieve a minimum 40% lift in productivity, between 75% to 95% reductions in cycle times, and an 80% average elimination of manual tasks. While the pandemic continues to wreak chaos on the U.S. job market, Mason is driving the industry forward by empowering servicers with her technology by automating the approvals of thousands of forbearance requests in minutes, and processing bulk process deferrals, borrower surveys and one-click loan modification approvals almost in real-time. One of Mason’s creations, CLARIFIRE COMMUNITY, has provided much-needed relief to servicers facing extraordinary call volumes and requests for assistance due to the pandemic and natural disasters. CLARIFIRE COMMUNITY is a workflow-driven resource that connects the myriad of players involved in self-service disaster and pandemic processes. Thanks to Mason, borrowers can access real-time assistance and automated loss mitigation workout options with a button click, providing those suffering from income loss with visibility and guidance as they work through challenging times. Meanwhile, the burden on servicers is reduced and operational chaos is resolved.
As vice president of product at HomeLight, JJ McCarthy is at the forefront of real estate tech disruption. He has been instrumental in identifying and spearheading the launch of a full suite of products, including HomeLight Simple Sale, Cash Close and Trade-In. Together, these products have been recognized by top real estate agents and industry influencers as revolutionizing the transaction experience for clients everywhere. Under McCarthy’s leadership, HomeLight has created products and services that smooth out real estate transactions at every step – from finding a top agent, to getting the best mortgage, to ensuring an on-time and easy close. McCarthy’s products have let HomeLight facilitate well over $20 billion dollars in real estate business on its platform to date, fundamentally changing the experience of buying and selling homes for thousands of people. McCarthy has built the product team from the ground up, building and leading a team of more than 50 people across the country. And now, the past year has been a whirlwind of forward momentum for McCarthy and his team, and as a result of their efforts, for the residential home purchase and financing industries, as well. McCarthy was instrumental in two recent acquisitions for the company including Eave, a digital mortgage company, and Disclosures.io, a tool that enables real estate professionals to manage, market, and sell listings in one secure location.
Dan Mugge
Charles Myslinsky
ClosingCorp
OJO Labs
With more than 20 years of experience in the industry, Dan Mugge is a tech leader with the ability to make complicated concepts understandable for his teammates, clients and the housing industry. As chief technology officer at ClosingCorp, Mugge is responsible for setting the company’s technology strategy and driving its development. Since re-joining the company earlier this year, Mugge has been instrumental in ClosingCorp’s strong operating performance and company growth. The company’s flagship product, ClosingCorp Fees, now has more than 30% market share and has processed more than 8 million fee quotes (including prequal transactions) in the last year. Mugge played a critical role in the completion of the WestVM order management technology platform acquisition from West earlier this year. Since then, he has been able to smoothly integrate the newly acquired technology, now called ClosingCorp Order Management, into the company’s overall product suite. Since launching ClosingCorp Order Management, the company has seen significant growth, with more than 30 lenders, including the onboarding of a top 10 lender, Caliber Home Loans. With Mugge at the helm, the company’s overall client base now includes more than 400 lenders, including 18 of the top 25 largest banks and mortgage companies as well as nine of the top 10 wholesale lenders.
As chief product officer at OJO Labs, Charles Myslinsky has been integral to the launch of an end-to-end platform for buying and selling homes at scale, providing unparalleled support to home shoppers and real estate partners alike. Since joining the company last year, he has already introduced a platform that is fundamentally improving the home shopping process. Myslinsky’s commitment to creating unparalleled consumer experiences has significantly leveled up OJO Labs’ impact on aspiring homebuyers and the broader real estate community. He created an end-to-end platform that serves everyone from consumers to the providers they work with, breaking down barriers within the industry to drive more personalized experiences and, in turn, more successful home sales. Myslinsky is always thinking about how to arm real estate partners with the resources they need to confidently sell homes. While the real estate industry has made strides to increase access to listings, share pricing insights, and streamline offers, it has yet to offer consumers the guidance they need to confidently navigate the complex real estate landscape. Myslinsky has bridged this gap by introducing a new experience, which provides personalized insights to help consumers navigate the homebuying process, and connects them with the best providers based on their unique needs and preferences.
Founder and CEO
Vice President of Product
Chief Product Officer
DECEMBER 2020/JANUARY 2021
43 ❱ HOUSINGWIRE
Chief Technology Officer
Olivia Nicholson
John Paasonen
Richey May
Maxwell
Olivia Nicholson has been instrumental in building Richey May’s Business Intelligence product, RM Analyze, and leading and managing the team that supports a rapidly growing number of independent mortgage banking clients on the platform. She developed the backbone of Richey May’s reporting structure and a comprehensive set of mortgage industry-specific analytics dashboards that enable rapid implementations with clients in just two weeks. Her mortgage industry knowledge and analytics skills enable her to innovate custom data solutions for her clients and communicate with leadership to drive operational efficiency. Nicholson led the development of RM Analyze’s quick deployment architecture and construction of industry-focused data connectors and custom visualizations that drive usage for its clients. Her work improved upon existing methods and leveraged new tools from technology partners to further ease implementations, shifting the company’s focus to customization after a quick initial set-up period. Nicholson’s collaboration with developers and industry partners has resulted in the quick deployment of industry connectors. Nicholson was quickly promoted to lead and grow the business intelligence team. Under her leadership, the customer base for RM Analyze has grown over 300%, with a 100% renewal rate and services agreements with every one of the firm’s Business Intelligence clients using the platform.
John Paasonen is the cofounder and CEO of digital mortgage tech platform Maxwell. Through his leadership, Maxwell facilitates more than $6 billion in loans on the platform every month, helping hundreds of lenders close loans more than 45% faster than the national average. He cares deeply about the small to midsize community lenders, arming them with the best technology and access to the best solutions to not only compete, but win against larger players. Paasonen’s impact is seen every day in the work of Maxwell’s more than 150 employees. Paasonen is committed to opening homeownership to more people through simple and accessible mortgage lending, Paasonen continually challenges the role technology can have in empowering the lending team to improve their operations, rather than using this technology to replace them. Paasonen drives the strategic direction of the business and its product vision to empower the more than 200 community lenders that use Maxwell today as their digital platform. By aligning the team on a north star and clear metrics, the engineering and product team work harmoniously together to deliver disruptive feature releases that solve problems, not just check boxes. Most recently, John spearheaded the launch of the Maxwell Fulfillment Platform, which enables small and midsize lenders to access onshore processing, underwriting, and closing services, powered by proprietary technology, at a low cost.
Brian Pannell
Jim Portner
DocMagic
First American
Brian Pannell is a subject matter expert on eSignings, eNotarizations, eClosings, eNotes, eVaults, eWarehouse lending and much more. He has helped lenders, technology service providers and others understand the immense value of going “e.” Pannell recognizes that the future of the housing industry is digital mortgages and takes a leadership role to evangelize the industry-wide benefits for the organizations he works with. Pannell has been pivotal in the implementation and adoption of multiple DocMagic solutions. This includes Total eClose, DocMagic’s single-source eClosing platform that removes all paper from the process and leverages the precision-based accuracy of DocMagic’s intelligent, dynamic document generation capabilities. DocMagic’s Total eClose platform scored as the mortgage industry’s leading eClosing technology based on market share, overall satisfaction and lender loyalty in STRATMOR Group’s 2019 Mortgage Technology Insight Study. Pannell plans to continue his drive to enable key entities to easily connect, communicate, collaborate and compliantly exchange critical loan data in real-time throughout the lending process. From borrowers to originators, lenders, settlement providers, investors, GSEs and servicers, Pannell strives to facilitate 100% paperless mortgage transactions to create newfound efficiency and transparency.
Jim Portner knows how to build great products. Portner has the ability to develop carefully crafted strategies anchored on a refined understanding of customer needs and evolving market trends. He and his teams consistently deliver solutions for today’s housing markets including four major new products launched in 2020- Title IQ Enterprise by DataTrace, First American Tax Source, First American MarketView and DataTree Lists. Portner has always been able to attract, mentor and build exceptional talent in his product and marketing organizations as well as bring out the best in the complementary engineering and operations teams by providing clear vision, direction and inspiration to the entire organization. Under his leadership since 2014, First American Data and Analytics continues to expand its position with innovative solutions that deliver efficiency, data quality and cost savings at scale. Portner spearheaded and championed the 2020 launch of TitleIQ Enterprise from DataTrace which provides the title and settlement services industry an entirely new automated way to produce title commitments. Through a unique combination of nationwide data sources, AI-enabled OCR extraction and automation, a robust search and examination workbench and direct integration to leading title production systems TitleIQ Enterprise has quickly become the industry game changer.
BI and Analytics Manager
Cofounder and CEO
44 ❱ HOUSINGWIRE
Chief eServices Executive
Vice President, Product and Strategy
DECEMBER 2020/JANUARY 2021
Suzanne Powell
Joseph Puthur
Radian
Mortgage Coach
Suzanne Powell leverages her expertise in operations and technology to optimize how Radian does business. In her role as senior vice president of digital client experience, she has covered everything from developing and implementing bots that work alongside Radian staff, to using data to determine who at the company is best suited to review a particular loan application, to better harnessing the wide variety of information the company receives from its diverse set of business lines. Since joining Radian about two years ago, Powell has spearheaded numerous efforts to optimize processes and effectively match the company’s technological resources and human capital to its business objectives. That has included creating a “Robotic Process Automation Center of Excellence” and the in-house development of four bots that enable Radian employees to spend less of their time on necessary but sometimes repetitive, boring or administrative work involved in things like reviewing loan applications, sourcing broker price opinions and processing home closings. Despite some initial trepidation among Radian staff, the bots – named Adrian, Buzz, Fred and Obi by the divisions that work with them (because Powell was looking to foster buy-in) – have quickly become beloved, since these bots enable members of staff to focus on the most interesting, complex work and simplify and eliminate some of their administrative workload.
Mortgage Coach President and Chief Product Officer Joe Puthur has been reinventing the mortgage industry’s loan presentation strategy with leading edge digital solutions. His vision for the current Mortgage Coach technology platform has positioned the Total Cost Analysis tool as a premier digital loan presentation solution. Throughout the past 15 years as a mortgage industry technology leader, Puthur’s innovations have pushed the envelope of what software and systems can do for mortgage professionals. He was the founder and former CEO of Lasso Technologies, a startup that pioneered bringing loan origination software online. In 2005, Ellie Mae acquired Lasso Technologies to create Encompass Anywhere, the largest SaaS offered LOS. When Puthur became president of Mortgage Coach, he transitioned the company and company products from individual loan officer sales to a unified enterprise, SaaS-based solution provider. With each release of Mortgage Coach, emerging technologies were added to the web-based solution, including the introduction of native Apple iOS and Android smart device versions. Over time, Puthur’s vision has continued to advance Mortgage Coach with the addition of the Advice Engine to solve for many of the inefficiencies and inadequacies loan officers experience in creating loan options for borrowers. He also spearheaded the addition of native video, virtual highlighting, real-time updating and alert notifications.
