May 2021 Issue

May 2021

2021

HOUSINGWIRE MAGAZINE ❱ MAY 2021

40 executives driving financial performance

HOUSINGWIRE Daily A deeper look into the HousingWire newsroom's most captivating stories.

Listen here: housingwire.com/podcast

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EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Sarah Wheeler

NEWSROOM MANAGING EDITOR James Kleimann SENIOR REAL ESTATE REPORTER Matthew Blake SENIOR MORTGAGE REPORTER Georgia Kromrei MORTGAGE REPORTER Alex Roha ASSIGNMENTS REPORTER Tim Glaze LEAD ANALYST Logan Mohtashami CONTRIBUTORS Rebecca Ayers, Lesley Collins, Alex Elezaj, Richard Koss, Veronica Nguyen, David H. Stevens, John Toohig PREMIUM CONTENT/HW+ HW+ MANAGING EDITOR Brena Nath HW+ INTERN Sarahi De La Cuesta DIGITAL MEDIA MANAGER Alcynna Lloyd JUNIOR DIGITAL PRODUCER Victoria Wickham CONTENT SOLUTIONS MANAGING EDITOR Maleesa Smith CONTENT EDITOR Jessica Davis ASSISTANT CONTENT EDITOR Jordan White SALES VICE PRESIDENT, SALES AND REVENUE OPERATIONS Jennifer Watson Laws DIRECTOR OF REAL ESTATE Mark Adams CALIFORNIA Christi Humphries CENTRAL Chris Anderson SOUTHEAST Tamara Wren GREAT LAKES AND NORTHEAST Michael Orme SALES STRATEGY ASSOCIATES Lindsley Harris, Amanda Luzsicza, Amina Jahic

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HW MEDIA CORPORATE CEO Clayton Collins CHIEF OPERATING OFFICER Diego Sanchez WEB DIRECTOR Brent Driggers PRODUCT MANAGER Matthew Stafford CONTROLLER Andrew Key MARKETING DIRECTOR Caren Karris MARKETING COORDINATOR Katie Galbraith, Brooke Combs GRAPHIC DESIGNER Emily Carpenter CLIENT SUCCESS DIRECTOR Haley Hess CLIENT SUCCESS COORDINATOR Kambrie Laurent AUDIENCE DEVELOPMENT MANAGER Alyssa Stringer AUDIENCE DEVELOPMENT INTERN Sydney Smith

HOW TO REACH US LETTERS TO THE EDITOR feedback@housingwire.com TIPS AND STORIES editorial@housingwire.com CURRENT MEMBERSHIP / SUBSCRIPTION hwplusmember@housingwire.com NEW MEMBERSHIP / SUBSCRIPTION housingwire.com/membership MARKETING & ADVERTISING jlaws@housingwire.com or (469) 850-4572 ADVERTISING CLIENT SUCCESS clientsuccess@housingwire.com

MAY 2021

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

Solving a liquidity crisis WHILE THEY’VE LONG BEEN the backbone of companies trying to navigate the cyclical nature

the housing economy forward.

And to get a detailed synopsis of the second-

of the housing industry, finance executives took

ary market that these executives were having to

center stage last year. With housing demand al-

plan around, go to page 40. This feature com-

ready high, the Federal Reserve introduced a new

pares the 2008 financial crisis to the pandemic’s

quantitative easing program in response to the

impact on the capital markets, outlining the mas-

COVID-19 crisis that pushed mortgage rates to

sive shift in market share by lenders. Despite the

historical lows and the housing market reacted in

roller coaster that was 2020, the author of the

a way that no one saw coming – it flourished.

story, John Toohig, asks, “Could the industry be

Then, on top of all of this, the events of last year created a race to file for IPO from the top

entering a new Golden Era for mortgage lenders — both depository and nonbank alike?”

mortgage and real estate players, creating even more liquidity for the heavy hitters in the industry.

HousingWire’s newest award program recognizes the 40 executives who are driving financial liquidity, helping their businesses access the capital markets, and most importantly, moving

Brena Nath HW+ Managing Editor @BrenaNath

Tweets From The Streets If you want #lumber prices to come down, just stop buying lumber.

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by @LumberTrading

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. © 2021 by HW Media, LLC • All rights reserved

MAY 2021

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performance, expanding margins, improving

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But you do have control over the decisions you make and the partners you choose to lead the way forward.

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may 2021 People Movers

Real Estate

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ALTA names its first-ever chief information officer, Kelly Romeo.

Take 5

11 Did you know Rocket’s Julie Booth loves 80s Hair Band music and skiing?

Lender Rankings

12 Here are the top 10 mortgage lenders of 2020, based on total originations.

Launches

13 Guaranteed Rate’s CEO launches a standalone mortgage tech company.

Hot Seat

14 Angel Oak on the importance of a healthy non-QM market.

Hot Seat

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Event Calendar

16 Don’t let your dog ruin the virtual conference you’re speaking at.

Inside Agent

17 Broker Steven Caporale on the newest location for luxury living.

Local Intel

18 These five markets showcase the current migration trends in the nation.

Trade Desk

64 These seven associations unpack the impact of COVID-19.

Mortgage

70 In the UWM & Rocket broker war, where did the big broker shops end up?

ServiceLink on growing and managing portfolios in today’s market.

Here’s where real estate agents fit into Zillow’s grand vision.

Real Estate Brokerage

78 Inside eXp Realty’s stunning growth and a look at its quiet leader.

Q&A 1

82 Beanworks CEO on leading her company to 77% growth in 2020.

Q&A 2

83 The journey to becoming a top-producing female loan officer.

Kudos

84 Real estate brokerage donates portions of home sales to charities.

Parting Shot

86 A behind-the-scenes look at HousingWire’s virtual Spring Summit.

MAY 2021

Housing Finance Leaders

features

f

26 This award honors the finance executives who are driving financial performance, improving liquidity and most importantly, moving the housing economy forward.

46

40 A new golden age in the secondary mortgage market Will lender focus shift to the jumbo/nonconforming market?

The homeownership opportunity conundrum What can the HUD Secretary do to help?

The nine companies featured in this section offer virtual solutions to not only speed up the valuation process but eliminate potential errors that could delay a homebuyer’s move-in.

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The end of forbearance and the capital markets

Don’t underplay compliance in mortgage software

The cyclical nature of the mortgage industry

By Richard Koss

By Veronica Nguyen

By Alex Elezaj

pg 20

pg 22

pg 24

MAY 2021

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Valuation Tech Special Reports

PEOPLE MOVERS

Brad Wayman

| Citi | Head of U.S. Mortgage

Citi hired a new head of U.S. Mortgage, officially naming Brad Wayman to the position after he had been serving in the role on an interim basis since December. First joining Citi in 2003, he most recently held the position of head of U.S. mortgage sales, where he led distributed retail sales, direct to consumer sales, strategic market business development, community reinvestment strategy and sales support. In his new role, he is charged with continuing to drive a unified strategy across Citi’s U.S. Retail Bank.

Kelly Romeo |

ALTA | Chief Information Officer

The American Land Title Association promoted Kelly Romeo to senior vice president and the newly created role of chief information officer. As ALTA’s first CIO, Romeo will provide strategic direction for the association’s information technology team, ensuring that all systems necessary to support its operations are in place. Romeo also will continue to oversee the education department, NTP Designation program, legal publications and the ALTA Registry.

Barry Feierstein |

EasyKnock | Chief Operating Officer

EasyKnock announced it hired Barry Feierstein as chief operating officer. In this role, Feierstein will be responsible for day-to-day business operations and ensuring that all departments and activities are focused on the company’s mission. He will also be tasked with establishing new partnerships and expanding the company’s presence in select markets as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Feierstein brings over two decades of experience leading various operations, ranging from burgeoning startups to Fortune 500 companies.

Rebecca Martin |

Total Expert | Chief Marketing Officer

Total Expert appointed Rebecca Martin as its new chief marketing officer, where she will apply her experience differentiating entrepreneurial brands and building marketing funnels. She is charged with growth development, creating demand, late-stage pipeline and revenue and establishing a customer engagement and advocacy program. She joins Total Expert from Calabrio, where she served as CMO, and she has also served in a variety of marketing roles at Code42, Oracle and Stellent.

Amanda Nunnink |

Freddie Mac | Vice President of Equity in Multifamily Housing

Freddie Mac appointed Amanda Nunnink as vice president of equity in multifamily housing. Nunnink will lead efforts to create improvements for renters and the rental housing industry and work across multifamily to elevate diversity, equity, and inclusion principles throughout the division. Nunnink joined Freddie Mac in 2012 in production and sales, where she led the development of several Freddie Mac Multifamily offerings.

Nunnink will also continue most of her duties as vice president of multifamily investor relations.

Will St. Clair |

Notarize | Vice President of Strategy and Development

Notarize hired Will St. Clair as vice president of strategy and development, adding 14 years of experience at Zillow, Uber and the Boston Consulting Group to the company’s leadership team. During his time in the technology space, he played a leading role in Zillow's entry into mortgage origination and has helped Fortune 500 companies with critical strategy, operations and growth topics. St. Clair will help Notarize forward migrate industries online for the very first time.

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Jean Weng |

Homepoint | General Counsel

Homepoint added Jean Weng to it executive leadership team, naming her general counsel. Weng joins Homepoint after serving as senior vice president, deputy general counsel and corporate secretary at Voya Financial. In that position, she oversaw the company’s board and committee operations and advised the company’s board of directors on corporate governance practices and trends, headed the company’s government relations function and led the company’s privacy, procurement and intellectual property team.

MAY 2021

TAKE 5

Julie Booth

Chief Financial Officer and Treasurer of Rocket Companies

Originally joining Quicken Loans, now Rocket Companies, in 2003, Julie Booth has walked the company through the Great Recession, helped grow market share, achieved numerous record-breaking years and assisted in the company’s journey to becoming the largest mortgage lender in America. Now serving in the role of chief financial officer and treasurer of Rocket Companies, Booth, with the help of her team, added launching one of the largest initial public offerings in the last decade to her list of accomplishments.

Below, Booth answers five questions that give an inside look at her life:

1. My guilty pleasure is...

80s Hair Band music

2. Besides my job and family, my greatest passion is...

skiing. I started skiing at age four and live for the thrill of trying to get better in the moguls and the fantastic mountain scenery.

3. I felt like a success at my job when...

a large project that I worked as part of a team to complete is successfully executed. I enjoy seeing people come together to tackle problems and accomplish big things together.

4. My last vacation was...

5. Biggest business success this year...

was being part of the team that took Rocket Companies through our IPO.

MAY 2021

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Norway, which was amazing. The Lofoten Islands, which are north of the Arctic Circle, are truly a sight to behold.

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A perfect storm of record low interest rates and shifting consumer behavior spurred by the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in an absolutely incredible year for mortgage lenders in 2020, especially the independent mortgage banks. Virtually every IMB saw origination volumes soar in 2020, with many eclipsing $40 billion in originations, according to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau‘s Home Mortgage Disclosure Act data. In fact, over 20 lenders issued 100,000 mortgage loans or more in 2020, the majority of them refinancings. One lender, Rocket Mortgage, issued over 1 million loans in 2020.

With the help of mortgage forecasting and advisory company iEmergent, here are top 10 mortgage lenders of 2020, based on number of loans issued.