Perry Rahbar
Jason Regalbuto
dv01
OpenClose
A former MBS trader at Bear Stearns and JPMorgan Chase, Perry Rahbar had a front-row seat to the market’s collapse and recovery, and he is now building dv01 to help prevent the next great recession. In Rahbar’s eyes, more transparent and efficient markets require Wall Street’s data infrastructure to be modernized, as fragmented data workflows make it difficult for lenders and investors to accurately and efficiently understand loan performance. By offering standardized loan-level data and world-class reporting tools in one place, dv01 is empowering the capital markets to make smarter data-driven decisions that make lending safer. After the financial crisis, legislation was imposed to regulate the industry and protect consumers from predatory lending practices, but the capital markets infrastructure for managing and analyzing loan data remained largely untouched. Rahbar started dv01 to complement and replace legacy systems, and the company’s innovative offerings are tackling the foundational shortcomings of the financial markets. Through Rahbar’s leadership, dv01 is able to drive the industry forward through a host of innovative products and offerings that include: access to critical post-issuance data via partnership with HouseCanary, proprietary non-QM benchmark and Tape Cracker, a data wrangling tool powered by machine learning that streamlines the entire data normalization process.
Jason Regalbuto is currently holding the dual position of chief technology officer and CEO at OpenClose. He has worked in both a mortgage banker capacity as a lender and a mortgage technology capacity as a lender, a background which gives him both a unique insight as well as a competitive edge. Moreover, Regalbuto is forward-thinking with technology and is always looking for ways to build a better “mousetrap.” Dating back to 1999, Regalbuto was the driving force behind ensuring OpenClose’s LOS and ancillary solutions remained ahead of their time by being purely web-based, requiring zero installs and essentially operating as SaaS long before SaaS became a commonly used tech term. Working closely with the OpenClose management and technical teams, Regalbuto helped spearhead a technology undertaking to offer a new POS digital mortgage technology, integrating tightly with OpenClose’s consumer direct portal called ConsumerAssist. Officially introduced in 2019, this new portal enabled OpenClose to offer an end-to-end digital mortgage solution starting at the POS robust functions. This gives lenders a single-source option that eliminates unnecessary integrations at the POS, and removes multiple pricing structures with different vendors, contracts and SLAs. ConsumerAssist helps reduce the cost to manufacture loans by up to 40%.
Senior Vice President, Digital Client Experience
President and Chief Product Officer
Chief Technology Officer and CEO
DECEMBER 2020/JANUARY 2021
45 ❱ HOUSINGWIRE
Founder and CEO
Nile Roberts
Patrick Sells
Genworth Mortgage Insurance
Quontic
Nile Roberts is a versatile technology strategist with more than 15 years of experience leading through change. As a truly hands-on leader, Roberts demonstrates strong collaboration, communication and problem-solving skills that not only encourage new ideas within his team, but also foster innovation. When COVID-19 became an apparent threat, Roberts and his end user services team quickly enacted Genworth Mortgage Insurance’s business continuity plan, focusing on investments in mobile technology, and key investments in cloudbased communication and collaboration services to rapidly support a remote workforce. As an IT operations leader, Roberts encourages a cloud-first strategy that supports the development of applications that are intended to be provisioned and hosted in the cloud. His team also utilizes modular design and immutable infrastructure concepts to deliver ideal flexibility and supportability for infrastructure services and support. These strategies and principles that Roberts led and engrained into the fabric of his team have allowed Genworth Mortgage Insurance’s IT organization to quickly adapt to changing business and industry needs, scale mortgage insurance services and infrastructure to meet increasing demand, and improve overall service stability and resiliency. Roberts also leads an innovative End User Services organization that faced unprecedented obstacles related to the global pandemic.
As chief innovation officer at Quontic, Patrick Sells is an award-winning leader who has been recognized for his digital innovation in banking. Sells led the digital transformation of Quontic from a struggling community bank to a nationally recognized digital bank which is now at the forefront of many technology breakthroughs. Stepping into his role, his strategy was to combine today’s Millennial workforce with experienced and open-minded leaders at community banks to create a powder keg for innovation. Sells says he believes innovation means taking a new approach by doing things differently and reframing existing processes, and through his role at Quontic, he is changing how banks operate today. Quontic offers a community development loan program, through which they can lend to non-traditional borrowers, such as immigrants, commission wage earners or self-employed people with an inability to document income traditionally. Under Sells’ leadership, Quontic launched a national wholesale mortgage division, which is quickly growing and has increased the footprint of Quontic with new lending offices. Sells and the wholesale lending team have used technology to offer new, accessible refinance solutions. Underwriter decision efficiency has increased 75% from January to September 2020, openings increased 170% from January to September 2020, and loan originations increased 131% from January to August 2020.
Henry Smith
Andy Taylor
NotaryCam
Credit Karma
Henry Smith has been a driving force behind NotaryCam’s growth and success. As director of notary operations, Smith is responsible for training, onboarding, troubleshooting and working hand-in-hand with NotaryCam’s more than 1,000 notaries. He consistently contributes to notary innovation, including streamlining operations, and plays a significant role in NotaryCam’s integration partnerships with leading industry vendors, as well as its partnerships with top-tier lenders. With the onset of COVID-19, remote online notarization technology played a critical role not just in moving the housing market forward, but also keeping it from grinding to a complete halt. While helping NotaryCam to maintain its reputation for customer service (and managing a tenfold increase in month-over-month transactions), Smith led the development of NotaryCam’s remote ink notarization product to help NotaryCam accommodate a greater number of remote closing ceremonies in a socially distanced world. While NotaryCam was fully equipped to handle the increased demand for RON transactions, the company tasked Smith with the development of its concierge service to accommodate RIN. Under Smith’s tutelage, NotaryCam’s notaries were able to manage a tenfold increase in demand from real estate professionals for digital closings while increasing the firm’s revenue over 100% in the first two quarters of 2020.
Since joining the Credit Karma Home team in 2018 through the acquisition of his mortgage POS company, Approved, Credit Karma Home has seen continuous triple digit growth as Andy Taylor leads the transformation of Credit Karma’s mortgage business into a fullscale home-buying platform. In fact, the home team just recently had its highest earning month in revenue ever. The value of the digital innovations Taylor has instilled in the Credit Karma Home platform has become especially important during COVID-19 as Credit Karma experiences record engagement with nearly 40 million members visiting the app each month. Taylor is passionate about providing an optimal customer experience for Credit Karma’s more than 90 million U.S. members. Because Credit Karma works with its members months and even years before their big purchase, the company is able to make real-time time offers based on deep member data and insights. The member lender match system Taylor and team have developed creates a more seamless and positive experience for partners and lenders, even in a pandemic. Taylor and his team will be heads-down in the fourth quater, building an infrastructure to simplify the partner onboarding process and providing Credit Karma Home partners with the tools and insights they need to make thoughtful decisions about their inventory.
IT Director, Infrastructure and End User Services
Chief Innovation Officer
46 ❱ HOUSINGWIRE
Director of Notary Operations
General Manager
DECEMBER 2020/JANUARY 2021
Todd Teta
Nick Thomas
ATTOM Data Solutions
Finicity
Todd Teta leverages more than two decades of experience in technology and product innovation in his role as ATTOM’s chief product and technology officer, where he is directly responsible for driving product development and tech innovation for the property database, as well as building teams to scale the business. Teta oversees the development of ATTOM’s table of data elements, comprised of various key data products and derived analytics, from which the company’s robust property data originates to fuel growth across many industries, driving decisions and providing real estate transparency. Teta’s contributions are key to ATTOM’s ability to provide property data in order to support companies that are innovating within the housing market. ATTOM’s industry-leading tech innovation has led to the completion of several strategic initiatives to bring more comprehensive real estate data to the marketplace, including the acquisitions of Home Junction in July 2020 and Onboard Informatics in February 2018. Each of these initiatives, as well as ATTOM’s acquisition by private equity-firm Lovell Minnick Partners in January 2019, were driven by the mission to provide premium property data that powers innovation. Teta’s leadership of these tech-led acquisitions has resulted in an extension of ATTOM’s data footprint. He continues to work toward enhancing the company’s value proposition as a one-stop shop for comprehensive property data.
As chief innovation officer, Nick Thomas leads Finicity’s data science team. Finicity’s intelligent, data-driven solutions improve the mortgage origination process by cutting time, saving money, increasing accuracy and improving security and privacy. Under Thomas’ guidance, Finicity has taken a leadership role in consumer-permissioned financial data to accelerate the digital mortgage experience, ultimately progressing credit decisioning significantly over the foreseeable future. Thomas has been dedicated to building Finicity’s mission to improve the lives of individuals and families through opening banking, in turn, empowering consumers to use their financial data to achieve greater financial literacy. He has been instrumental in developing a platform that looks to transform the way consumers experience money, leading to better financial outcomes for consumers. Within mortgage, Thomas plays a key role in the evolution of the digital mortgage experience including leadership in digital verifications. Thomas has been instrumental at Finicity in driving innovation in technology that helps lenders and borrowers alike. Along with CEO Steve Smith, Thomas can be credited with Finicity’s focus on improving the mortgage process through the use of consumer-permissioned data. Mortgage origination is becoming more and more digital thanks to new technology and solutions being pushed by consumer demand for a simpler, faster, modern mortgage experience.
John Tobison
Ginger Wilcox
eXp World Holdings
Home Point Financial
John Tobison leads software engineering, product management, information technology, product launch, project management, data services and innovation for eXp World Holdings and its companies: eXp Realty, foreign entities and VirBELA. Tobison brings more than three decades of experience in business and information technology management, helping eXp scale products, business processes and staff capabilities for rapid growth. Previously, Tobison spent years consulting in international technology and helped grow three early-stage software companies into market leaders. Through eXp’s fully virtual, cloud-based platform, agents can work remotely from anywhere – there are no brick-and-mortar offices. With Tobison’s oversight, eXp has scaled this platform to support its growing agent count to uniquely serve residential buyers and sellers. Remarkably, eXp grew its agent count and revenues from housing sales during this challenging time. Also, behind Tobison’s leadership, eXp has assembled a variety of affiliated services companies that are proven and vetted for quality and professionalism. They partner with eXp to provide consumers with critical aspects of the home-buying process such as title, mortgage, and home warranty services. eXp’s agents can confer with these partners in the eXp virtual campus and effectively provide a great buying experience for their clients.