Total Originations – 1,142,638 Total origination volume – $313.41B Purchase volume – $36.96B Refi volume – $274.1B Percent volume increase from 2019: 121.3%

02

United Wholesale Mortgage

Total Originations – 560,796 Total origination volume – $182.82B Purchase volume – $42.99B Refi volume – $139.8B Percent volume increase from 2019: 69.4%

03

Freedom Mortgage

Total Originations – 389,146 Total origination volume – $99.24B Purchase volume – $6.39B Refi volume – $92.8B Percent volume increase from 2019: 247.4%

04 Wells Fargo

Total Originations – 319,429 Total origination volume – $126.9B Purchase volume – $60.1B Refi volume – $63.39B Percent volume increase from 2019: 15.1%

05 loanDepot

Total Originations – 294,466 Total origination volume – $100.5B Purchase volume – $28B Refi volume – $72.43B Percent volume increase from 2019: 124%

MAY 2021

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01

Rocket Mortgage

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Here are the top 10 mortgage lenders of 2020

06

Caliber Home Loans

Total Originations – 228,633 Total origination volume – $70.6B Purchase volume – $31.6B Refi volume – $38.96B Percent volume increase from 2019: 73.1%

07

Fairway Independent Mortgage Total Originations – 228,154 Total origination volume – $64.96B Purchase volume – $37.2B Refi volume – $27.53B Percent volume increase from 2019: 72.6%

08

JPMorgan Chase

Total Originations – 224,833 Total origination volume – $95.62B Purchase volume – $28.4B Refi volume – $62.96B Percent volume increase from 2019: 38.6%

09

Bank of America

Total Originations – 184,088 Total origination volume – $76.91B Purchase volume – $23.2B Refi volume – $47B Percent volume decrease from 2019: -7.7%

10 U.S. Bank

Total originations – 180,261 Total origination volume – $58.1B Purchase volume – $20.15B Refi volume – $33.7B Percent volume increase from 2019: 43.4%

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LENDER RANKINGS

LAUNCHES

Gateless Plaid

Guaranteed Rate announced Gateless, a mortgage technology company, will officially operate as a standalone company. Founded by Victor Ciardelli, president and CEO of Guaranteed Rate, Gateless brings next-generation artificial intelligence and machine learning to the mortgage industry through a suite of tools called AI Mortgage. The tool is designed to help enhance performance and reduce manual tasks by automating key components of the loan process, such as document review and filing. AI Mortgage uses vision-based technology to substantially increase data accuracy and productivity while eliminating costly key-in errors.

Fintech company Plaid announced the release of Income, a beta-product aimed at simplifying income verification so customers can secure loans, qualify for mortgages, rent apartments, lease vehicles, and more. The company said the Income platform can also be used by mortgage lenders to capture and “digest” a person’s income data directly from their payroll provider to make more informed decisions about their creditworthiness.

When accessing Plaid, consumers are given two options on how they can verify their income — by using their employer or payroll provider account, or by uploading payroll documents.

Qualia Scale Digital closing platform Qualia announced the release of “Qualia Scale,” a software program that allows proptech companies to attach title and escrow to their core offerings. It’s the second proptech offering created by Qualia. The first, Partner API, is used to unify title companies, real estate agents, lenders, and homebuyers throughout a single real estate and mortgage transaction. Partner API is now part of the Qualia Scale “bundle,” which also includes banking and reconciliation programs, a team of title and escrow experts, and Qualia’s digital closing platform.

Finance of America Finance of America Reverse announced a new hybrid product that combines elements of a reverse mortgage with a forward mortgage. The new product, called EquityAvail, funds at closing and requires that the borrower make payments for 10 years but at a reduced amount.

EquityAvail was designed to provide a new approach to servicing borrowers who are of retirement age but don’t qualify or wish to refinance into a long-term mortgage.

Rocket Mortgage announced the launch of Jumbo Smart, a product that is intended to allow significantly more borrowers to qualify than a typical jumbo. The product offers loans that go up to $2 million and borrowers can use it for primary homes, secondary homes and investment properties. The loans require just one appraisal, and there is significantly less self-employed documentation than the typical jumbo.

MAY 2021

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Rocket Mortgage

HOTSEAT

SPONSORED CONTENT

Mike Fierman Managing Partner and Co-CEO Angel Oak

H

ousingWire spoke with Angel Oak’s Mike Fierman about the non-QM market.

HousingWire: Why is a healthy non-QM market important for the mortgage industry?

Mike Fierman: A healthy non-QM market is crucial for the overall mortgage industry and overall housing market. Mortgage lenders and brokers will need to utilize as many products as they can so that they can continue to grow revenue and recruit top talent. The non-QM market could equate to as much as $250 billion a year in additional loan production over the next few years. In order to keep pace with the growing and dynamic housing markets across the US, the mortgage industry needs a healthy non-QM market.

In addition, thousands of creditworthy borrowers simply don’t fit into agency guidelines. The growth of the so called “gig” economy and other self-employed borrowers require different product offerings. These borrowers are underserved and, in many cases, shut out of the housing market. Non-QM products can bridge the gap to allow these credit-worthy borrowers to purchase a home.

A healthy non-QM market means continued growth for the mortgage industry.

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Q&A

HW: What are some common misconceptions when it comes to non-QM lending?

MF: The most common misconception is that non-QM loans are difficult to originate and take longer to close.

The bottom line is that non-QM and non-Agency loans close just as easily and quickly as Agency. The process is simply different in that it requires a prequalification, but the rest of the process is very similar to conventional financing. The key is to work with a high-quality mortgage lender with experienced account executives.

There are still many originators who have not utilized non-QM and therefore the process is unfamiliar. It can be intimidating at first, which further confirms the importance of a lender who specializes in and is a leader in non-QM loans. The right lender will help educate originators so they can market non-QM to referral partners.

HW: As the refi boom slows, why should lenders look to non-QM? MF: Based on what we see at Angel Oak and industry reports from sources such as the Mortgage Bankers Association, refinance business is shrinking. Not too long ago, the challenge was keeping up with refinance volume. Now the challenge is finding business to replace refi volume. Non-QM can help maintain volume as originators pivot towards the purchase market.

Lenders need a full suite of products to recruit high quality loan officers/account executives and retain current staff. As well, with Fannie and Freddie limiting purchases on investment and second home-backed loan acquisitions to just 7% of their total portfolios, we know that margins are shrinking on the Agency side. Fannie Mae also announced that its underwriting guidelines will be tighter. All of this points to alternative mortgage loans and volume absorbed into the non-Agency / non-QM market. So, there are two issues, one being a refinance market that is slowing and the other not being able to count on Agency business alone to maintain volume.

HW: How has 2021’s market impacted non-QM, and what do you think the future holds for non-QM lending?

MF: The largest impact occurred in 2020 as credit markets were disrupted. In 2021, the credit market is very healthy. Non-QM is back growing exponentially and will continue to for the foreseeable future. We project we could see the non-QM market bringing in $250 to $350 billion a year. It will take a few years to get there, but that is based on the trajectory we are seeing right now.

The U.S. housing market is growing, and non-QM will own a growing share of the mortgage market.

The net of this is that originators who utilize non-QM could have a windfall opportunity in 2021 and for years to come. Increased bank lending regulations and restrictions means further growth for the alternative non-QM space.

The management team at Angel Oak Mortgage Solutions has been inundated with interest in learning more about non-QM as mortgage originators are seeing it as the means to capture purchase volume. It’s a great time to be in the mortgage industry — especially if you include non-QM in your offerings.

MAY 2021

HOTSEAT

SPONSORED CONTENT

Brian Pidgeon Vice President ServiceLink

HousingWire: What portfolio management challenges are investors facing right now?

Brian Pidgeon: The primary challenge right now is uncertainty. With Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac extending the moratoriums on single-family foreclosures and REO evictions until June 30, and FHFA offering eligible borrowers an additional three-month extension of COVID-19 forbearance, we all have to wait a little longer to see when and how borrowers exit these programs. Will they be able to make their payments again or will they become further delinquent?

Q&A

HW: How can investors manage and grow their portfolios in today’s market?

BP: It’s a matter of identifying the purchase opportunities that make sense for their risk appetite in this market. There are still portfolios for sale. Fannie and Freddie have put some nonperforming loan (NPL) and reperforming loans (RPL) pools out to market over the past year, so larger investors have been able to bid on the GSE pools if they have the resources to do so.

Another option is identifying private investors who are looking to unload portions of their portfolios due to the uncertainty. Investors with a sound strategy for valuing and managing NPLs and RPLs can potentially capitalize on the market.

HW: How could upcoming forbearance exits potentially affect portfolio growth?

BP: No one can be sure yet. A lot of sophisticated eyes, all around the industry, are looking at the current forbearance and moratorium situation and wondering how the loans under forbearance will play out once the plans are lifted. Depending on the outcome, investors may choose to become active in selling or acquiring and servicing those loans.

As of March 16, there were about 2.6 million loans in forbearance, according to estimates from the Mortgage Bankers Association. Many of these loans are 90 days

delinquent. If they continue to stay severely delinquent after they exit forbearance, some investors will want to offload these NPLs, while others look to buy and manage them. The investors holding the loans, who haven’t had many options for servicing them over the past several months, will need to get more aggressive with loss mitigation efforts: collections, loan modifications, or potentially short sales or foreclosure, depending on the borrower ’s equity in the property and willingness to work through loss mitigation measures.

On the other hand, if borrowers take their loans current through the various options available — for example, deferring forborne payments or a loan modification — we will come out of forbearance with low levels of delinquency and lower NPL activity.

HW: What sort of home inspection/valuation products are best for investors looking to grow their portfolios in today’s market?

BP: Running automated valuation models (AVMs), can be a good starting point to help investors see where they have low or negative equity across their portfolios and match that information with severely delinquent borrowers so they know how they should be prioritizing their loss mitigation efforts once the programs lift.

Additionally, exterior valuation products — broker price opinions, evaluations and hybrid appraisal products — can be a huge help to investors who want to better understand property condition and collateral value/price, for the riskier loans in their portfolios and start planning risk mitigation efforts.

HW: What should investors look for in a service provider partner?

BP: They should seek a proven partner with experienced valuation leadership, innovative technology solutions and the financial strength to weather market fluctuations. Their partner should provide the full range of available valuation options, from AVMs all the way through full interior and exterior appraisals, and consultatively deliver property valuation solutions that optimize the investor ’s asset management and risk mitigation strategies. National scope is important, too, so that this partner can meet the investor ’s needs no matter where the properties in their portfolios may be.

Learn more about ServiceLink’s solutions at svclnk. com/investors.

MAY 2021

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H

ousingWire spoke with ServiceLink’s Brian Pidgeon about portfolio growth.

EVENT CALENDAR

Mortgage Innovators Conference

LISTEN NOW “HousingWire Daily”

May 4 - 5, 2021 Cost to attend: Prices may vary

AN HONEST CONVERSATION ON MINORITY HOMEOWNERSHIP BY: ALCYNNA LLOYD

LOCATION: VIRTUAL

AS ONE OF THE BIGGEST ADVOCATES for the mortgage industry for one of the largest markets in the nation, the California Mortgage Bankers Association once again is hosting its Mortgage Innovators Conference online. The two-day event will feature interactive events like their "Innovation Lab," designed as an immersive experience to elevate the one-to-one networking for viewers. The goal of the conference is to equip attendees with practical ways to be more efficient, connect with customers and better execute and deliver through technology.

2021 NALHFA Virtual Conference May 12 - 14, 2021 Cost to attend: Prices may vary LOCATION: VIRTUAL THE NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF LOCAL HOUSING FINANCE AGENCIES’ virtual conference focuses on building the future of affordable housing and sharing the latest trends at the local level. The three-day event creates a space for local governmental affordable housing and community and economic development professionals to receive first-hand insights and case studies of effective housing and development practices.

Sessions include a variety of topics, including the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on affordable housing, cybersecurity and data sharing best practices, single and multifamily market outlooks and the latest on down payment assistance.