Since joining Home Point Financial this year, Ginger Wilcox has played an integral role in developing and launching technology solutions that drive Home Point’s digital transformation and solve pain points for its borrowers, brokers, partners and associates. As chief experience officer, Wilcox delivers exceptional experiences by utilizing two decades of technology expertise to improve the customer life cycle journey. Over the last decade, Wilcox has helped disruptive companies in real estate and mortgage push innovation boundaries to deliver better experiences for consumers, loan officers and real estate agents. In January 2020, Wilcox joined Home Point Financial as the company’s first chief experience officer, responsible for driving innovation, elevating the customer experience and accelerating Home Point’s growth. Less than a year into her role at Home Point, Wilcox has implemented several innovative strategies that improve the end-to-end mortgage experience. Under Wilcox’s leadership, Home Point adapted to meet unprecedented financial and operational challenges brought on by the pandemic. Wilcox worked with Home Point’s Servicing team to create and launch an automated forbearance app in less than 48 hours — which rolled out weeks before other lenders. As a result of Wilcox’s efforts, she has helped Home Point grow to become the fastest-growing top-five wholesale mortgage lender in the country.
Chief Product and Technology Officer
Chief Innovation Officer
Chief Experience Officer
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Chief Information Officer
Guy Wolcott
Brian Zitin
Homesnap
Reggora
As founder of Homesnap, Guy Wolcott oversees the Homesnap platform which combines people, property and data with software for real estate professionals to run and grow their business at every stage of the transaction. Wolcott is responsible for the entire design, execution and product roadmap for the Homesnap platform, which includes Homesnap Pro and Homesnap Pro+. His influence on Homesnap begins at the product ideation phase and extends through every step of the implementation, coding, design and marketing of the end result. Wolcott has a deep understanding of the residential real estate market and believes that real estate agents deserve the most innovative, highest-quality products to help run and grow their business. Over the past 10 years, Wolcott has stewarded Homesnap through years of intense growth and change. Wolcott’s vision for Homesnap has expanded over the years since its launch, as he has incorporated new technology, integrations and features with each update, all aimed at making agents more productive and powerful from their phones. Taking Homesnap to a new level in 2020, Guy oversaw the launch of Homesnap’s biggest update yet, All-New Homesnap Pro, the newest and most advanced generation of the home search platform, which features a simple, user-friendly interface that empowers agents to dominate their market with extensive property information and the ability to identify potential sellers and homes before the competition.
Brian Zitin is revolutionizing the appraisal process with a two-sided platform for mortgage lenders and appraisal vendors. Not only is Zitin modernizing the experience for everyone involved, Reggora’s technology is designed to reduce turn times and help the industry get closer to a one-day mortgage reality. Zitin is leading the Reggora team and product development with three core focuses: shortening the overall amount of time it takes to complete an appraisal; reducing lenders’ operational costs and the amount of time spent managing the appraisal process; and creating a more transparent experience for banks and homebuyers. Reggora’s platform now automates the majority of the appraisal workflow for mortgage lenders. This includes instant order allocation for new appraisals, facilitating borrower payment, appraisal scheduling, automated notifications and transparency for everyone involved, automated appraisal review and underwriting, electronic appraisal delivery to the borrower, vendor payments and more. When COVID-19 struck, Zitin quickly evaluated market needs to bring solutions to the market. By April 2020, the Reggora team had released Virtual Inspection, a browser-based, mobile-optimized tool that lenders can trigger from their Reggora platform. Unlike similar tools made just for home appraisers, Virtual Inspection integrates with lenders’ existing Reggora workflows and automates the entire process, pulling relevant information from the LOS.
Founder
Cofounder and CEO
INTERNAL CALLOUT
Mary Ann Azevedo Managing Editor
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FinLedger
Since being named Managing Editor of FinLedger in August 2020, Mary Ann Azevedo has jumped right in to directing a powerful news and content strategy in addition to building a team of fintech journalists to support a robust audience of financial services and fintech professionals. With a focus on the news, perspective and insights impacting banktech, insurtech, proptech and payments – Azevedo works tirelessly to empower industry professionals to make smarter decisions as they move their digital strategies and capabilities forward in the ever-changing world of fintech. In addition to building an A-list roster of newsletter subscribers and daily readers that includes bank CTOs, insurance CISOs, unicorn entrepreneurs and top VCs, Azevedo receives weekly praise from readers for quickly making FinLedger the go-to news source for fintech news.
DECEMBER 2020/JANUARY 2021
THE OUTLOOK FOR
2021
A recovering economy, record purchase originations and a drop in refinances
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By Michael Fratantoni About the author: Michael Fratantoni is MBA's Chief Economist and Senior Vice President of Research and Industry Technology. In this role, he is responsible for overseeing MBA's industry surveys and benchmarking studies, economic and mortgage originations forecasts, industry technology efforts, and policy development research for both single-family and commercial/multifamily markets. Additionally, Fratantoni is a member of the Board of Directors of MISMO and the membership committee of MERS.
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T
and following a sudden halt in the spring, home sales are booming. WHAT WILL 2021 BRING? Mortgage lenders are operating in a period of heightened uncertainty, given the still unknowable course of the pandemic, and a somewhat hesitant economic recovery. Given this uncertainty, business leaders in our industry – now more than ever – need to consider alternative scenarios in respect to the challenges and opportunities that will drive the pace of activity in the year ahead. Our expectation is that 2021 will most likely be a year of a continued, but slow economic recovery, with a modest rise in mortgage rates, and the stubborn, ongoing housing market conundrum of inadequate supply in relation to demand. Home prices have risen more rapidly than incomes for years now, and the many challenges that have slowed homebuilding will continue to push home prices higher. The combination of these factors should lead to growth in purchase volume and a falloff in refinances. Of course, this path presumes that an effective vaccine is being distributed next year, that another stimulus package is passed, and that both arrive in time to prevent a substantial increase in bankruptcies or other business failures. This is by no means certain. If we take another step back with respect to the course of the pandemic, with tight lock-
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here is no place like home. The nature of this crisis because of the ongoing COVID19 pandemic has emphasized that fact. Even though we love our family members, we all need our space. Housing demand continues to remain quite strong for those fortunate enough to work in industries that are currently shielded from job loss, while also being more amenable to remote work. Mortgage rates are at record lows, and many households have realized they need more or different housing than was the case at the beginning of this troubled year. That is why with robust demand for refinancing and home purchases through the end of this year, MBA forecasts mortgage originations to close out 2020 at more than $3.2 trillion – the most since 2003’s $3.8 trillion. 2020 has been one of the most challenging years in the history of our country. However, the real estate industry should be proud of how rapidly participants moved to ensure home sales transactions and refinancings could take place safely – and with minimal disruption. Our market truly has been one of the very few bright spots of the economic recovery. Millions of homeowners have saved money through refinancing, mortgage servicers have helped over 5 million homeowners stay in their home by offering forbearance,
DECEMBER 2020/JANUARY 2021
downs in place again, it could be very damaging for consumer and business confidence and could lead to severe scarring of the economy. This more pessimistic scenario would certainly result in rates staying lower for longer, and as a result would extend the current refinance wave. But all waves crest at some point, and we expect that even in this scenario, burnout would eventually lead to a drop in refinances. Furthermore, a severe and prolonged recession – or meager growth – would hit consumer confidence and likely hinder the purchase market. The election certainly posed a number of significant uncertainties regarding the market and economic outlook. At this writing, it appears likely that the Democrats will maintain control of the House, and control of the Senate will be determined by a runoff election in Georgia, with President-elect Biden taking over the executive branch. Regardless of which party takes over the Senate, the expectation is that there will eventually be another stimulus package to help households and businesses. Prior to the election, the possibility of a “Blue Wave,” with Democrat control of the government, raised expectations that there would be much higher levels of government spending, larger budget deficits, and higher interest rates. That would certainly have cut off the refinance wave more quickly. Keeping in mind the alternative paths
The expected expansion in 2021, which hopefully should be steadier, will allow the job market to improve, incomes to rise and home sales to meaningfully increase.
which hopefully should be steadier, will allow the job market to improve, incomes to rise and home sales to meaningfully increase. With further job growth, the unemployment rate should decline next year to average 6.8%, which is a decline from the average of 8.4% in 2020. The swings in the job market data have been closely watched throughout this crisis. In February, the unemployment rate was at a 50-year low. By April, with more than 20 million job losses, it had spiked to 14.7%, the highest rate we have seen since the 1930s, and well above the 10% peak during the Great Financial Crisis. However, as states re-opened beginning in May, millions of workers who had been temporarily furloughed were called back to work. And while the pace of job gains has decelerated since June, and total employment still remains well below the level achieved pre-pandemic, the unemployment rate has dropped more quickly than we had predicted at the onset of the recession. Close followers of the employment reports know that the headline unemployment rate only tells part of the story. Many parents with young children have struggled to work (or conduct a job search) while supervising their kids’ remote schooling. The labor force participation rate has declined, as at least some have (at least temporarily) stopped actively looking for
DECEMBER 2020/JANUARY 2021
work, and hence are no longer counted as unemployed. Broader measures of underemployment have moved down in parallel with the headline reading, but the drop in labor force participation likely means that the unemployment rate will improve more slowly from here. If the pace of hir-
We expect the pace of homeprice growth to decelerate over the course of 2021... ing picks up, it would bring more workers back into the labor force, which would keep the unemployment rate from falling more quickly. As the job market improves, millions of homeowners find themselves sitting on plentiful equity with many potential buyers ready to pounce the moment they list their house for sale, while others are bursting at the seams and need more space – now. Unfortunately, the lack of inventory – less than three months of existing
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we might travel in the year ahead, let’s focus more on MBA’s baseline forecast. The October version of the forecast is shown in the previous table. Our forecast calls for the U.S. economy to expand at 3% next year after dropping about 3% in 2020. This was largely a result of a very sharp drop in the second quarter, a robust rebound in the third quarter, and further growth in the final three months of the year. The expected expansion in 2021,
home supply at September’s sales pace – has provided ample support to home prices. The late-summer reading from the Federal Housing Finance Agency shows home prices nationally were rising at an astounding 8% rate. We expect the pace of home-price growth to decelerate over the course of 2021, as builders pick up the pace of construction, and additional listings of existing homes come online. We do not expect home prices to decline on a broad basis. Also, bolstering housing demand is the rise in remote work during the pandemic. Many have been given the green light by their employer to work from anywhere and have decided to move to more affordable areas. Additionally, given the rising stock market and increasing wealth, many
lion in 2021, beating the previous record of $1.51 trillion set in 2005. Refinances – especially in the first half the year – should continue to keep lenders busy. After a substantial 70.9% jump in activity this year, we anticipate refinance originations will slow next year, decreasing by 46.3% to $946 billion. Overall, expect another strong year. Even with an expected overall decline to around 2.49 trillion, the 2021 originations tally would still be the second-highest total in the past 15 years. The Federal Reserve has made very clear their intention to keep short-term rates at zero at least through 2022. Given their announcement in August of a shift in their framework from targeting a 2% level of inflation to a more dovish approach of al-
ties, at least for a time. It is interesting to note that at least some Fed officials have begun to question the benefits of further expanding these asset purchases. Market participants should remember the taper tantrum in 2013, when just the hint of a slowing pace of asset purchases led to a substantial jump in longer-term yields. Next year, be on the lookout for changing circumstances, which could lead to another similar market tantrum. Beyond the conduct of monetary policy, the stance of fiscal policy will have an important role in determining the direction of interest rates in 2021. The fiscal 2020 federal budget deficit exceeded $3 trillion, and another stimulus package next year could push the fiscal 2021 deficit well above $2 trillion. While we think the
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Even with an expected overall decline to around 2.49 trillion, the 2021 originations tally would still be the second-highest total in the past 15 years. affluent households are considering a second home for vacation, additional rental income, or as the “satellite” workspace when not back in the office. All of these factors are why MBA is predicting purchase mortgage originations to grow 8.5% to a new record of $1.54 tril-
lowing inflation to exceed 2% for a period of time, we expect the central bank to be both later – and gentler – when it comes to increasing short-term rates. It is also likely in the Fed’s plans to continue their purchases of longer-term U.S. Treasuries and mortgage-backed securi-
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economy, the job market, and distressed households and businesses need the support such a package could bring, the size of the debt and the required debt issuance needed to finance these supersized deficits, will likely put upward pressure on longer-term rates.
All in, that means a steeper yield curve in 2021, with short rates locked at zero by the Fed, but longer-term rates pushed upwards by a recovering economy and bulging federal deficits. Mortgage rates are priced off the longer end of the curve, hence the most likely outcome is somewhat higher mortgage rates. Because the supply/demand imbalance for Treasuries
3%, before increasing to 3.3% by the end of 2021. Many mortgage lenders are posting record production profits in 2020, fueled by a surge in volume and strong margins. After struggling to grow capacity this year, lenders need to be prepared to pivot to a somewhat smaller originations market next year – for the reasons I’ve highlight-
year. The cyclical and evolving nature of employment in the mortgage industry will continue, and the best and brightest will once again shine. Ultimately, economic uncertainty will be with us until the public health crisis is solved. A more robust economic recovery greatly depends on slowing the spread of the virus – hopefully through the develop-
If all goes well, the economy rebounds and grows faster, incomes rise, unemployment goes down, but so do mortgage rates. ed. However, even with an improving job market and lower unemployment rates, we think the servicing side of the business is going to be challenging in 2021. Obstacles will certainly include elevated delinquency rates – particularly for FHA borrowers – and managing exit from forbearance for millions of borrowers. This will likely result in the need for additional loss-mitigation personnel. Hence, some origination staff this year might be usefully re-deployed into servicing next
ment of a vaccine and effective treatments. If all goes well, the economy rebounds and grows faster, incomes rise, unemployment goes down, but mortgage rates will rise. 2020 has been an unforgettable year on many fronts. MBA fully expects next year to again be a strong year for the mortgage market, fueled by still historically low rates, an increase in homebuilding and strong housing demand.
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will be much larger than that for mortgages, mortgage-Treasury spreads would then likely narrow from the very wide levels observed in most of 2020. If our originations volume forecast is right, lenders will also be less capacity-constrained next year, which would be consistent with narrow spreads as well. Predicting the path for mortgage rates is always a challenge, but I expect that mortgage rates will start to slowly rise, with the 30-year fixed-rate expected to end 2020 at
DECEMBER 2020/JANUARY 2021
TRADE DESK
Trade associations from across the housing industry are on the front lines of issues that lenders, real estate agents and everyone in between face every day. In these letters, they give their members an inside look at what they are working on, and the most important issues facing each industry today.
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AIME......................................57 ALTA.......................................57 MBA ......................................58 NAHB ....................................58 NAMB ...................................59 NAMMBA...............................59 NAR.......................................60
DECEMBER 2020/JANUARY 2021
TRADE DESK
Marc Summers
President Association of Independent Mortgage Experts
AIME members, The independent broker community has grown to over 100,000 strong according to the most recent jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. This growth is attributed in large part to brokers’ ability to be nimble and scale quickly in the current market. AIME is working hard to support our members’ growth by continuing to be forward thinking as we enter the new year. Following our 2020 Fuse National Conference we saw how committed brokers are to serving their purchase clients even in the midst of a refi boom. As independent originators are growing their teams and adapting strong company culture, wholesale mortgage
experts are instituting pillars that will lead to long term success for the broker channel. To support this, AIME will resume our Best in Class trainings with catered content for brokerages of different size and experience levels. Additionally, AIME has launched Spark, a collection of small business grant programs to ignite growth in the mortgage industry by funding new brokerages and providing access to training for incoming mortgage processors and originators. Our vision is to grow the broker market share to over 25%, and through programs that support current brokers and bring new ones into the channel, we are confident that we will see this vision fulfilled and far surpass it.
Association of Independent Mortgage Experts the industry was doing because of the pandemic in the communities they serve. What was most amazing about this effort was how quickly title professionals jumped on board. In true form, title professionals gave almost $500,000 to the Foundation in less than one week. Dur ing A LTA ONE, we announced the ALTA Good Deeds Foundation’s first grant recipient: the Tunnels to Towers Foundation, which helps build mortgage-free smart homes for catastrophically injured veterans and first responders. We are honored so many title professionals have committed to the ALTA Good Deeds Foundation. While it certainly has been a challenging year, we as an industry have accomplished a lot. Good deeds do indeed grow communities – and we could all use a little more of both right now.
American Land Title Association
DECEMBER 2020/JANUARY 2021
Diane Tomb
CEO American Land Title Association
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ALTA members, During its virtual ALTA ONE event in October, the American Land Title Association launched the ALTA Good Deeds Foundation to bolster charitable efforts of its members in their communities and help those adversely impacted by national emergencies, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. Founded on the mission “Good Deeds Grow Communities,” the foundation awards grants and supports title professionals as they work to build and strengthen their local communities and exemplify the title industry’s values, We Lead, We Deliver and We Protect. As we saw in spades during the pandemic, ALTA members are extremely involved in their local communities. ALTA’s #GoodDeeds Campaign was a social media effort we started during the pandemic that brought out stories of ALTA members doing big and little things to help at home. Whether it was buying meals for frontline workers, providing face masks or feeding the hungry, title companies stepped up. We decided to start the foundation in support of the work
Robert Broeksmit President & CEO Mortgage Bankers Association
Mortgage Bankers Association
TRADE DESK
MBA members, The future of the mortgage industry is digital. MISMO is helping lead the way. MISMO is at the forefront of advancing technology, including eMortgages and remote online notarization, that helps to accelerate the mortgage process. The pandemic has revealed a strong customer preference for these capabilities, and MISMO is working to address these industry needs. You may recall from my June column that the MBA and MISMO boards of directors approved a $0.75 fee for all new loans. MERS has agreed to act on MISMO’s behalf as the billing agent for this fee. The billing begins Feb. 1, 2021, and is based on a prorated billing period of July 1 to December 31, 2020.
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NAHB members, While the COVID-19 pandemic has dampened much of the nation’s 2020 economic landscape, housing has been a bright spot. New home sales and sales of existing inventories have made significant gains this year, and builder confidence is at an all-time high. Record-low interest rates have boosted home buyer traffic and a suburban shift away from high density areas is keeping builders busy. Stay-at-home orders early in the pandemic led to a renewed sense of home as refuge. Some owners have sought to remodel existing homes, while others have looked for new homes with added space for school, work and recreational activities. A lack of both new and existing inventory also points to solid levels of single-family construction in the months ahead. Hiring in construction has bounced back, with the rebound in construction job gains concentrated in the residential building sector, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data. As the overall labor market continues to recover, residential construction can be a haven for displaced workers from other industries still struggling to recover. Home building jobs are good paying jobs that
All proceeds collected from this Innovation Investment Fee will go directly to MISMO to develop digital standards and solutions that will benefit our industry and our customers. As lenders commence planning their 2021 budgets, I encourage them to plan for this fee and to set up MISMO as a valid vendor within their vendor management systems. This fee will help speed the development of industrywide standards, benefiting lenders of all sizes and business models and the consumers they serve. I look forward to updating you on how the proceeds are helping to lower lender costs through MISMO’s role in next-generation technology. To learn more, I invite you to visit MISMO’s fee webpage at https:// www.mismo.org/get-started/innovation-fee.
offer the opportunity for a meaningful career. And home building also creates jobs in a mix of industries – subcontractors, engineers, attorneys, mortgage brokers, bankers and more – all crucial to boosting a healthy economy during a period of recovery. The industry also generates millions of dollars in taxes and revenue for all levels of government to support police, firefighters and schools. Our industry’s role in the country’s economy has never been bigger. We have weathered the storm, but the residential construction industry still faces headwinds. High lumber costs, excessive regulations, and restrictive zoning policies all threaten the sector’s momentum. NAHB will continue to push for government policies that enable our members – and our industry – to create jobs and move the economy forward. As the economy recovers from the coronavirus pandemic, home building will lead the way.