Earlier this year, HousingWire launched a new mini-podcast series that examines the state of minority homeownership and what experts are doing to close the gap.

The podcast, Honest Conversations, explores the factors that have contributed to inequality within American housing by providing listeners with a greater perspective on how race, housing and wealth intersect.

The first episode features Michael Neal, a senior research associate in the Housing Finance Policy Center at the Urban Institute, about the history and data behind minority homeownership.

Neal, whose experience includes working at Fannie Mae as a director of economics in the Economic and Strategic Research division, explains how inequality within housing came to be and what it means for today’s borrowers.

When asked how past housing policies from federal organizations have impacted the legacy of housing for people of color in America today, Neal says he thinks it’s very important as homeownership has significant implications for family outcomes in terms of household stability, political clout and community development.

“We know that homeowners in a particular community tend to have a stronger say and tend to be much more involved in local politics than, say, renters,” Neal said. “So, all of that I think is combined and really puts minority homeownership into a very key light.”

And when it comes to his biggest area of concern for minority homeownership, Neal explained that his biggest concern is that African Americans and Hispanics, in particular, are not experiencing the benefits of homeownership to the degree that their white counterparts are.

“That is, even if we were somehow to close the gap in homeownership, the gap, with respect to the financial benefits of homeownership, remains wide for a number of reasons,” he said.

Listen to this informative episode on the history of minority homeownership now.

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Event TIP “I always place a sticky note on my front door stating ‘Please DO NOT ring the doorbell’ during any virtual conference. It never fails that FedEx will ring the doorbell during a virtual panel or conference and my dog begins frantically barking. The sticky note gives me the ability to fully pay attention without an interruption from my cute, but extremely loud, dog."

- Tai Christensen, director of government affairs and diversity, equity and inclusion officer at CBC Mortgage Agency

MAY 2021

INSIDE AGENT

Steve Caporale Founder and Managing Partner of ACCEL Realty Partners Steven@accelrealtypartners.com 1521 W. Fence Post Lane, Eagle, Idaho $1.7 million 3 bed, 2 bath 1,652 sqft

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MEET THE NEW SITE OF AMERICAN LUXURY – Boise, Idaho, where home values appreciated 115% over the last 10 years, according to Zillow. The above 1,652-square-foot featured home is technically in Eagle, 15 miles northwest of Boise. Its listing price is $1.7 million, four years after the home was built for $915,000, according to Steven Caporale, broker of ACCEL Realty Partners. Alei Merrill of ACCEL has the listing on the three-bedroom, two-bathroom home whose amenities include a heated backyard pool adjacent to a stream and waterfall.

Caporale has been in brokerage for 25 years, he said. But he has never seen demand so high for an Idaho region he considers beautiful but also lacking in the restaurants, arts, and other amenities of places like New York or Los Angeles. One reason, Caporale said, is mortgage interest rates of less than 3%. “When I got in the business, these old dinosaurs took me out to two-martini lunches, and they were like ‘6% mortgage rates, I can’t believe it!’ Now that seems high," he recalled. Caporale has ridden the Idaho demand wave after starting his career in New York City. He has grown to love Idaho, but he sees himself perhaps eventually relocating to one of the coasts.

MAY 2021

LOCAL INTEL

By: Matthew Blake

Bethesda, Maryland

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Providence, Rhode Island

Boise,

Mynor Herrera is personally acquainted with escalating housing demand in the DMV (District of Columbia/Maryland/Virginia) area. “I just overpaid for a house on the water by $50,000,” said Herrera of Mynor & Associates in Bethesda. “There is tight inventory, prices soaring, and multiple bids on everything.” Last summer, Herrera said, he enjoyed a “noticeable uptick” in business as white-collar professionals in D.C. were “buying second homes like candy” in the Maryland eastern shore area. “We had people moving away from the city, when the commute was no longer an issue,” Herrera said. But in the last few months, Mynor & Associates, which is a Keller Williams-affiliated franchisee, has struggled to maintain a desired volume. “Listings,” Herrera said, “are at a premium.”

The clientele for Jim DeRentis at Residential Properties changed in the past year. “For my personal business, it came predominantly from Brooklyn,” DeRentis said. “It was younger families looking for a house and a sense of community. Providence is a small city with a lot of amenities, and it is three hours from Brooklyn.” COVID just flipped the market “on its ear,” DeRentis said. He fielded an unusually high volume of sales from New York as well as Boston and other coastal cities. While business has generally been good, Providence-area brokers are saddled with the nationwide problem of low inventory. “Inventory is at an all-time low,” said Dean deTonnancourt, a broker at HomeSmart in neighboring Warwick. An amount of inventory on the market that could last for six months is the norm for Rhode Island, deTonnancourt said, “but we barely have a couple of months of supply on the market.”

MAY 2021

I

Wolfeboro, New Hampshire

Idaho was the No. 1 state nationally in 2020 home appreciation, according to the Federal Housing Finance Agency. But rising home prices have done little to ease the inventory crunch. “Our sales are considerably down because of the lack of inventory,” said Steve Caporale of ACCEL Realty Partners in Boise. In February 2020, Caporale said, there were 3,500 homes on Boise’s Multiple Listings Service.

In February of this year, the number was 370. “It is an extremely unique predicament,” the broker said. “There is probably too much capitalization.

Too much liquidity.” When in doubt, blame (or credit!)

California. “Our number one migration basis point is California,” Caporale said, adding that Bay Area families are coming to places like Boise and Sun Valley with “monopoly money.”

Denver, Colorado

Obscene. Insane. Those are the words Lonnie Glessner, a senior loan officer at Draper & Kramer mortgage in Englewood, uses to describe the Denver housing market. Glessner has observed winning bids for single-family homes at “$50,000$70,000 over list price” and “winning bids being $150,000 over list price on a $750,000 home.” Glessner fears the market could rattle homebuyers and sellers. “We must help our clients understand that the list price is not the home’s value,” Glessner said. “I have had over a dozen real estate agents tell me that you don’t know how to price a listing today because our market is insane.”

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Idaho

Wolfeboro — so named for a British general in the French Indian War — is called the “oldest summer resort in America,” and it is an enclave frequented in the past by the president of France and prince of Monaco. The town of less than 7,000 permanent residents, then, serves as a litmus test for New England luxury. And the demand for homes in Southern New Hampshire is so great that it is no longer benefiting real estate agents. “In a healthy market there’s about 100 active listings,” said Adam Dow, head of the 14-person Dow Realty Group. In early March, Dow said that there were seven active listings in the Southern New Hampshire Multiple Listings Service. Yes, seven. Some wealthy Bostonians flocked to Wolfeboro at the pandemic’s start, Dow said. But more than a year after the pandemic hit New England, the broker doesn’t see a let-up in the imbalance between buyers and sellers. “There is still a lot of pent-up demand in the area,” Dow said.

COMMENTARY

T

he end of forbearance and the capital markets Did the CARES Act postpone an inevitable correction in the housing market?

By Richard Koss

One of the great questions facing the housing markets in 2021 is what will happen when the forbearance programs under the CARES Act expire. When this act was originally passed on March 27, 2020, there were notable concerns that these measures would merely postpone an inevitable correction in the housing market once the programs expired.

Since that time however, a powerful fiscal and monetary response brought mortgage rates to a record low and boosted household savings. In addition, an increase in the prospects for ongoing work-from-home arrangements combined with a growing preference for less dense living arrangements has led to a massive boost in the number of families looking to move.

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“...concerns have shifted away from a wave of foreclosures weighing on markets to an overshoot in prices and a subsequent hard landing.”

The result has been an extraordinary acceleration in home price growth. According to the Federal Housing Finance Agency purchase only house price index, it took almost six years during the bubble period from 1998 to 2004 for home price growth to accelerate from 5% to 10% on a year-over-year basis. In 2020 the same result took just five months, an extraordinary market impulse.

With prospects increasing for a new first-

time homebuyer tax credit and student loan debt forgiveness in a decades-tight housing market, concerns have shifted away from a wave of foreclosures weighing on markets to an overshoot in prices and a subsequent hard landing.

How this will all play out depends to a large degree on developments in the mortgage market. Of course, the regular dynamics of the market are in play: Fed policy, changes in inflation expectations, etc. But the wonderful thing about the securitized mortgage market is the great variety of types of securities available to investors that allow them to allocate their capital based on nuanced views about future market developments. There are hundreds of thousands of pools to choose from, including those specified pools, custom pools from single-issuers, those containing loans made in single states, low balance loans or modified loans, along with a myriad of others.

NEARING THE END OF FORBEARANCE Up until the expiration date, forbearance is entirely up to the borrower. When it is over, the household will either 1) become current, 2) negotiate a modification or 3) sell the house and move. During the global financial crisis, the latter option caused a great deal of distress to households and the overall financial system due to the large number of underwater borrowers. This time is vastly different as home price increases continue to accelerate. Even in the FHA market, which is dominated by high LTV borrowers at origination, we estimate that only about 3% of borrowers in the FHA book have a current LTV greater than 95. Borrowers have a great deal of incentive to hang on to their homes.

While some borrowers may become current when forbearance expires, this will not be easy for many, as payroll employment in February 2021 stood 9.5 million jobs below the similar figure a year earlier. Moreover, 4.1 million people have been unemployed 27 weeks or longer. Structural change in the economy during the pandemic will make it difficult for many to return to the labor force quickly after the pandemic fades. Given these circumstances, we turn our focus to the workout options

MAY 2021

WHAT HAPPENS AFTER FORBEARANCE? What will happen when forbearance expires?

Some of the 800,000 loans currently in forbearance might receive a partial claim and enter the pipeline into the RG pools, and some of them might be modified or receive other loss mitigation treatment. This development presents a new challenge to servicers who will have to closely watch what their peers are doing and sharpen their skills in working out troubled loans.

This creates a lot of questions. First, how will these pools perform? From a standpoint of prepayment speeds, at first, servicers may not give these borrowers a high priority, although over time that may change. Anecdotal evidence suggests that investors are comfortable that speeds will not be too fast for now and price these accordingly. From a standpoint of involuntary buyouts based on delinquencies this is an even tougher question. Traditionally, modified loans perform worse than the general

population. For example, total delinquencies of modified loans in the FHA book are 23.3%, greater than 11.6% of others for March 2021. Consequently, involuntary prepayment speeds of modified loans are much higher than others within the first few months after they are delivered into the pools. But forbearance and partial claims are very different from the old normal mods and may well perform differently, we will have to see. With interest rates off their lows, involuntary buyouts look to be a bigger factor in driving performance “Over the course of than voluntary prepayments. the pandemic, Ginnie Second, what impact will we observe should a wave of Mae has shown itself modifications transpire when to be very capable of forbearance expires on the taking creative action Ginnie program itself? If the in a crisis...” numbers are big enough, speeds in multi-issuer pool types may rise, raising investor concerns.

In addition, individual servicers may see benefits from more frequent modifications, weighing on the performance of the RG program. These are factors that will have to be monitored closely, but mid-stream policy corrections can serve to mitigate these concerns as needed.

Over the course of the pandemic, Ginnie Mae has shown itself to be very capable of taking creative action in a crisis, with capital markets innovations ranging from the release of loanlevel forbearance data in July 2020 to the new data disclosures providing greater visibility into the share of loans from low- and moderate- income Census tracts in their pools.

Bio: Richard Koss is chief research officer at Recursion.

Previously, he has served as the head of capital markets research at Fannie Mae and as IMF visiting scholar and director of the Global Housing Watch.

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available to delinquent borrowers. The GSEs have various borrower assistance plans, while for Ginnie Mae there is a new innovative capital markets instrument called RG pools.