National Association of Home Builders
DECEMBER 2020/JANUARY 2021
Chuck Fowke
Chairman National Association of Home Builders
President National Association of Mortgage Brokers
NAMB members, NAMB President Kimber White presented his President’s Message, the following is an excerpt… As we look forward to 2021, NAMB For ALL means more advocacy, more education, more networking, more member benefits, more opportunities, more growth, more different. I’m excited to lead some important initiatives coming…including • Fair Housing – We will create lending programs that eliminate inequality and income gap…to make sure that more Americans have the opportunity to own a home – regardless of race, religion, ethnicity, economic status, or sexual orientation. • NAMB University – We’re launching a 16-hour loan officer curriculum that will provide Certified Residential Mortgage Specialist training. • LO Concierge – A new NAMB member help desk that gives you a direct connection to your lenders. You can ask them right from NAMB questions about
NAMMBA members, On September 17 and 18, NAMMBA hosted its largest annual event, CONNECT 2020, and due to the pandemic, this year’s event was completely virtual. Against the odds of possible tech issues and differing time zones, CONNECT 2020 still proved to be a huge success. Industry leaders gathered together for four sessions over two days to discuss topics such as the Black Lives Matter movement, building a brand with social media, what Millennials need and more. We here at NAMMBA would like to acknowledge and thank all of the organizations who helped accomplish this wonderful conference. Following the success of our CONNECT 2020 virtual two-day event, the CONNECT 2020 Virtual Tour allowed for us to bring our message to cities across the country. The CONNECT 2020 Virtual Tour went through November 12th with events for local mortgage and real estate professionals in cities from Philadelphia to Houston. These virtual tour dates ensured that our
your loans. We will be growing and expanding this program to help you grow your business. It’s a central spot to connect with lenders and get answers. • We are partnering with the CFPB to make sure that schools have financial literacy; it’s critical to give everyone the knowledge and education to be able to purchase a home. It must begin in our schools and become a part of our culture. • We are launching a NAMB membership drive, asking ever y member to bring on new members. Why is this so important? The stronger NAMB is, the more education we can bring you. The more tech and tools we can bring you. The more advocacy and impact we can have in Washington. Remember, NAMB was created and founded by members for members. This is our association. This is our agenda. This association was created for small and independent mortgage brokers across our nation. Let’s move forward. NAMB for ALL.
NAMMBA members, industry leaders and others were able to gain knowledge from CONNECT 2020 virtual conference speakers, plus local industry leaders in their area. NAMMBA will be offering many resources and events during the upcoming months. Our six-month NAMMBA Leadership Academy course recently started and provides the essential knowledge and skills necessary to grow your career as a leader. The NAMMBA Leadership Academy is geared towards anyone interested in gaining foundational knowledge of the real estate finance industry. The course runs through March and attendees will graduate at our CONNECT 2021 conference. Of course, more events focused on education and career development are to come.
National Association of Minority Mortgage Bankers of America
DECEMBER 2020/JANUARY 2021
Tony Thompson
Founder/CEO National Association of Minority Mortgage Bankers of America
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Kimber White
National Association of Mortgage Brokers
TRADE DESK
TRADE DESK
NAR members, The National Association of Realtors recently launched NAR en Español, a fully-Spanish sub site to the association’s main webpage, nar.realtor. NAR has seen its Spanish-speaking membership soar as the U.S. Hispanic population reached a record high in 2019. As these trends continue, NAR believes initiatives like NAR en Español will ensure all of the association’s educational resources and tools are available to help support our Spanish speaking audiences across the country. Additionally, NAR’s new “Right Tools, Right Now” program has helped provide Spanish-speaking Realtors access to the wide variety of resources made available to NAR members in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, including virtual education courses and webinars fully conducted in Spanish. NAR en Español will play an important role in outreach
efforts toward Hispanic homebuyers and sellers. We want everyone to have a positive real estate experience no matter what side of the transaction they find themselves on or where they are in the buying or selling process. A significant component to NAR en Español will be its efforts to help elevate the professionalism of our members through educational products. NAR is working hard to have some of their most prestigious designations and certifications translated into Spanish so the learning needs of our growing Spanish speaking Realtor family can be addressed. Visit www.nar.realtor/nar-enespanol to access NAR’s new Spanish language webpage.
Vince Malta
National Association of Realtors
President National Association of Realtors
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DECEMBER 2020/JANUARY 2021
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MORTGAGE
DECEMBER 2020/JANUARY 2021
MORTGAGE
Who will reap rewards of nonbanks going public? WILL WALL STREET AGREE NOW IS THE TIME TO IPO?
O
n Nov. 12, 2015, traders on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange wi t n e s s e d t h e Dow suf fer its wor s t one - day loss in six weeks, plunging 254 points. That afternoon, in Washington, D.C., members of the Federal Reserve’s Federal Open Market Committee discussed hiking interest rates. And in Foothill Ranch, California, with the markets in chaos and an IPO expected that day, Anthony Hsieh, loanDepot chairman and CEO, made one of the biggest calls of his career: he would abort the potential $2.6 billion public offering, citing adverse market conditions and poor valuations for other newly public fintech companies. Though undoubtedly disappointed, Hsieh at the time didn’t rule out another bite at the IPO apple.
The emergence of nonbank mortgage lenders as public companies may fundamentally change the composition of the industry.
Five years later, analysts and competitors expect loanDepot – backed by private equity shop Parthenon Capital Partners and now the nation’s sixth-largest retail originator – to join United Wholesale Mortgage, Caliber Home Loans, AmeriHome, Guild Mortgage and Finance of America in gunning for market leader Rocket Companies, which made its public splash in early August. “For the industry, especially for private equity that typically supports independent mortgage firms, this is a once-in-a-generation chance to monetize equity, that frankly was trapped inside of these companies,” said Christopher Whalen, an investment banker and author. “You couldn’t really take them public at book value. So if you were private equity, and you would put money into one of these things, it was basically in there and you could take out income, but you really didn’t have much chance to sell the business.” The emergence of nonbank mortgage lenders as public companies may fundamentally change
DECEMBER 2020/JANUARY 2021
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BY JAMES KLEIMANN
MORTGAGE
the composition of the industry, giving a host of companies access to cash they couldn’t have dreamed of a year ago. But more impor tantly, industr y observers say, the IPO craze should separate the wheat from the chaff, and will test the strength of various lender models. Whether investors believe nonbank lenders are a good value during a time of record origination, outsized margins and historically low interest rates, remains to be seen. “It’s so exciting,” said an executive at one large nonbank lender. “We’re going to finally see who’s full of shit and who isn’t.”
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UWM, the wholesale titan, reported record earnings of $1.45 billion in the third quarter, and Rocket, the parent company of Quicken Loans, is expected to actually top the second quarter’s $3.4 billion in profit. The smaller operators are also posting outsized numbers, whether they’re retail, wholesale, correspondent or a blend. Caliber, with an upcoming IPO that could be valued at north of $2 billion, cleared $36 billion in originations in the first half of the year. It operates in all three channels. Retail-heavy Guild Mortgage posted a $111 million profit in the first half of the year, and generated $10 billion in originations in the third quarter. And AmeriHome, one of the country’s largest correspondent lenders, has been profitable since 2015 and generated $642 million in revenue for the first half of the year. But it’s a highly fragmented space. Rocket is the largest player at around 9% market share and has a market cap of $41 billion. UWM follows at around 6%.
In filings with the SEC, the hopeful ascendants variously describe the opportunity ahead – it’s a two trillion dollar market, their platform has sticking power, they’re powered by world-class technology and they’re growing every year. “These companies aren’t all that different from each other, even though they’ll tell a different story,” said Jack Micenko, a housing and mortgage analyst at Susquehanna Partners. Rocket, primarily a direct-to-consumer dynamo with some wholesale ambition, and UWM, a focused wholesale colossus with servicing aspirations, each envision a future in which they solidify over 25% market share in the next decade. That isn’t possible without the ability to scale their tech platforms, greatly expand their marketing clout, and – most importantly – find new customers. That costs money. Bags full of it. “For a nonbank lender, the issue you’ve always had is accessing capital,” said
“You’ve got a really strong purchase market, you’ve got a record refi market... You’ve got limited capacity and one of the ways these companies manage capacity is through price. So, the margins which are earning on each loan you make, are at all-time highs. That’s the good news." -Jack Micenko
DECEMBER 2020/JANUARY 2021
Patrick Stone, Williston Financial Group CEO and chairman. “And going public takes care of that in a couple ways. Obviously you access capital by going public, but you also put yourself in a position to access the debt markets a lot easier, to borrow money easier.” The current climate has led to a confluence of very positive events for the industry, according to Micenko. “You’ve got a really strong purchase market, you’ve got a record refi market,” he said. “You’ve got limited capacity and one of the ways these companies manage capacity is through price. So, the margins which are earning on each loan you make, are at all-time highs. That’s the good news.” Mor tgage banks have been undervalued in recent years, and access to the public markets – where capital is cheaper – could be massive, according to one nonbank executive. “Just think about who you have going public – you have very different models,” he said. “You have people that are heading into servicing, people that aren’t. You have people that have bet everything on distributed retail, and people that have bet everything on wholesale, or you have people that are fully focused on consumer direct. So it’s going to be really interesting to see how being publicly traded companies... kind of rationalize behavior a little bit. As well as it starts to expose who’s full of shit and who’s not.”
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Though lenders will be able to avoid paying exorbitant coupons to access investor capital as they once did as private companies, analysts are skeptical that there’s clear long-term value in the lenders as public companies. “ Margins are double historical averages,” said Micenko. “And it’s not
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Rocket, easily the biggest brand name, is prolific with direct-to-consumer, but its partner and wholesale business, which generates purchase originations, is roughly one-third the size, though it’s growing, according to Micenko. UWM is the biggest player in the broker channel, which provides direct access to new homebuyers, but more than 50% of its business is refi. UWM CEO Mat Ishbia has expressed confidence that his company can adjust when the cycles change. “Our scale, our technology, our efficiencies make it so we will win in these cycles, regardless if rates go up or down,” Ishbia said on a September call with investors of his newly-formed company, which is expected to debut via SPAC at a $16.1 billion valuation by the end of 2020. “We’ve done it before and we’re going to continue to do it again.” Even more historically purchasefocused lenders such as Caliber and Guild – who operate through correspondent channels – have increased their refi
businesses to take advantage of the cycle. Could they be best positioned to take advantage when the market turns back to purchase?