RG pools were unveiled last December and consist entirely of loans that were bought out of traditional pools and cured with partial claims (a partial claim is a second lien with a single balloon payment made at the time the first lien is eliminated). According to the Ginnie Mae pool rules, such loans are eligible for resecuritization once they have gone six months without a missed payment, but not into any existing pool type. Hence the RG pools.

As of March 17, 2021, this program is miniscule, with just 6,000 loans across six issuers. But FHA neighborhood watch data shows issuers have made 188,000 partial claims through FHA since the onset of the pandemic, and the number is still increasing.

This trickle could turn into a flood of loans into the RG program once these loans successfully make six payments.

COMMENTARY

D

on’t underplay the role of compliance in digital mortgage software Here are some key steps to consider when addressing regulatory requirements

By Veronica Nguyen

Imagine wanting to build software in the mortgage industry. You spend your time visualizing the problem your technology plans to solve, but after researching the industry, you realize that when it comes to building mortgage technology, you’re not just building an application. You actually have to take the proper steps to make sure it gets built correctly, and from a compliance standpoint.

If you don’t come from a software or a mortgage background, it will be a long journey. The good news is that there are some key measures that you can follow for how to best navigate building digital mortgage software with compliance in mind.

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DIGITAL COMPLIANCE IN THE EVER-EVOLVING MORTGAGE INDUSTRY The mortgage industry continues to evolve with new technology coming in to better serve mortgage lenders, real estate agents, service providers, appraisal management companies and others, so taking compliance into consideration is key.

Whether you’re new to the industry or a seasoned individual coming in to disrupt the mortgage industry with your new technology innovation, you have to consider whether you understand how to address regulatory requirements in the mortgage industry.

For example, a marketing platform needs to track marketing campaigns because compliance

“...you have to consider whether you understand how to address regulatory requirements in the mortgage industry.”

officers need to review those campaigns to make sure they don’t violate RESPA (8). If you’re not sure what this means, it’s best to do your research on this topic to ensure your software is compliant.

VALIDATION OF YOUR PRODUCT When we first started building our mortgage point-of-sale platform, we needed validation of what we had created. With so many data points to validate, you have to go through a rigorous process to make sure everything is compliant according to the laws and regulations. Again, this is not something that just gets developed. It is something that is planned, developed and then validated. There are more than 300 rules that affect the mortgage industry, and when building software, you have to think about those rules and how to build your software around them.

If you’re a lender, compliance is a top concern because you have your compliance officer reviewing everything from marketing to disclosures — basically, what we call alphabet soup. Then on top of that, you have to do quality control audits.

Lenders not only have to worry about making sure that they are in compliance when doing business, but now they also have to worry about the fintech mortgage lenders entering and competing in the market. As digital mortgage software providers rise, many lenders may find themselves overwhelmed with all the drastic changes happening in the industry.

So, whether you’re building your own software or vetting a software provider to be part of your tech stack today, here are some key points you should be diving into.

WHICH REGULATIONS DOES THIS SOFTWARE TOUCH? Federal and state governments set rules that mortgage lenders must follow. When your software is being designed, you have to review the government rules and then the state rules to ensure you’re making a product that is going to be up to date with those regulations.

When vetting or building your software, these are the sort of things you have to consider, as time and money can be wasted when not addressing this early on.

MAY 2021

IDENTITY VERIFICATION (IDV) AND AUTHENTICATION IDV comes in different forms, such as out-ofwallet questions or a fraud scorecard. Identifying not only fraudsters attempting to steal millions of dollars, but also spammers, hackers and bots wasting your time creating fake accounts and trying to steal your data is important. IDV not only protects you, but it streamlines your data operations.

While your identity is real and legitimate, you need to make sure it is really them on the other end of the digital device. Best practices are out there, such as multi-factor authentication and time-based one-time password.

In today’s digital world, the rise of identity fraud is real, especially since the start of the COVID-19 crisis. For example, today’s banks have to worry more about synthetic identity, where fraudsters create “fake” identities with perfect credit scores.

Those identities are then used to apply for credit, and because those identities have actual credit, banks lend to them. They don’t find out that the identity was fake until they stop paying.

There will be common change requests from different departments that may conflict with each other. Proper alignment of people, process and policy will be crucial to prevent serious pitfalls, such as putting the organization at compliance risk.

VERBIAGE/CONTENT Any language or visual that a consumer sees introduces risk.

If you don’t say the right things or disclose details completely, it could become an issue. Language must be configurable and adaptable. By doing so, you guard against compliance risk and have the added benefit of being nimble and using A/B split testing to maximize conversion.

Many vendors will preach integrations, automation or their secret sauce, but sometimes it is as simple as saying the right things at the right time. This also includes proper disclosures, such as the CHARM booklet or eSign/eConsent.

SOCIAL SELLING As the world becomes more accustomed to selling socially, you will need a tool that automatically tracks the conversations between a loan officer and a borrower. Again, this is another check on your compliance list that you must address, if your software offers this.

COMPLIANCE TEAM The deeper you go into the mortgage process, the more likely you will need a compliance team. Mortgage lenders employ and spend thousands of dollars on compliance labor. On top of that, some lenders use actual software that monitors their compliance. So, if you are building a deep mortgage product, then it’s likely you will need a compliance officer.

IN CLOSING In this article, we mentioned a few areas that must be considered when building digital mortgage software. Keep in mind, we haven’t covered other areas, such as PCI SSC compliance or ISO standards.

As you can see, building digital mortgage software with compliance in mind is crucial in the mortgage industry. So, whether you are thinking about building something from scratch or implementing a vendor solution for your mortgage lender, think about how you will plan, develop and validate.

CHANGE MANAGEMENT It’s important to properly monitor mortgage regulation changes ahead of time, not only for your people and processes, but also for your technology stack. Software development is time consuming and costly, and it introduces risk.

Therefore, it needs to be planned in advance, with padding. If you are using a third-party software vendor, you should be able to rely on them for monitoring and execution. But of course, regularly inspect what you expect.

Bio: Veronica Nguyen is co-founder and executive vice president of BeSmartee, an original founder of the modern digital mortgage and developer of Digital Mortgage Platforms for megabanks, credit unions and non-bank lending institutions.

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HOW IS DATA HANDLED? So many new digital mortgage companies — often bootstrapped or lightly funded — pose an inherent risk, handling data properly. For example, security is difficult to do right, and to do it in a SOC II Type II manner. The point is that the risk is greater now than ever.

But it isn’t just about how data is secured, it’s also the story it tells. How did the loan data change over time, starting from initial point of contact, or both the consumer and user behavior?

The story that data tells helps people understand what is really happening. The days of being able to physically see and monitor the process is difficult and declining.

Being able to analyze the data in a sophisticated manner, and to understand how the data is flowing, is important to be able to see unauthorized access and other anomalies that can corrupt the data.

COMMENTARY

T

he cyclical nature of the mortgage industry Here’s what 2020 taught us

By Alex Elezaj

The ability to look past the now and develop strategies that poise an organization for future success is key to any leadership position in almost any business. It’s true for the mortgage industry and especially the long-term strategies we’ve developed to react to the current low-rate environment brought on by a global pandemic.

One of the most fascinating factors that drove rates lower was the decoupling of duration and swap spreads for mortgagebacked securities, which, ironically, analysts expected to be short-lived in 2020. This rally caused rates to drop which lured millions of homeowners to refinance their current home loans throughout 2020, leading to unprecedented loan volume for the entire mortgage industry.

While much of the industry fixated on low rates the past year, it’s important to understand the anatomy of what drives rates. In the U.S., the federal funds rate refers to the rate that

banks can charge other banks for lending excess cash from their reserve balances on an overnight basis. This rate can influence short-term rates on mortgages and credit cards in addition to impacting the stock market. This rate is also set by the Federal Open Market Committee.

While they can’t mandate a particular rate across the board, the Federal Reserve can adjust the money supply so that interest rates will move toward the target rate — when they increase the amount of money in the system, rates fall, when they decrease the amount of money, rates rise. This rate is set eight times a year based on economic conditions.

Over the last year, Fed Chair Jerome Powell consistently pledged that the Fed would continue to buy mortgage-backed securities to stabilize the American economy, which increased the amount of money in the Federal Reserve System and drove rates lower.

Now in 2021, rates are still hovering around 3% and the Fed is holding steady on keeping rates relatively low until 2022. So,

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“One of the most fascinating factors that drove rates lower was the decoupling of duration and swap spreads for mortgage-backed securities...”

MAY 2021

what did we learn and what will happen to wholesale rates, refinances and overall growth in the mortgage industry?

IT’S NOT OVER Despite record mortgage production volume in 2020, we aren’t close to exhausting the opportunity for refinance business. The average mortgage rate is in the low 3s. Our data shows that over 70% of the mortgage debt outstanding in the U.S. is locked at a higher rate, meaning these consumers are still eligible for a refinance loan. While rates ticking up may cause some uneasiness with those in the industry, our projections show we actually have at least another four years to refinance all eligible mortgages in this population, which will continue to drive high production volumes for lenders around the country.

wholesale channel and independent mortgage brokers thrive in a rising rate environment. This is because brokers are in their local communities and work closely with local real estate professionals.

MORTGAGE SERVICING RIGHTS WILL BE HOT WHEN RATES RISE With more access to capital, many companies who went public now have the ability to hold onto their mortgage servicing rights. As rates rise, MSR books become more valuable, which ultimately generates more cash. This can further help grow and protect business throughout the mortgage industry.

THE ROAD AHEAD Rates will eventually go up and come back down again, that’s the nature of this cyclical business. When rates do go up next, it’s going to become a purchase-heavy market. A lot of times when we discuss capital markets as an industry, things tend to get overly complicated. But a big thing to keep in mind is that the Fed’s actions throughout 2020 were powerful enough to bring us stability so far in 2021, meaning we’ll likely continue to do well as an industry for the next year or so.

While we can use data to develop predictions, the past year taught us that things can change dramatically in the blink of an eye. It’s important to remember and learn from the times where we’ve been able to thrive among so many uncertainties.

WHOLESALE IS CONSISTENTLY COMPETITIVE While we’ve been dealing with a significantly volatile market, one thing has remained clear; the wholesale channel is strong. We know that all lenders generally do well in a low interest rate environment, but the

Bio: Alex Elezaj serves as chief strategy officer at United Wholesale Mortgage. Before joining UWM, he was CEO of Class Appraisal.

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THE MARKET WAS PRIMED FOR A REFINANCE FRENZY Over the past five years, the average mortgage rate in the U.S. hovered around 4% to 4.5% with rates as high as 5.34% and as low as 3.41%, which set the stage for a high-demand, high-growth market for lenders who were poised to respond to a sudden low-rate environment. We also learned that speed was going to be more important than ever as borrowers were eager to lock in a lower rate and start saving money immediately, as the economic outlook for the finances of millions of Americans became shaky at best.

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Housing Finance leaders

MAY 2021

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THE HOUSING FINANCE LEADERS award recognizes outstanding performers in the finance space. The 2021 winners demonstrated their worth in the crucible of 2020 — navigating through shut-down orders and liquidity concerns before pivoting quickly to respond to record-low interest rates.

Those rates resulted in record-setting volume for real estate and mortgage companies, and a whole new set of challenges for their finance leaders. From scaling staff to taking companies public, these executives are the ones who are driving financial performance, expanding margins, improving liquidity, helping their businesses access the capital markets, and most importantly, moving the housing economy forward. The following pages honor HousingWire’s

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first class of housing finance heavy hitters.

MAY 2021

Julie Booth Marty Bozarth Quinn Brown Greg Brown Karri Callahan Jeremy Collett Nelson De Leon Michael Delehanty Margaret Dellafera Chao Deng Catherine Dondzila Patrick Flanagan Michael Fontaine Timothy Forrester Maria Fregosi Matt Garlinghouse AJ George Dawn Hill Mike Kennemer John J. Lynah

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MAY 2021

Gary Malis Donnie Martin Julie Messina Mark Miller Jason Obradovich Mike Patterson Daniel Perotti Thanh Roettele Chad Rogers Emanuel Santa-Donato Alex Seavall Charlotte Simonelli Max Slyusarchuk Brett Stefanski Bob Telles Hance Thurston Ken Torre Jeff Whiteside Josh Woodward Ann Yett

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Table of Contents

Julie Booth

Marty Bozarth

Rocket Companies

Baird & Warner

Chief Financial Officer and Treasurer

EVP, Chief Financial Officer

Julie Booth has been with Quicken Loans since 2003, leading the company’s accounting and finance teams as chief financial officer since 2005. In the past 15 years, Quicken’s success in growing market share, surviving a recession and achieving numerous record-breaking years was made possible by Booth and her team’s focus on creatively gaining access to new sources of liquidity and growing a fortress-like balance sheet. As Rocket Mortgage grew at scale, Booth and her team diversified and strengthened the company’s liquidity profile so the company could continue helping Americans achieve homeownership and financial freedom.

Booth also took the story of success to Wall Street while taking part in a “road show,” explaining to investors who Rocket Mortgage and Rocket Companies are and what drives their growth. In 2020, Booth and her team successfully launched one of the largest initial public offerings in the last decade, and Booth continues to lead the finance team through tremendous growth.

As the Baird & Warner chief financial officer, Marty Bozarth is leading the company’s financial operations for all lines of business — residential sales, mortgage and title — during a time of both record growth and unexpected challenges. Bozarth’s expert guidance keeps a 165-year-old firm at the top of its game by focusing on operational efficiencies, lowering costs and continuously improving relationships.

Baird & Warner’s residential, mortgage and title business lines recorded an annual volume of $11.4 billion in 2020, an increase of 27% from 2019, which eclipsed previous years. Mortgage originations alone spiked 80% between 2019 and 2020.

Last April, as market challenges during the start of the pandemic gripped the housing industry as a whole, Baird & Warner suffered a dramatic 50% decrease in revenue. Bozarth sprang into action to recalibrate the company’s business plan and worked with the executive team to identify ways to eliminate costs and avoid company-wide layoffs.

Quinn Brown

Greg Brown

Axia Home Loans

Academy Mortgage Corporation

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Chief Financial Officer

Chief Financial Officer

Quinn Brown, chief financial officer at Axia Home Loans, has kept the company grounded, leading her team toward growth by keeping up with sophisticated and accurate cash flow forecasts to adequately plan for sources and uses of cash during the global market volatility.

Brown’s strategy helped bring a level of predictability in supporting key decisions, resulting in over 70% growth in 2020. Brown was also instrumental in ensuring the proper resources were available to support such growth by deploying capital, increasing working capital requirements and maintaining liquidity to take advantage of market opportunities throughout the year. Brown’s proactive approach ensured that, in the midst of global uncertainty, Axia met all vendor, investor and company stakeholder obligations in a timely manner.

Brown has come to be known as a professional who works in the best interest of the entire organization and was instrumental in taking Axia to a 100% ESOP, where all the employees have ownership in the company.

Since joining Academy Mortgage Corporation in November 2009, Greg Brown has played a key role in establishing and increasing the company’s servicing portfolio, expanding product offerings and overseeing warehouse lines, capacity and utilization to keep Academy running smoothly. Serving as chief financial officer, Brown, alongside his finance team, is continuously looking for ways to increase efficiency throughout the organization. Brown has allowed Academy Mortgage to stay ahead of the curve thanks to his ability to adapt quickly and think outside of the box. Under Brown’s leadership, Academy has established a servicing portfolio which has grown significantly, expanded the company’s product portfolio and achieved record growth.

Brown has also led numerous different functions to support Academy’s continued growth, most recently by introducing a new commission platform that provides enhanced speed and accuracy. Brown has been a driving force behind Academy’s finance and production teams working together.

MAY 2021

Karri Callahan

Jeremy Collett

RE/MAX Holdings

Guaranteed Rate

Chief Financial Officer

Executive Director, Capital Markets

Karri Callahan earned the title of chief financial officer at RE/MAX only three years after joining the company, due in part to her commitment to excellence and delivering results.

She is now the longest tenured member of RE/MAX’s executive management team, operating with influence in virtually every aspect of the business. Callahan helped lead RE/MAX through its successful IPO and built out the mergers and acquisition strategy that has led to four procurements during her tenure as CFO. At the onset of the pandemic, Callahan and the executive leadership team took action to provide temporary financial support in the form of fee waivers and deferrals to franchisees and adjust the cost structure to align with the environment without having to resort to any mass layoffs or furloughs of staff within the company’s global headquarters.

Callahan and her team are constantly evaluating how to elevate business opportunities and contribute to strategic growth initiatives, playing a key role in the expansion of RE/MAX.

Since arriving at Guaranteed Rate more than 10 years ago, Jeremy Collett has demonstrated a capacity to combine deep industry knowledge with bold financial decision-making, helping fuel the company’s rise within the mortgage industry. As executive director of capital markets, Collett built and leads a team of experts through the challenging terrain of trading, securitization, interest rate risk management, product pricing and investor relations. Collett’s knowledge of the industry and its secondary markets continues to foster the company’s growth, funding $73 billion in total loan volume in 2020 and generating revenue of $3 billion. Collett’s stewardship of capital markets remains equally vital to the company’s success. In a year that produced both historically low interest rates and wild disruptions to the economic landscape, Collett leveraged decades of experience to help manage more than $40 billion in assets and sell over $50 billion of mortgages and mortgage-backed securities into the secondary market.

Nelson De Leon

Michael Delehanty

Homeowners Financial Group

Mountain West Financial

Chief Financial Officer

Going into his fifth year at Homeowners Financial Group, Nelson De Leon, chief operating officer, has played a significant role in the company’s recent growth.

De Leon’s relationships have helped Homeowners Financial Group attract talent to the organization. In addition to overseeing secondary and capital markets, De Leon was recently promoted to a dual role to include chief financial officer. De Leon ensures that Homeowners Financial Group’s loan professionals have the loan products and pricing needed to be successful in their market and is well-versed in all loan products nationwide and the various mechanics of each, including both QM and non-QM offerings.

With his additional role as chief financial officer, De Leon has helped create operational procedures and systems to ensure better efficiencies, while maintaining the necessary risk standards the company and its partners expect — all contributions that are critical to Homeowners Financial Group’s success.

With nearly 20 years of experience in secondary marketing roles, Mountain West Financial Chief Financial Officer Mike Delehanty is responsible for developing and implementing strategic initiatives to improve productivity, enhance customer service, increase production and improve profitability throughout the company. Delehanty is able to help realize creative solutions for issues far outside of P&L and financial responsibilities and is often a source of ideas for efficiency, leading with technology and overall motivation for a multitude of departments.

In his current role, Delehanty is a resource for Mountain West Financial’s sales team to strategize for long-term success without sacrificing short-term wins as a high-level contributor to the company’s executive team. Delehanty not only helped celebrate the wins of the company’s internal sales team during the challenges of the pandemic, but continued to make decisions that kept long term goals in mind for continued success.

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Chief Operating Officer

Margaret Dellafera

Chao Deng

Credit Suisse

NewDay USA

Managing Director

Chief Financial Officer

As managing director at Credit Suisse, Margaret Dellafera has a track record of business building and strong and consistent revenue generation within the industry.

Dellafera’s tenured career includes a proven ability to source, negotiate, close transactions and establish and nurture relationships with clients and internal stakeholders.

In her role, she is responsible for securitized products finance and mortgage finance. During her time at Credit Suisse, she has helped lead the client relations department, bringing a keen understanding of legal, IT, and operational infrastructure to everything she does.

Dellafera possesses the qualities needed to ensure long-term success and to drive stable revenue as well as manage risk within Credit Suisse.

As a leader in the financial industry, Dellafera has been recognized for her work in the space, also being named a Women in Finance Award Finalists by Traders Magazine in 2020.

Chao Deng’s leadership has made NewDay USA a leading VA mortgage company. NewDay USA estimates its 2020 revenue will more than double to $315 million this year, up from $152 million in 2019, while serving more than 20,000 veteran families in 2020. Much of the company’s success last year can be attributed to Deng, who directly, as chief financial officer, oversees the NewDay USA’s treasury, budgeting, forecasting, tax planning and financial reporting, as well as manages key relationships with investors and banks. Additionally, Deng worked with NewDay’s management to improve productivity of its account executives and built strong relationships with NewDay’s warehouse partners to increase its credit facilities from $440 million in 2019 to more than $900 million in 2020. Deng also helped expand NewDay USA’s product offerings, which achieved high growth for the business and better asset diversification to prepare for another successful year in 2021. Due to her professional development programs, NewDay is also developing the next generation of financial leaders.

Catherine Dondzila

Patrick Flanagan

NewRez

loanDepot

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Chief Financial Officer

Chief Financial Officer

Catherine Dondzila joined NewRez in 2019 as chief financial officer, overseeing treasury, accounting and reporting, financial planning and analysis, data and analytics and corporate real estate teams. In the year since, Dondzila has successfully grown each of the departments within the finance group under her oversight, including developing the data and analytics team from scratch. She has brought finance processes and capabilities to NewRez by building sustainable liquidity forecasting, diversifying liquidity sources and ensuring agreements are appropriately sized for the organization’s current and future growth trajectory. In 2020, Dondzila focused particularly on progress improvements and efficiency enhancements. Dondzila introduced a treasury management platform, machine learning enabled high-volume reconciliation technology and an industry leading financial and spend management platform. Dondzila also sponsored the development of forecasting models from liquidity to fulfillment capacity and resource planning to remote workforce productivity insights.

loanDepot’s chief financial officer, Patrick Flanagan, has more than 17 years of C-level experience in strategy development and execution of top and bottom line driven business plans. As chief financial officer, he is responsible for managing all of loanDepot’s financial actions, including its accounting, treasury, tax, corporate finance and investor and lender relations activities. loanDepot has grown to become one of the nation’s largest retail mortgage lender and nonbank retail originator, funding more than $275 billion since inception.

Over his 32-year career, Flanagan has managed the origination, acquisition and management of over $400 billion of residential mortgage and residential real estate-related assets. Flanagan also has expertise in debt and equity capital markets, securitization and structured financial products. Most recently, he served as executive vice president at Carrington Mortgage Services and has held a variety of executive positions within capital management, mortgage lending and digital financial services industries.

MAY 2021

Michael Fontaine

Timothy Forrester

Plaza Home Mortgage

United Wholesale Mortgage

Co-President and Chief Operating Officer

EVP, Chief Financial Officer

As co-President and chief operating officer of Plaza Home Mortgage, Michael Fontaine is responsible for the day-to-day management of the company, including strategic planning, overseeing capital markets, risk management, treasury and finance, IT, operations, marketing, human resources and servicing operations.

During Fontaine’s 17-year tenure, Plaza has grown from a start-up into one of the top 15 wholesale lenders in the US. In 2004, the year Fontaine joined Plaza, the firm set a new origination record of $1.5 billion. The next year it hit $3.5 billion and last year, that number was nearly $12 billion. Fontaine’s commitment to client service has been the foundation of the company’s growth, success and sustainability.

Fontaine is also a member of the Freddie Mac Advisory Committee and the California Mortgage Bankers Association’s Board of Directors.