see investors and founders raise money and reinvest it in the business. “Rocket didn’t get any money from their offering,” Micenko said. “Caliber’s not
“...he knows very well what can happen if you buy too much third-party production and if you’re not careful." -Christopher Whalen
“Typically Guild is at 80, 85% purchase, which is great,” Whalen said. “And Sanjiv [Das], remember he fixed Citi, he had to come in right after the crisis and clean up their correspondent business. So he knows very well what can happen if you buy too much third-party production and if you’re not careful. Look at that document, see how little leverage he has. That man is being very conservative. It’s a boom time, you would think he’d throw more sail up on the mast, right? No, he’s a cautious man.” Meanwhile, on its S-1, AmeriHome, which originated $55 billion worth of mortgages in the 12 months ending on June 30, touted its heft in correspondent, direct-to-consumer and servicing as reason for investor confidence. LoanDepot, which still has yet to file its S-1, operates a direct-to-consumer operation and a wholesale business. Like UWM, it does wholesale, and like Rocket, it does direct-to-consumer, though it hasn’t been as successful in either channel. Anthony Hsieh‘s firm is hoping for an IPO between $12 billion and $15 billion, and like others, it’s likely to tout its supposed technological prowess as a key to unlocking future business. Beyond questions about who can thrive when the market isn’t as glossy, there’s another central issue for prospective investors: it’s about who gets paid when the new stock tickers are traded on the NYSE floor. Typically, Wall Street likes to
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getting any money from their offering. What you’re getting primarily so far has been ownership of private equity monetizing their stake, not raising capital for the company going forward. With Caliber, Lone Star’s getting the money. Not Caliber.” Observers said the same is likely to be true for Guild, backed by McCarthy Partners Management; AmeriHome, par tly owned by Apollo Global; Blackstone Group-controlled Finance of America; and potentially even loanDepot, which is also backed by private equity. According to its S-1, private investors at UWM are also getting paid on the deal, which includes $425 million in the SPAC’s trust plus $500 million in equity from a private investment. The proceeds will be used to buy out a portion of UWM’s private shareholders. The firm expects to pay a dividend starting in 2021. Analysts and rival executives who spoke to HousingWire were intrigued – but unsurprised – by Caliber’s upcoming debut, in particular. The company’s private capital is over 15 years old (well beyond the usual 10-year cycle in private equity), and it’s no secret in the industry that Lone Star has been looking to take Caliber public for years. “Lone Star has been licking their chops hoping to sell Caliber,” one observer said. “That doesn’t suggest it’s an unimpressive business at all. They do well in three origination channels.”
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just Rocket, it’s everybody. The problem with that is, in our view, investors buying IPOs in the sector today are buying peak earnings.” When refi volumes fall, so will margins, Micenko said. The lenders that are flirting with public offerings are “six-toeight multiple businesses,” not the 20X businesses that grace the S&P 500, the analyst said. “So generally, these are seen as lower multiple, lower-value businesses. They’re hard companies to model and they’re hard companies to predict the future because the future is outside of their only control. None of them can control their own destiny. They’re all at the mercy of the broader economy.”
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REAL ESTATE
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REAL ESTATE
Luxury housing market inspires “total frenzy” in vacation boom towns PEOPLE SETTLING IN VACATION HOME DESTINATIONS
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hat started as a trend over the summer m o n t h s t u r n e d long-term as luxury vacation towns saw an influx of homebuyers, especially in mountain towns like Aspen, Colorado and Jackson Hole, Wyoming. People who were hunkering down with their families in cramped homes sought out expansive vacation properties. After seeing significant drops in April and May, the luxury market has rebounded in places that are usually popular for second homes. Now that summer has passed and school has begun, the luxury housing market is still experiencing that boom since more people are working and schooling from home. In the third quarter, luxury home sales jumped 41.5%, the biggest year-over-year shift since 2013,
“What we’re seeing here in Palm Beach is a total frenzy... And since early July to now, it's just getting very busy.” -Dana Koch
according to Redfin. And while real estate agents repping luxury homes aren’t seeing as many bidding wars as they did this summer, their respective housing markets are still crazy right now. “What we’re seeing here in Palm Beach is a total frenzy,” Dana Koch, a sales associate with Corcoran Group, the Koch Team in Palm Beach, told HousingWire. “I’ve had many conversations with clients of mine from late April through early July, the market was total pandemonium. And, since early July to now, it’s just getting very busy.” A report from Douglas Elliman and Miller Samuel in October revealed that the average Palm Beach home price in Q3 was $7 million. Contracts during this time also skyrocketed 62%. While the Palm Beach housing market has not seen a lot of bidding wars, Koch said that a lot of the inventory has been absorbed and properties are getting multiple offers. Since it’s a summer destination, Palm Beach’s busy season for home buying starts on Nov. 1, and runs through May 1. Koch said that since this
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BY JULIA FALCON
REAL ESTATE
summer – typically the home buying offseason – was busy for buyers, he thinks it will only get crazier. “We normally average roughly like $200 plus million on an annual basis, and during the first three quarters, we’ve sold $350 million worth of real estate,” Koch said. “So it’s been a crazy year. It’s been a very profitable year.”
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Over where the weather is colder, Steven Shane, a Compass real estate agent in Aspen, Colorado, said that buyers are coming from all over Texas, Florida, New York and California. Shane said that schools in Aspen have increased their enrollment, as families are putting their roots down where they can have more space. “I think that there’s a lot of people who rented, put their kids into school, and now, interest rates are so low, if you think about it, it makes a heck of a lot more sense to buy something than to pay rent,” Shane said. “So a lot of the people who came here initially may have rented just to get a place and now are looking to buy a home.” From hiking to skiing and fishing, Shane said that people want to be able to get out and be able to stretch their legs if they’re working from home, and they can do that in Aspen. “People learned that they can work from anywhere,” Shane said. “For the most part, people can work remotely, and their children might be attending school remotely. So why not be in Aspen, Greenwich, Connecticut or the Hamptons?” Speaking of the Hamptons, as of Q3, home sales in the area have increased 51% year-over-year, according to another report from Douglas Elliman and Miller
“For the most part, people can work remotely, and their children might be attending school remotely. So why not be in Aspen, Greenwich, Connecticut or the Hamptons?” -Steven Shane
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Samuel. Gary DePersia, a broker with the Corcoran Group in East Hampton, said that the market is extremely busy right now at all price levels. “We’ve had quite a few deals above $10 million, above $20 million and above $40 million,” DePersia said. “So, there’s activity all over the place.” DePersia said that there are definitely bidding wars in his housing market, especially with more people coming out from the city and trying to live in the Hamptons full time. On the day HousingWire spoke with DePersia, he had six showings. “For a Thursday in October, that is a lot of showings. “At this time of year, we get a lot of showings on the weekend and very few during the week,” DePersia said. “Now we’re getting a lot of showings. It’s not uncommon for us to have three, four or five showings on a weekday of my various
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In the Lake Tahoe area, Amie Quirarte said that there are lots of Bay Area residents who fled to the vacation town, creating not only an increase in sales but also an increase in rentals. “It’s been a really interesting summer, to say the least,” the agent at Tahoe Luxury Properties said. In the past, it wasn’t unusual for houses in Quirarte’s market to sit on the market for 30 days and sometimes 60 days without much movement, causing a decrease in listing prices. “In that respect, [it has] shif ted tremendously,” Quirarte said. “Now we’re seeing nearly every offer is almost all cash, and if they’re not cash then they have at least waived their financing contingencies including their loans and
they have the ability to compete with cash offers. And many people, more this summer than any other time in my career, people have waived contingencies
“Miami is another destination to benefit from the big city exodus caused by the pandemic.” -Ines Flax
altogether, which is very unheard of for our market. Very, very unique.” Miami Realtor Ines Flax, with One Sotheby’s International, said her housing market is heating up this winter. “Some houses are getting multiple offers, which [we] haven’t seen that in a while,” Flax said. “Especially in the highend luxury market.” Miami is another destination to benefit from the big city exodus caused by the pandemic. Flax said that she thinks her market will be busier this winter than last winter, and said both public and private schools in the Miami area have had triple the amount of students applying. “We used to have five of the [mega mansion] sales a year in Miami Dade... and now we’ve seen 20,” Flax said. “Just five sold on Star Island within the last six months. The cheapest sale on Star Island was like $19 million, and that was a plot.”
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listings, or buyers coming out and looking for things with me. So that’s something that’s changed dramatically.” DJ Grubb said he’s seeing a lot of activity in the higher end of the housing market where he is in the East Bay area in California, including all-cash buyers and buyers taking advantage of the lower mortgage rates. “I have a lot of people moving within town, and a lot of Millennials coming out of San Francisco, that having just gone through COVID that are now coming over to the East Bay and finding the East Bay a very good buy, whether it be in the million five range or up to $5 million range,” Grubb said. Grubb, the president of Grubb Company Realtors, said that even though people are moving into his communities, people are moving out, too. The “wealthy, wealthy” are moving to the likes of Aspen, Colorado; Jackson Hole, Wyoming; and the Tahoe area.
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FINTECH
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FINTECH
Don’t underestimate the power of your real estate back-office systems THESE SYSTEMS ARE THE LIFEBLOOD TO YOUR BROKERAGE
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erhaps the least sex y technology to talk about are t h e b a c k- o f f i c e systems. But these are the lifeblood of the brokerage and certainly can’t be ignored or
underwhelming. However, this seems to be an area where little investment has flowed in recent years and certainly hasn’t seen the investment that areas like lead generation and agent tools have seen. And while there’s more to it than this, I’ve broken down the segment into commissions and office management and accounting. Honestly, there’s such a blurred line between commission tracking and accounting that many companies in the space have built systems to try to deal with it all.
Perhaps the least sexy technology to talk about are the back-office systems.
In terms of the general purpose of real estate back-office systems, I look at them as the systems that the company needs to manage its day-to-day operations. Core to that is tracking revenue coming in and expenses going out. In addition, these systems are helping you manage how you’re getting paid and making payouts. And they’re making sure that the amounts are correct and payments and receipts are on time. This isn’t just about numbers though. It’s also about all of the details behind those numbers. Commission plans. W-9’s. License numbers. Bank accounts. Addresses. EINs and SSNs. Credit cards. In other words, all kinds of sensitive information that needs to be carefully tracked, stored and secured. And believe me, I’ve seen all kinds of no no’s on this front. Yes, these systems are lifeblood. They’re also fraught with peril from a data privacy, security and liability perspective. So you can’t just give it the ol’ college try. You need to be confident.
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BY SCOTT PETRONIS
FINTECH
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Like many of the systems I’ve discussed throughout the HousingStack articles, integration is quite crucial here, and honestly even more so. That’s especially true when it comes to the back-office systems that help facilitate the right income calculations and getting your agents paid. Typically these systems will at least integrate with your transaction management system and with your accounting system. Ideally these systems integrate seamlessly with your brokerage CRM and recruiting systems as well for seamless transition into productivity.
There are a number of systems out there that actually handle more than commissions and back-office functions.