Under Fontaine’s leadership, Plaza has grown to be a leader in third-party originations, offering a full range of GSE, government, renovation and reverse mortgage programs.

As executive vice president, chief financial officer, Timothy Forrester leads United Wholesale Mortgage’s finance and accounting teams in the day-to-day operations of managing the company’s financial planning, treasury, accounting, risk management and financial reporting to ensure the functions are not only compliant, but strategic. His diversified background in the mortgage, financial and accounting industries for decades, helps to drive UWM’s financial performance and provide guidance throughout UWM’s growth.

Forrester played a critical role in the preparation of UWM going public, helping to align both the business and financial strategies to continue to drive UWM’s long-term growth and overall performance.

UWM relied heavily on Forrester’s broad knowledge and key insights through the entire experience, especially since SPACs as well as the mortgage industry are under intense scrutiny in the markets. Through his leadership, UWM saw significant growth and record-breaking mortgage volumes.

Maria Fregosi

Matt Garlinghouse

Homepoint

Cherry Creek Mortgage

EVP, Capital Markets

As the chief investment officer and a founding executive at Homepoint, Maria Fregosi has spent the last five years demonstrating how a mortgage company can be built to succeed in changing market conditions.

Fregosi’s many accomplishments, including her role in spearheading the closing and integration of four major acquisitions in four years, has established the company as one of the nation’s fastest-growing nonbank lenders in just five years. Her latest promotion to chief investment officer comes as she led Home Point Capital to become a publicly traded company in January 2021.

In the last 12 months, Fregosi focused on improving Homepoint’s financial position and capital structure and increased the sources of capital through multiple access points, driving Homepoint to an annualized capital turnover ratio of 69x.

The improvement in Homepoint’s 2020 vs. 2019 metrics is substantial and speaks to how Fregosi has led Homepoint through a period of market volatility.

Over a 20-year career, Matt Garlinghouse has used his determination and interpersonal skills to become a capital market expert in the mortgage industry. One year ago, after building a track record of success at Everbank and Supreme Lending, Garlinghouse moved to Cherry Creek Mortgage, where he oversees trading, product pricing and development, investor relations, post-closing and risk management for one of the fastest growing lenders in the country. In the past 12 months, Garlinghouse has enriched the company’s trade desk and introduced new concepts in the capital markets division that helped fuel Cherry Creek’s growth in production last year.

Leveraging his creative abilities in addition to his expertise in finance, portfolio lending, strategic acquisitions, risk management and advanced analytics, Garlinghouse’s contributions were a major factor behind Cherry Creek’s 87% increase in production from 2019 to 2020, which became one of the most successful years in the company’s 34-year history.

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Chief Investment Officer

AJ George

Dawn Hill

CMG Financial

Royal Pacific Funding

Chief Administrative Officer

Chief Financial Officer

AJ George serves as the chief administrative officer for CMG Financial, developing new ways to expand execution, pioneer strategies to increase liquidity and implement innovative structures that have not existed in the past.

George takes a comprehensive approach to creating new opportunities for all areas within mortgage finance, ranging from his work serving the needs of institutional investors and the origination community, all the way down to ensuring that the needs of the individual borrower are met.

Over the last year, George’s leadership has successfully navigated CMG through the turmoil of 2020. His guidance and decisiveness within the firm’s capital markets pricing structure and execution was key to the success of the company’s strategic interest rate risk management. Via CMG’s affiliated broker dealer, CMG Securities, George also ensured that the company provided TBA and MBS liquidity to the mortgage origination community at a time where it was in great need.

As chief financial officer, Dawn Hill has been not only instrumental in the continued and elevated success of Royal Pacific Funding, but has also been a role model and leader at work and throughout her community. Hill’s vision for launching both a delegated and non-delegated correspondent channel was pivotal in RPF’s continued success and in creating more space in the housing market for additional bankers, offering liquidity options to other lenders so that they can lend to more borrowers.

Hill led RPF’s 2020 finance strategies and navigated the company through an evaporating non-QM market, sharp declines in the TBA securities market and the agency mandates on delinquent servicing portfolios. She had the foresight to structure RPF’s cash position to sustain the volatility that the industry experienced. Under Hill’s leadership, the RPF built a strong servicing portfolio which became both important to the balance sheet and served as a natural hedge for the company.

Mike Kennemer

John J. Lynah

Mid America Mortgage

Mortgage Equity Partners

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Chief Financial Officer

Chief Financial Officer

As chief financial officer, Mike Kennemer provided Mid America Mortgage with the financial wherewithal to cement its position as one of the mortgage industry’s most innovative companies. Leading by example, Kennemer is a hands-on executive who is known to be available to support in day-to-day decisions such as pipeline management. His efforts have enabled Mid America to further its eMortgage capabilities, expand its warehouse lending operations and provide a key source of industry liquidity through its strategic purchase of loans ineligible for sale to other investors. Kennemer has also worked to optimize Mid America’s capital markets execution to assist in division and overall profitability and has earned a reputation internally for working closely with all branches and divisions to maximize profits and reduce expenses.

Kennemer’s work is evident in Mid America’s audited financials for the fiscal year 2020, which show that Kennemer helped increase Mid America’s net profits by more than 1,757% over 2019.

Under John J. Lynah’s financial direction, Mortgage Equity Partners has gone from a small-sized IMB to a mid-sized IMB in less than two years. Based on his strategic plan, the company dramatically increased volume without sacrificing the service level it provides to borrowers and business partners.

Lynah promoted a paradigm shift focusing on key performance indicators to challenge the staff to excel while also leading the way in the use of data to set and accomplish goals. In addition to his analytical and accounting skills, Lynah is a tireless advocate for the company and has been key in fostering a culture of kindness and inclusivity at MEP. He has raised the profile of diversity in the organization by creating an environment that supports marginalized groups’ advancement. Lynah has a keen ability to balance the organization’s success with the needs and desires of the employees. He is also responsible for reinstating the company 401(k) contribution and spearheading employee advocacy programs.

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Gary Malis

Donnie Martin

Paramount Residential Mortgage Group

Texas Capital Bank

Chief Strategy and Capital Markets Officer

EVP, Director of Warehouse Lending

Gary Malis has made an impact not only on Paramount Residential Mortgage Group, but the mortgage industry itself throughout his 25 years of consulting. With his overall passion and experience, Malis has been an integral element in assisting PRMG in its mission to remain competitive in an ever-changing market by being nimble and flexible to adapting to change.

Today, Malis oversees and advises corporate strategy and capital markets for PRMG, including all areas of secondary marketing, risk, strategic operations, warehouse lending, compliance, credit policy, ancillary services, valuations, and acquisitions — all of which play a major role as it relates to growth, risk, budgeting, efficiency, execution and overall strategy.

When he originally joined the company over four years ago, Malis successfully unwound a 10-year-old consulting company while transitioning into the executive management and ownership role of chief strategy and capital markets officer with PRMG.

As executive vice president, director of warehouse lending at Texas Capital Bank, Donnie Martin manages the risks associated with mortgage finance. With nearly ten years under his belt at Texas Capital Bank, Martin works daily with the mortgage finance lines of business, including warehouse lending, correspondent aggregation and mortgage servicing rights lending to identify, assess, and develop controls around the risks associated with each business. Martin leads daily activities associated with the warehouse lending participation program, retail mortgage processing unit, and third-party payment processor program, as well as the vendor oversight program in mortgage finance. Originally joining as a senior vice president, Martin has a proven track record of managing risk and sales production.

Before joining Texas Capital Bank, Martin was a vice president at JPMorgan Chase, where he managed a team of business analysts and project managers for the customer experience team of Chase Home Lending.

Julie Messina

Mark Miller

LHM Financial Corporation

Taylor Morrison Home Funding

Chief Revenue Officer

As vice president, secondary marketing manager, Julie Messina steered LHM Financial to not only survive 2020’s global pandemic and economic crises but thrive. As mortgage interest rates plummeted and pipelines burst to levels never seen, Messina positioned the company to manage the onslaught of business and margin calls by preparing in advance a strategic secondary plan, which created a methodical cascade effect, providing efficiencies from daily lock volume to secondary execution.

The result: LHM’s financial strength is stronger than ever. In 2020, the company doubled its business, funding more than $1.2 billion with 185 employees. Messina’s secondary department currently runs with only 3 employees doing twice the business, funding on average $500 to $600 million annually.

Under her leadership, the secondary department was able to quickly adapt to the fast changes of the pandemic, continuing to lock loans, fund loans and hedge to larger investors.

With more than 29 years of experience, Mark Miller’s capital market and secondary in-depth knowledge and execution has helped form Taylor Morrison’s financial services value to its stakeholders and customers. Miller plays a pivotal role in contributing to the financial success of the company. In the last 12 months, Taylor Morrison Home Funding acquired and integrated a publicly traded homebuilder and mortgage company that had recently acquired another lender.

Miller took a significant lead along with the company’s chief financial officer to smoothly integrate the business so the company could leverage the best structure and support the larger business. All while reacting and adapting to COVID challenges as well as capital markets and market volatility that threatened the industry. First coming to the organization in January of 2016, Miller has been instrumental in the company’s financial success and operations, working alongside each department from field to operations for customer and business objectives.

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VP, Secondary Marketing Manager

Jason Obradovich

Mike Patterson

New American Funding

Freedom Mortgage

Chief Investment Officer

Chief Operating Officer

As New American Funding’s chief investment officer, Jason Obradovich plays a critical role in ensuring the continued growth and success of one of the nation’s largest independent mortgage companies.

Obradovich brings a deep understanding of capital markets, their impact on all levels of an organization and is uniquely adept at executing through market turmoil.

In an unprecedented year, Obradovich successfully navigated 2020’s complex and constantly changing financial landscape to help New American Funding operate without any liquidity concerns and complete its best year ever.

Obradovich is responsible for managing pricing, trading, hedging, investor relationships, warehouse, mortgage servicing rights and liquidity management. Since joining the company in 2013, Obradovich has successfully built robust capital markets, pricing, finance, and business intelligence teams. in his current role, he also oversees accounting, treasury and warehouse.

As chief operating officer, Mike Patterson has been invaluable to Freedom Mortgage, which experienced unprecedented growth in 2020. Patterson leads financial oversight and planning for 12 support service teams including mergers and acquisitions, capital markets, corporate finance, HR, facilities, investor relations and corporate communications, all of which are critical to the company’s success.

During 2020, Freedom Mortgage grew its originations business by more than 2x and funded $134 billion. The company also successfully accessed the capital markets to invest in its growth with corporate debt and MSR and servicing advance securitizations issued under Patterson’s oversight and raised over $1 billion in corporate secured and unsecured debt through the capital markets. Patterson’s efforts also helped the company add more than 5,600 employees — mortgage professionals and support staff — to handle the company’s tremendous growth. Much of the growth and success that Freedom Mortgage saw in 2020 can be attributed to Patterson’s leadership.

Daniel Perotti

Thanh Roettele

PennyMac

JPMorgan Chase

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Senior Managing Director and Chief Financial Officer

Managing Director

Daniel Perotti was promoted to senior managing director and chief financial officer at PennyMac Financial Services in January 2021.

With his promotion, Perotti is responsible for PFSI’s overall financial management. Prior to his new role, Perotti was senior managing director and deputy chief financial officer, where he was responsible for oversight of accounting operations, financial planning and analysis, valuation of investment assets, tax analysis, and the Sarbanes-Oxley program.

Perotti also serves as senior managing director and chief financial officer of PennyMac Mortgage Investment Trust, and has served as the company’s chief asset and liability management officer among other positions since joining the company in 2008.