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There are a number of systems out there that actually handle more than commissions and back-office functions. For example, products like Brokermint cross the boundary into transaction management and compliance while also handling agent onboarding, commission plans and financial tracking, then integrating with accounting systems like QuickBooks and others. Core Back Office (formerly BrokerSumo and acquired by Inside Real Estate in 2015) sits right in the middle of TMSs like SkySlope and DocuSign Rooms, and accounting systems like QuickBooks and Microsoft Dynamics, handling agent onboarding, commission plans, commission tracking and integrations with payment processing and 1099 filings. Lone Wolf Back Office (formerly brokerWOLF) is perhaps the most mature offering out there, with roots
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dating back to 1989, and tries to handle all aspects of running and managing the brokerage, including a full-fledged accounting system with GL, AR, AP, payroll, trust accounting and more. broker.ez was designed for brokerages who are part of a franchise system and has taken a workflow-centered approach to helping brokerages manage backoffice operations while integrating with accounting and other systems. Some of the newest entrants on the scene include RealtyBackOffice, started in 2015 in Miami, which tries to cover all the bases from forms and eSignature to transaction management to commission tracking and forecasting and disbursement authorization. They also integrate with a number of accounting and other systems for convenient data synchronization. Zipi, started in 2017 in Roseville, California, provides integrated back-office, accounting and payment services in a single platform.
they’ve clearly extended far beyond that through numerous acquisitions as well as internal development efforts. AcctFusion, on the other hand, has focused almost exclusively on accounting since their founding in 2017 with the addition of commission management and calculation. Emphasys Sof tware, part of the Constellation Real Estate Group, also offers an accounting-focused solution both as a stand-alone offering as well as an integrated solution leveraging Quickbooks. REALedger is considered an “all-in-one” system for commissions, accounting, bookkeeping and more.
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There are more than a dozen other companies building back-office systems for real estate brokerages indicated on
monthly fees) and 1099 contractors (for their commission payments)? Can you track unpaid fees and apply them against transactions before agent payouts? Is all of the data secure, auditable and safely back-up? It ’s no small task migrating from the way you do things today, to a new way. But that’s no reason not to look at what’s out there. One of the biggest impediments to a brokerage’s success is usually an inability to scale to support greater volume. People alone don’t solve that problem, nor do systems alone. It’s the blend of the two that make all the difference, So if you find that your people are tapped, that it’s taking longer to get people paid or close out each month or quarter. It’s probably time to evaluate and see what systems are out there to help your people succeed. HousingStack is a real estate technology landscape that provides a dynamic visual that reflects the rapid changes in the sector. The HousingStack is exclusively for HW+ members. https://www.housingwire. com/housingstack/
Integrated with SkySlope, Dotloop and DocuSign, their system takes over with commission calculations and disbursement authorizations, then handles accounting functions and reporting. Brokerage Engine, the newest entrant in this space starting in 2018, was founded by Sotheby’s franchise owners and ex Rackspace founders. In addition to back-office and accounting functions, Brokerage Engine focuses on workflow and integrations with many other systems including the Realogy dash back-end. While companies like Lone Wolf are well-known for their accounting system,
the HousingStack, so depending on your needs, there’s bound to be a solution for you. There’s no reason to run your business on spreadsheets! There’s definitely complexity when it comes to real estate back-office functions, especially as it relates to commission plans, how agents get paid and how the money should properly flow. If you’re in the market for a new system, be sure you understand your requirements. How many commission plans do you really have? Can the system handle individual and team caps? Can you treat agents both as customers (for things like
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It’s no small task migrating from the way you do things today, to a new way.
POLITICS & MONEY
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Politics & Money
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POLITICS & MONEY
What a Biden victory would mean for housing INDUSTRY OBSERVERS PREPARE FOR STRICTER REGULATION
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s results trickled in on election night following a historic 2020 general election, re s ul t s s e e m to be leaning toward a Joe Biden victor y, but potentially also a Republican-led Senate. What would the impact of a Biden presidency be on housing? “For the mortgage industry, a split government might be the best possible outcome,” RealtyTrac Senior Vice President Rick Sharga said. “Because it would probably prevent overarching new tax policies that could impact investment and could impact the cost of homeownership.” Gridlock in Washington won’t stop Biden’s administration from attempting to push through sweeping changes into housing, where the former vice president has promised to invest $640 billion
“For the mortgage industry, a split government might be the best possible outcome.” -Rick Sharga
over the next 10 years so Americans can have “access to housing that is affordable, stable, safe and healthy, accessible, energy efficient and resilient,” according to his campaign website. He has pledged to introduce a tax credit for firsttime homebuyers upwards of $15,000, reintroduce sharper regulatory teeth to agencies such as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, alter a spate of restrictive zoning laws to increase development, build millions of units of affordable housing, and cap payments for certain renters. It is also widely believed a Biden administration would keep the GSEs under conservatorship. Regardless of who’s in the White House, observers from across the housing and mortgage industries believe interest rates will continue to hover near historic lows for the next several years and volumes will remain high, largely due to simple economic realities: there simply isn’t enough inventory and the economy is too fragile for rates to increase. Some say it might even be business as usual, globally speaking. Such is the state of politics in
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BY JAMES KLEIMANN AND TIM GLAZE
POLITICS & MONEY
a polarized nation with frequent election cycles. “At this moment, there will be very little change if Biden wins and the Senate remains,” said Patrick Stone, Williston Financial Group chairman and CEO. “People think Biden’s going to do this, going to do that. But he’s going to be handcuffed by the makeup of Congress.” On the day after the election, interest rates and the 10-year Treasury dropped primarily because the market doesn’t expect another massive CARES Actlike stimulus if Republicans still control the Senate, Stone said. It might be just a trillion or two dollars. Despite potential roadblocks put in the way from Republicans, Biden has wide latitude to use agencies and regulatory bodies to shape housing policy.
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Federal Housing Finance Agency director Mark Calabria and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin have made it clear that they want Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac out of conservatorship. “And they are working very diligently to get to that outcome,” said Tim Rood, SitusAMC head of government and industry relations. “So I would imagine that if they continue on this path, they’ll have a capital framework released this year.” He added that the Trump administration would likely do what they could do make the GSEs “as durable as possible” before a new administration is seated. Should Biden take office, some experts say he would likely wind back any progress Mnuchin and Calabria made in taking the GSEs out of conservatorship. “If Biden wins, he is going to look to use Fannie and Freddie as instruments of public policy to help close the
“Biden would tend to take the approach to apply regulation in favor of consumers, balanced with interests of business, including on environment, workplace and consumer regulation.” -Mark Hamrick
homeownership gap, the wealth gap, cap people’s payments on both rental and occupied housing, support the construction of 1.5 million to 2 million affordable housing units,” Rood said. “So I would imagine that the GSEs are going to have a much longer road to hoe getting out of conservatorship with a Biden administration.” Biden will undoubtedly also select a new leader of the CFPB, after the Supreme Court passed a ruling saying a new president could make staff changes when elected. The CFPB, led by Donald Trump-appointed Kathy Kraninger, was put in place during the Obama administration in 2011 to protect consumers from financial abuse and predatory practices in several services – including credit cards, mortgages and loans. “Biden would tend to take the approach to apply regulation in favor of consumers, balanced with interests of business,
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including on environment, workplace and consumer regulation,” BankRate Senior Economic Advisor Mark Hamrick said. “One could see a Biden presidency more aggressively, and potentially more effectively, finding room for compromise. As was seen on the question of stimulus here in the second half of the year, the Trump White House was unable to forge a middle ground between the Senate and House, leaving individuals and businesses going without.”
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Biden’s aforementioned plan to inject more than $600 billion into better housing isn’t all the new potential administration has its eye on. It also plans on providing financial assistance to help Americans buy or rent housing – including “down payment assistance through a refundable and advanceable tax credit and fully funding federal rental assistance,” per Biden’s campaign website. This tax credit, announced at $15,000 for qualified applicants, is aimed to help young, first-time homebuyers and Black and Hispanic homebuyers. An early draft of the proposal, put together by the Tax Policy Center, would cost approximately $25 billion annually, according to Eugene Steuerle, Fellow at the Urban Institute. “ T h e b a s i c r a t i o n a l e f o r any homeowner’s subsidy rests on a few basic notions, such as the likelihood that people take better care of their own property than someone else’s, the stability that home ownership gives to a community, and the wealth reserves homeownership provides to families for retirement, emergencies and other purposes,” Steuerle said. Industry observers who spoke to HousingWire during the election week weren’t optimistic that Biden would
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The appointment of a new FHFA leader by Biden could directly impact the future of the world’s two biggest mortgage financiers, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. If Biden were to appoint a new director in Calabria’s seat, they would likely take an approach similar to the Obama administration in holding Fannie and Freddie responsible for advancing certain affordable-housing goals. “I believe that a Biden administration would tack on fees to government backed loans, the proceeds of which would be used to offset housing costs for lowerwage earners,” Sharga said. “And under that scenario, it’d be hard to see Fannie and Freddie getting sprung free from
conservatorship anytime soon, because those funds for affordable housing have to come from somewhere.”
“It’s clear that the enforcement regime is going to be far more punitive and aggressive than under the Trump administration.” -Tim Rood
With a Biden-appointed FHFA director in place, the government could declare Fannie and Freddie critically undercapitalized, Rood said. “Hypothetically, a new FHFA director could evaluate the COVID-related credit losses that are kind of pending, and require them to reserve an extra, say $20 billion a piece, for credit reserves,” he said. “And that would throw them into the category of critically undercapitalized.” Rood said expectations are that a Biden administration will use regulatory authority far more often than Trump did, which he said will increase the cost of credit and drive the availability down. “It ’s clear that the enforcement regime is going to be far more punitive and aggressive than under the Trump administration,” he said. “Customers and lenders, as they used to describe the 2000s, they would find themselves waking up in fear of the government. Once they find themselves waking up in fear of the government again, they’re going to do the least risky thing, which is to only use government-backed programs and use less of anything that would fall under scrutiny.”
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have the legislative muscle to get the full initiative through, unless Democrats also take the Senate. “As a standalone bill I don’t think it would get the traction,” Rood said. “It would have to be coupled with something else, some sort of other stimulus relief bill. Biden had it tied to this infrastructure plan, which is going to have a hard time getting any traction with a Republicancontrolled Senate.” A similar tax credit was implemented during the Obama administration, when homeownership rates were sinking. Sharga said doing it again in 2021 could actually exacerbate an existing problem – low inventory. “Washington, in general, likes to put a stamp on anything that gives the impression they’re giving away free money,” he said. “A first-time homebuyer tax credit would have a chance of getting through a divided congress – maybe not $15,000, but something significant. I am a little concerned that that might be a solution in search of a problem.”