Before joining the leadership team at PennyMac, Perotti was vice president at BlackRock and served as the head of the quantitative research team within its BlackRock Solutions business as well as in various other roles at BlackRock from 2002 to 2008.

Thanh Roettele has more than 25 years of experience with JPMorgan Chase and currently serves as managing director of mortgage finance for JPMorgan Chase’s Corporate Client Banking and Specialized Industries. The CCBSI Mortgage group offers independent mortgage companies warehouse lending capabilities and traditional financial solutions. In his role, he oversees the business responsible for coverage of non-bank mortgage, residential and multi-family originators, mortgage REITs, and servicers throughout the United States. The Mortgage Finance team partners with product specialists across the firm to deliver solutions for his clients in areas such as credit, Treasury services, investment banking, asset management and mortgage banking. In 2020, the business funded over $275 billion, approximately 860,000 mortgages.

Roettele holds a wide range of experience working in the financial services industry, including working in portfolio management, risk management, commercial lending, banking and credit analysis.

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Chad Rogers

Emanuel Santa-Donato

Intercap Lending

Better.com

Chief Financial Officer

VP, Capital Markets and Lead Acquisitions

At Intercap Lending, all accounting, secondary and capital markets functions report through Chad Rogers in his role as chief financial officer. Rogers’ leadership and vision during the COVID-19 pandemic permitted Intercap to assist thousands of additional clients to take advantage of historically low interest rates. Rogers and his team managed the ever-changing pricing challenges, hedging strategies and reporting changes throughout the pandemic. Since joining Intercap in late 2018, Rogers has been an integral part of increasing production by over 8x. Despite this growth, Rogers remains invested in each member of his team and committed to providing individualized attention to all Intercap employees. Rogers is a critical voice on Intercap’s management team and works to ensure the best-possible outcome in every situation, even if the solution must be creatively tailored. His attention to detail and ability to forecast and understand market changes has allowed Intercap to continue to thrive despite many challenges.

Emanuel Santa-Donato heads capital markets and lead acquisitions at Better.com, covering secondary markets, pricing, mortgage product development and systematization, along with the majority of the company’s D2C marketing channels. He joined Better.com in January 2016 as one of the early-stage employees, and since that time, he has developed the team, execution logic and processes to grow Better. com’s capital markets desk from zero loans to now over 10,000 a month. Santa-Donato also created an API integration between Better. com’s pricing engine and proprietary loan operating software, improving the efficiency of the company’s lockdesk by 10x.

He drew upon the risk management concepts he brought to Better from his prior portfolio management experience to significantly scale down risk in early March weeks ahead of the greatest dislocation in the mortgage market since the financial crisis. Better was able to maintain its growth and pricing levels through that uncertainty due to the work by Santa-Donato and his team.

Alex Seavall

Charlotte Simonelli

HomeServices of America

Realogy

EVP, Chief Financial Officer and Treasurer

As vice president of business development and acquisitions and chief financial officer at Home Services of America, Alex Seavall has harnessed his extensive knowledge of consolidation, external audit, accounting, Sarbanes-Oxley Act and Generally Accepted Accounting Principles to guide the company through many of its successes over the years. Seavall assisted the executive leadership team in the identification of acquisition targets, and managed and cultivated acquisition pipeline, leading an evaluation of targets with total purchase price between $1 million to over $500 million. Additionally, Seavall leads negotiations with target leadership and oversees drafting of purchase agreements and related documentation for acquisitions and strategic initiatives among several other roles within Home Services of America. Joining HomeServices of America over eight years ago, Seavall has assisted in the growth of the ever-expanding family of market-leading real estate brokerages, mortgage companies, settlement service providers and affiliated businesses.

Charlotte Simonelli is executive vice president, chief financial officer and treasurer of Realogy, the largest full-service residential real estate services company in the nation. Simonelli leads all financial functions, including financial reporting, planning and analysis, accounting, treasury, tax and investor relations across the company’s multiple businesses and brands, spearheading Realogy’s ongoing transformation to strengthen its financial profile. Simonelli was critical to Realogy’s success through the challenges of 2020, ensuring the company managed costs at the onset of the pandemic and proactively operated from a position of strength during the market’s upswing to enable Realogy to own the recovery and emerge even stronger. Under her leadership, Realogy delivered its biggest third quarter on record in 2020. Volume was up 28% year-over-year, revenue was up 20% year-over-year, and the company was able to successfully capture more incremental transaction economics from its title business and mortgage joint venture.

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VP of Business Development and Acquisitions, Chief Financial Officer

Max Slyusarchuk

Brett Stefanski

A&D Mortgage

Draper and Kramer Mortgage

CEO and Founder

SVP of Finance

As CEO and founder of A&D Mortgage, Max Slyusarchuk combines his 20 years of mortgage and banking industry experience to provide an innovative solution to the non-QM segment of the mortgage banking market. Slyusarchuk oversees all day-to-day activities and strategic planning for all entities and is responsible for business development and maintaining relationships with key partners.

Slyusarchuk began his career in United Financing as a vice president of operations and moved to the same position at A&D Financial in 2005. As an executive leader, Slyusarchuk encourages a collaborative environment with the goal of delivering long-term value to the business.

With experience in both private equity investments and portfolio management for institutional and private sector clients in Eastern Europe and the United States, Slyusarchuk has launched and raised capital for multiple projects across a wide spectrum of industries, including the financial and construction segments.

Brett Stefanski has served Draper and Kramer Mortgage for over 17 years with a broad range of talents that contribute to the growth of the company. Stefanski oversees all facets of the company’s secondary, accounting, post-closing, warehouse, payroll and servicing departments in addition to helping lead the technology oversight team.

As Draper and Kramer Mortgage was challenged to handle record-high loan volume and company growth, Stefanski was at the core of the company’s response. Stefanski navigated the liquidity crunch, interpreting the movements of indices and understanding the Fed’s influence on mortgage bonds, forbearance requirements, loan servicing, mortgage sales and consumer behavior. Internally, Stefanski oversaw emergency-style teams to maintain the ability to deliver to borrowers who had their product availability altered or erased. He also balanced the trading of loans versus the servicing of loans, the use of warehouse lines and the designation of loans to Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and Ginnie Mae.

Bob Telles

Hance Thurston

American Financial Network

Southern Trust Mortgage

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Chief Financial Officer

Head of Capital Markets

Bob Telles, chief financial officer at American Financial Network, is a leader in mortgage finance. Under his leadership, AFN adapted its warehouse lines and made other adjustments required to handle the massive increase in loan volume that occurred in 2020, with AFN funding $13.6 billion, a 78% year-over-year increase, which is more than 45,000 units.

As an industry veteran, Telles contributes significantly to AFN’s growth and makes every effort to ensure liquidity and stability. As low-interest rates increased demand across the industry, requiring more warehouse cash to sustain business, Telles secured lines with warehouse banks to ensure AFN had enough warehouse line capacity to meet increasing demands. He is also frequently included in the Mortgage Bankers Association and accounting firms’ discussions regarding accounting tailored for the industry that is done in full accordance with Generally Accepted Accounting Principles and Internal Revenue Service guidelines.

As head of capital markets, Hance Thurston is unique in his ability to translate his technical skill and vast experience into value-adding solutions for Southern Trust Mortgage customers and staff. To Thurston, capital markets expertise is acquired and applied in the service of others.

In his role, he provides Southern Trust Mortgage loan officers with an understanding of market events, which they regularly use to inform customers and educate business partners. Throughout 2020, Thurston applied his skills and vast industry relationships to create solutions for Southern Trust Mortgage customers. These include creating long-term rate locks for home shoppers, implementing MSR retention strategies to mitigate the impact of capital markets liquidity disruptions, developing alternative execution strategies which allowed the company to pivot away from aggregators during market upheaval and maintaining access to non-agency products and liquidity when most sources had vanished.

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Ken Torre

Jeff Whiteside

EVP, Capital Markets

Chief Financial Officer and Chief Collaboration Officer

First Guaranty Mortgage Corporation

eXp World Holdings

Leading with experience, First Guaranty Mortgage Corporation Executive Vice President of Capital Markets Ken Torre is instrumental in the daily operations and long-term strategy of the company. During the chaos of 2020, Torre was able to strategically lead his teams and company, drawing on his 25 years of diverse market experience.

Adjusting to the impact of the pandemic, Torre was able to adapt quickly to the changes and pivot the company's capital markets strategy. He led his team to adapt to each market change efficiently during the uncertainty in 2020, sometimes doing four or five daily price changes.

These efforts to build stability were successful and led to FGMC’s highest production numbers in its history and unprecedented growth in hiring. Torre has also been instrumental in the development of the company’s non-agency product line, Maverick Solutions, as he works to build matrices, create guidelines and mitigate risk in the non-QM space to allow FGMC to grow in the market.

As chief financial officer and chief collaboration officer of eXp World Holdings, Jeff Whiteside has driven the company’s financial growth, catalyzed its international expansion and overseen key acquisitions and leadership hires. Since Whiteside joined the company in 2018, eXp has grown from a residential real estate company to a technology company with complementary subsidiaries — all with a focus on powering the new economy. Whiteside has played a crucial role in elevating eXp’s financial performance, with revenue growing 100% year-over-year and valuation increasing from $650 million in Q4 2018 to more than $7 billion at the beginning of 2021.

Under Whiteside’s leadership, eXp Realty welcomed more than 15,000 agents to the eXp family in 2020, expanded operations into five new countries and grew its commercial business. Additionally, he helped scale Virbela (eXp World Holdings’ virtual world platform), which saw a 78% increase in new users over Q2, and 50% new user growth in international markets in Q3.

Josh Woodward

Ann Yett

Lima One Capital

Keller Williams Realty

Chief Financial Officer

Josh Woodward has led Lima One Capital to exponential growth since joining the company, with originations doubling year over year for three consecutive years, all while demonstrating the company’s value of executing with excellence and integrity. In 2020, Woodward helped lead Lima One Capital through the disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic with balance sheet management and strong capital markets relationships.

As a result, Lima One is poised for a record year in 2021. Woodward also led the issuance of one of the industry’s first mortgage-backed notes that included a mix of fix-and-flip, new construction, single-family rental, and multifamily loans. Woodward leads the company’s product development team and has worked to make loan programs more customer-friendly. In addition, Woodward led Lima One’s efforts in expanding capital markets relationships while also leading an in-house servicing team that became one of the company’s biggest revenue producers.

Ann Yett is chief financial officer for Austin, Texas-based Keller Williams, which is home to more than 164,000 agents in the United States and Canada. She has served as CFO of Keller Williams since July 2006. In her role, Yett leads the brand’s accounting, finance and tax teams and oversees global financial operations. Yett has more than 30 years of experience serving as a financial leader at Price Waterhouse and various other senior-level financial positions in the consulting, publishing and technology sectors.

In 2015, Yett was honored with the prestigious CFO Legacy Award from the Austin Business Journal. During her tenure as CFO, Keller Williams has achieved record growth, productivity, and profitability gains. Yett’s focus on controlling expenses and identifying investment opportunities has helped fuel Keller Williams’ growth, increasing opportunities for associates and their families. Yett provides strategic guidance for the company, as it continues to drive forward with rapid growth and expansion.

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Chief Financial Officer

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A new golden age in the secondary mortgage market Will lender focus shift to the jumbo/ non-conforming market?

By John Toohig

2020

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was a banner year for many residential mortgage lenders. The home became our sanctuary from the COVID-19 pandemic, and space has never been at a higher premium than it is now.