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with Eric Stegemann Tribus CEO
Why it’s important to make real estate websites accessible to all Roughly 8% of the population needs accessibility features on their browser This week marks the 30th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act, creating opportunities for the disabled community. According to AP News, disabled workers still face higher unemployment than other adults, even 30 years after the act was passed. By June 2020, the unemployment rate for disabled people rose to 16.5%, compared to 11% for workers without a disability, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. In an interview with HousingWire, Eric Stegemann, CEO of Tribus, a custom brokerage platform vendor, answered a few questions on the importance and necessity of making real estate accessible for all. This interview has been edited for brevity.
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HousingWire: Why do you think accessibility matters in real estate? Eric Stegemann: It’s something I’ve actually been really passionate about for [almost] 10 years. I used to serve as the chair of the business issues committee for the National Association of Realtors, and this is something that was brought to my attention back in 2011 to 2012. We started looking heavily into it and saying “okay, well, what’s going on here?” This was kind of the early days of the discussion of ADA, and its importance in real estate, and for websites in general. I don’t think until that time anybody had really considered ADA, as far as websites. I think the biggest thing to know is that roughly 8% of the population needs some sort of accessibility setting on their browser or when they’re navigating websites. I actually did double and triple check some of those numbers because I thought that would be too high, but sure enough, it is [right]. The reason why accessibility isn’t just about what you consider blind people or handicapped is that it can also be your grandma or grandpa. They can’t easily read small text on a website. What it comes down to is that you need to make sure your website is working for all of these different folks be-
cause you’re essentially turning off close to 10% of your potential business if you don’t. HW: How can digital content be made more accessible? ES: Tech people, younger folks, etc., they’re not the ones that have to experience this, and they don’t think about the ramifications to this group of people. Whether it’s somebody who is completely blind or whether it’s your grandma or grandpa, they don’t think about those things. From that perspective, there are lots of different sites that are online that kind of show you what it’s like to go through it as somebody who’s either on the far end and would be completely blind and trying to use a website or if it’s needing larger text. I think it’s a matter of everybody educating themselves. If I’m a broker, I should go educate myself on what it means to be accessible, and the range of things that people need to make their sites accessible to the various different groups are out there. As I mentioned, when it comes to the sizing of text, the most simple item, the feature that’s there has been in browsers for a very long time, but it is in use all the time by a good chunk of the population to make reading websites easier. A lot of websites, particularly in the real estate industry, when you try to increase the text size, it blows the text off the page and makes it not usable. We can definitely get into more advanced items that are out there like screen readers and high contrast, but from a usability standpoint, I always find that’s the one that people who
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don’t have accessibility needs are able to connect with the most because most people have had that happen at some point by accident.
HW: What needs to happen in the future for real estate and real estate technology to be made more accessible? ES: There needs to be a focus on accessibility by the brokerage company, particularly during the brokerage tech purchasing process. As soon as brokers demand this from their vendors, the issue will be quickly solved. In the meantime though, brokers are losing more than 5% of potential clients by ignoring this set of the population. HW: What does making a website accessible for disabled people mean for fair housing and making housing more attainable? ES: As all agents learn in real estate licensing classes, disabilities are a protected class by fair housing laws. In today’s world, most home searches begins online – not just for non-disabled people, but disabled people as well. It’s the duty of agents and brokers to make sure that housing remains the American dream. Having a website that helps facilitate this for disabled people is a fundamental part of the home-buying process.
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HW: How can a website, like a real estate website, be made more accessible for those who need it at a time like this, where open houses are now virtual, there are 3D home tours and there’s remote online notarization? What are the steps that need to be taken to achieve accessibility on that side of the industry? ES: The standards for this change all the time, so it’s a matter of constantly thinking about it. I always tell brokers, if you’re not a client, to make sure your vendor communicates with your website vendor on what they are doing to make sure that their site stays accessible and stays up to date with current standards just like you would need to update your website for current standards for browsers. For example, many people might be familiar with the fact that you had to make your website compatible with Internet Explorer, Chrome, Firefox and Safari. They all use different ways of making your website load. Accessibility should be thought of in the same way, as it’s a constantly moving target. You need to review it on a regular basis and do an audit of your website on a regular basis. Really, the first step is either you know your in house tech people or your vendor [and] you should be asking them to do an audit of the website. Number two, a big one, what I see missed all the time is that most brokers could not begin to tell you what an alt tag on a website is. Again, communicating with your vendor is vital, and having a vendor that is looking out for you in these cases and being ahead of these things is vital. So from that perspective, ask your vendor, “Are you automatically creating alt tags or do you have a way that I can add alt tags to the page?”
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KUDOS
Climb For The Kids: How one mortgage company finds a higher purpose by hiking 14ers
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By Brena Nath
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It’s 6:30 in the morning on September 25, 2020, and a small team from The Home Loan Expert is beginning their long climb up Mount Elbert, the highest summit in the Rocky Mountains of North America and the highest point in Colorado. In a class commonly referred to as 14ers by those adventurous enough to climb them, this 14,440 foot-high mountain isn’t for the faint of heart. On this particular early morning, The Home Loan Expert President Ryan Kelley, Chief Compliance Officer Michael Chiarella and Chief Financial Officer April McCoy were determined to make the roughly 10.5-mile ascent, which, on average, takes seven hours to complete. Literally taking it one step at a time, Chiarella recounts just trying to take the journey 25 yards and 30 yards at a time, making the most of the incremental milestones to hopefully add up to reaching the summit. F inally, after two false summits, which is a peak that appears to be the pinnacle of the mountain, Chiarella made it to the top. “It was absolutely exhilarating,” said Chiarella. Drawing a connection bet ween the strength it takes to summit the mountain and the determination it takes to go through life, Chiarella said, “Once you get to the top, you see the reward for all your hard work, so to some degree, that is a metaphor.” While hiking Mount Elbert was Chiarella’s first hike with The Home Loan Expert, for others on the team, this year marked the sixth year in a long, heartfelt journey on how the company has used hiking as a way to raise money. The reality is that this group wasn’t hiking to simply check something off the bucket list. Instead, every step and minute that went by on their hike was fueled by a greater mission. Kelley is not only the president of The Home Loan Expert but is also the founder of Climb
For The Kids, an annual campaign to climb mountains to raise money to help families of children with cancer and bring awareness to life-threatening diseases. Kelley started the campaign in 2015 by hiking Mt. Rainier, which is right outside of Seattle, Washington. At the time, he was able to raise over $14,000 for Friends of Kids with Cancer, which is devoted to enriching the daily lives of children undergoing treatment for, and survivors of, cancer and blood-related diseases. To Kelley, the heart of giving back began around five or six years ago when he would go visit SSM Health Cardinal Glennon Children’s Hospital in St. Louis, Missouri after a long day at the office to spend time with the children who were getting treatments. These children sparked something inside of Kelley, a core desire to give back and fight to bring awareness to what they’re going through. So, when Kelley dreamt up this whole plan for the company to come together to climb a mountain, his mission was to raise money for Friends of Kids with Cancer. McCoy, who was there for the first hike in 2015 up Mt. Rainier, credits that first climb and the fight it took to attempt to climb the extremely technical mountain, as the climb that set the company on this trajectory of helping kids, and completely changed her life forever. Since that first climb in 2015, Climb For the Kids has been able to raise more than $14,000 in 2016 and 20017, more than $50,000 in 2018, and more than $85,000 in 2019. The campaign has been able to donate money to places like Vanderbilt Children’s Hospital, SSM Health Cardinal Glennon Children’s Hospital and the Staunton State Park Track Chair Program. But for McCoy, one person in particular, Alec Ingram, who they donated to, holds a special place in her heart. After making the first climb in 2015, The Home Loan Expert was offered the opportunity to throw out a first pitch at a Cardinals baseball game, which they turned
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into a raffle drawing as a way to raise money. However, the person who won the raffle donated the pitch back, allowing them to give the first pitch to a boy, Ingram, who was diagnosed with osteosarcoma bone cancer in May of 2015 at nine years old. Over years, he became part of The Home Loan Expert Family. McCoy and the team would visit him in the hospital, bring him food and just be there to support him. He even became an honorary employee. After fighting the disease for more than four years, Ingram passed away on Nov. 7, 2019, a true super-
hero to everyone who knew him. Ingram’s legacy lives on through his parents, who started the Team Alec Forever Foundation, which McCoy now sits on the board of. Their mission is to financially help childhood cancer families with end of life expenses, who are treated in the St. Louis area. Since her first climb in 2015, McCoy wasn’t able to climb again until this yea r ’s climb when she hiked Mount Elbert in honor of Ingram and to advocate for the Team Alec Forever Foundation. “I did not quit this time because of Alec and because of what I was fighting for,” McCoy said. “When I finally got to the top, I was really proud of myself and that I made it so I could tell people I made it for Alec
and to raise money for the foundation.” When McCoy reached the top, she texted Ingram’s mom letting her know that she inspired her to get to the top. Alec’s mom replied, “So glad you made it. Tell Alec I said hi. I feel like you’re a little closer to him at 14K.” When she sa id, “Tell Alec I said hi. You’re a little closer to him,” McCoy said that was her moment because she did it for Alec’s mom. It also helped her to bring awareness to the foundation. It’s stories like Ingram’s that drive The Home Loan Expert team to continuously climb mountains every year.
F rom this past climb i n 2 0 2 0, T h e H o m e L oa n Exper t wa s a ble t o r a i s e $9 0,0 0 0 fo r Team Alec Forever, SSM Health Cardinal Glennon Children’s Hospital, Friends of Kids with Cancer, Girls on the Run – St. Louis, St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital and First Descents. “What motivates me now is the larger we grow the company and the bigger we get, the more dollars in awareness we can raise for charitable partners,” Kelley said. “We will always have this as one of our main cornerstones of the company.”
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Photo by Victoria Wickham
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❱ HW ANNUAL Digital Producer Alcynna Lloyd stands in front of the HousingWire Annual setup in HousingWire’s podcast studio. The event kicked off its virtual one-day summit Oct. 8 with a mission to bring together the most important stakeholders in government and business to discuss how 2020 rapidly changed the industry, and what to expect next. This year’s theme was “The Great Acceleration” – a conversation about the disruption speeding through the nation’s landscape led by housing luminaries including Doug Duncan, Ed DeMarco, Cindy Waldron, Logan Mohtashami and many more.
DECEMBER 2020/JANUARY 2021
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