When I was talking to a client at the height of the pandemic last May, he and his wife, along with their two young children, lived in a 900-square-foot studio apartment in New York City. At the time, I said to him, “There are warmer forms of hell out there, but at the moment, I can’t think of one worse than what you’re in right now.”

Not surprisingly, he and his family left that apartment and found a single-family home with more square footage so they could spread out, including a backyard. Much has been written about the flight to suburbia, but stories like the one from this couple represent why the jumbo market will continue to thrive in 2021, as Americans grapple with what could be another year of work from home as we slowly get vaccinated and the world reawakens.

What’s the state of the non-conforming / jumbo secondary market?

Certainty of execution gives lenders confidence in their ability to generate loans and sell them at a profit. Many on Wall Street would argue that 2020 was a disappointing year for non-conforming MBS issuance, most notably for the non-QM market, but also jumbo 2.0. According to industry estimates, the forecast for 2020 was estimated to be roughly $30 billion for jumbo 2.0, $50 billion for non-QM and hoped to be one of the best years in the last decade.

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The resulting issuance was roughly half of those forecasts and fell short of pre-pandemic high hopes. Though we did see a strong pick up in issuance during the latter part of 2020, much of the securitization world froze at the onset of the pandemic.

More on what that freeze did to lenders in a moment. Many on Main Street would say that the jumbo mortgage business is booming. That’s the challenge with measuring the non-conforming whole loan market, with possibly as much as a third of originations going to rest on a bank, credit union or depository balance sheets (See Urban Institute graph).

Sales of whole loans were the best this desk has ever seen as measured by par balance sold and number of trading partners, but there are no league tables showing the size of the market. The remainder of the market is fairly transparent. Agency high balance or conforming balance jumbo can be tracked on what’s sold to the GSEs. Private label issuance levels can be seen through Bloomberg or the various rating agencies.

To get an estimate on the size of the bond secondary market, it helps to show historical context as provided by the Urban Institute (See Urban Institute graph).

Volumes today are a shadow of the go-go days ramping up to the financial crisis.

This is also greatly influenced by who originates the loan and will be demonstrated on how that mix has shifted.

2003 – 2006 was the peak of the run up to the financial crisis. However, a quick review of the top originators in 2006 shows that few of those names still exist. A multitude of mergers and acquisitions, but mostly bankruptcies, took many of these top lenders out of the market. What’s interesting to see is that those who are still in existence today are tier 1 banks who had the balance sheet necessary to weather the storm. Those who were purely dependent on private label MBS execution struggled when the secondary market crashed and came to a halt.

This demonstrates the importance of diversity of funding sources to have access to both whole loan and securitization exits. Names like Wells Fargo, Bank of America, JPM all saw their market share grow to roughly half the origination volume, though in a much contracted market size, over the next several years as they

continued to lend and provide additional banking products to their customers.

The prime jumbo private label market was resuscitated by Redwood Trust in 2010. The resulting wreckage of the housing crisis brought on a multitude of new regulations surrounding the mortgage market, with the Qualified Mortgage probably being the most recognized by Wall

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Street. Safe Harbor and Ability to Repay (ATR) had a dramatic impact on what could be put into a CUSIP. Coupled with the fines rolling out of Washington D.C., this resulted in a pull back from the FHA/VA space by some tier 1 banks.

At the same time, we began to witness the rise of nonbank origination efforts driven by their ability to sell loans into the

2006 rank 1 2

2011 rank NA 1

Company Countrywide Home Loans Wells Fargo Bank NA

Where are they now?

Bought by Bank of America in 2008 Acquired Wachovia in 2008

3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

NA 3 2 NA NA 8 NA NA NA NA 11

Washington Mutual Bank Bank of America NA JPMorgan Chase Bank NA National City Bank American Home Mortgage Inc. SunTrust Mortgage Inc. Wachovia Mortgage FSB New Century Mortgage Corp.

IndyMac Bank FSB Countrywide Bank FSB CitiMortgage Inc.

14

NA

Freemont Investment & Loan

15

NA

GreenPoint Mortgage Funding Inc.

16

NA

WMC Mortgage Corp.

17

NA

HomeComings Financial Network

18

NA

First Horizon Home Loans

19 20

NA NA

Option One Mortgage Corp.

First Magnus Financial Corp.

Failed and acquired by JPMorgan Chase in 2008 Acquired Countrywide Financial in 2008 Acquired Washington Mutual in 2008 Sold to PNC Financial Services in 2008 Filed for bankruptcy in 2007 Remains in mortgage business Sold to Wells Fargo in 2008 Filed for bankruptcy in 2007 Failed in 2008 Acquired by Bank of America in 2008 Remains in mortgage business Sold most banking assets and all deposits to CapitalSource Inc. in 2008 Shut down by parent Capital One Financial in 2007 Shut down and sold by parent General Electric in 2007 Parent GMAC Financial Services ceased originations in 2008 Parent First Horizon sold all non-Tennessee loan operations to MetLife. MetLife in now exiting the business Parent H&R Black Ceased Option One's loan originations in 2007 Filed for bankruptcy in 2007

Source: (Top to bottom) S&P Global Market Intelligence, iEmergent and HMDA, S&P Global Market Intelligence.

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GSEs. Significant investment in technology, dramatically rising costs to originate loans, narrowing margins, coupled with less regulation on the nonbanks, began to shift the mortgage origination mix. Names like Rocket, loanDepot and Freedom Mortgage reclaimed nonbank origination dominance from the depositories. JPM, BAML and Wells went from commanding nearly 50% of the mortgage market in 2011, down to 21% by 2016. The disruption in the mortgage market had begun.

Fast forward to 2019 and Wells, Chase and BAML had seen their market share cut again in half, declining to 11%. Quicken overtook Wells Fargo as the nation’s No. 1 lender and six of the top 10 mortgage originators are nonbanks. (Top Originators in 2019 graph) However, the nonbanks lack the balance sheet necessary to hold these loans for long and that limitation was deeply exposed at the onset of the pandemic. You may have noticed the recent rush to IPOs by names like Rocket or loanDepot. If you read the registration statement, Rocket states clearly the risks and importance of the secondary market to their business.

“We depend on our ability to sell loans in the secondary market to a limited number of investors and to the GSEs, and to securitize our loans into MBS through the GSEs and Ginnie Mae. If our ability to sell or securitize mortgage loans is impaired, we may not be able to originate mortgage loans,” stated Rocket Companies’ S-1 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The GSEs continue to be not only the best price in town but also have the deepest balance sheet. However, those names dependent on the private label market last year were not so lucky.

With the capital markets seizing up, mortgage finance companies, REITS and nonbank lenders all experienced a very painful deleveraging in late Q1 / early Q2 2020 as the pandemic hit. Non-conforming loans that were regularly selling at 103+ premiums quickly plummeted to 90s dollar prices and below for some non-QM product. Some nonbank lenders tried to tighten credit, raise rates to price themselves out of originations or completely eliminate entire product lines in the absence of a reliable take out for the loans.

Meanwhile, depositories tightened some credit profiles, adjusted some rates

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Top mortgage originators of 2006 5 of 20 remain

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to manage risk but largely kept making loans and earning interest. Several trading desks quickly snatched up many of those high-quality loans that were sold by forced sellers more due to liquidity-driven events and less due to performance issues.

In hindsight, that’s an easy call to make, but at the time, the world was crashing down upon us.

The speed at which the Fed acted in this pandemic was vastly different than the financial crisis, which was largely driven by the sins of mortgage lenders. While the disruption in mid-2020 was deep and painful, it was short-lived compared to the events of 2008. With the market flooded by stimulus and the Fed buying just about anything but equities, pricing and spreads snapped back over the later part of 2020.

Unemployment levels, which reached unthought-of highs, have slowly drifted lower and forbearance levels continue to improve.

Which brings us to the secondary market in early 2021. Mortgage lenders, particularly depositories, find themselves with a challenging decision.

On one hand, with the Fed gobbling up much of the MBS market and driving pricing, the gain on sale generated by selling whole loans can be addictive. A lender that has a mortgage origination engine has the ability to generate premiums that one could argue may never be higher due to the Fed’s influence on pricing. As they say, don’t fight the Fed. In Q2 2020, lenders reported a net gain of $4,548 per loan originated, according to data from the Mortgage Bankers Association.

This was driven by rapidly falling rates, a raging refi market and Fed manipulation of pricing. That pricing remains elevated in Q1 2021 over historical averages.

On the other hand, with record amounts of cash due to continued stimulus coming out of Washington, loan yields have fallen, prepayments have risen across nearly all lending products, net interest margins have compressed and there is a real need for earning assets on the depository balance sheet. With commercial lending still being in the crosshairs of COVID, residential mortgages could provide a much-needed boost to interest income. This has driven strong secondary market demand for products by those institutions that have not invested in the origination machine necessary to make loans in house.

These loans continue to provide depositories with strong cross-selling opportunities to other products offered by the owner of the loan, which presents additional avenues for fee income. The only complicating factors to the discussion are historically low rates and consumers’ very strong demand for all things 30-yr fixed rate. This leaves depositories with the choice to hold long term, low rate coupons and added interest rate risk.

MAY 2021

The choice for many depositories is simple, a 3% jumbo mortgage or the current Fed funds rate as they struggle with internal loan demand. Readily available securities have attempted to soak up much of that liquidity, but when you can buy the whole loan for 100bps, better yields than the bond, the loan is much preferred, if it can be found. Admittedly, the loan carries credit risk, whereas the bond does not.

Speaking of credit risk, the New York Fed outlined in January how this golden age differs from the previous best-ever mortgage period that was 2003. The credit risk in the mortgage market today is low and pristine. The growth that we’ve seen in 2020 and beyond has left a segment of borrowers behind. Credit officers may point to the fact that FICO score algorithms have changed over the last two decades, but few could argue that that 70% of borrowers in 2020 who had a 760 FICO or higher compared to only 30% in 2003 isn’t a monumental shift.

Depositories have been historically very wary of this lower band of credit, but it

clearly outlines an untapped segment of the market that could further spur growth in the mortgage industry. The question is how could that band of borrowers be appropriately priced for the credit risk it carries, yet still give lenders confidence that there is certainty of execution for the product? An important topic for another day.

As we look to 2021 and beyond, you can see the pent-up demand bursting at the seams as a multitude of new issuance is coming to market. Both jumbo 2.0 and non-QM lenders alike have Q1 deals in the market. Regular issuers like JPM, Redwood Trust, Goldman Sachs, Verus, Deephaven have all accessed the private label RMBS market in Q1 2021 with more to come.

I would describe the current secondary market as a new Golden Era for mortgage lenders — both depository and nonbank alike. Private label issuance for prime jumbo is spinning back up as Americans put a premium on square footage as we are locked in our homes for much of this year. Non-QM originations are back off their knees and helping the gig economy, underserved borrowers and small business owners get a loan.

Regulations such as the QM rule are being relaxed, allowing entities to have more certainty of execution in a space where many were worried about the lagging litigation risk for making those loans

or selling them in the secondary market.

This could potentially give depositories the confidence to step into the non-QM market with a greater presence.

In the conforming market, you have the Biden administration suggesting a firsttime homebuyer tax credit which should further incentivize homeownership. We continue to be faced with a housing crisis driven by a lack of supply, which has been very favorable to home values, and there appears to be no short-term solution to that long-term problem. If we get the combination of rising rates and rapidly rising home values, the “affordability” conversation is about the only discussion that could take away the origination party punchbowl.

Gradually rising rates might actually benefit the secondary market as it would remove the only complaint being reported today: paying high premiums for loans only to see higher than historically normal prepayment speeds. However, the Fed remains committed to keeping rates low through much of 2023, which should help spur the purchase money market and keep the refis coming.

Several have pointed out that much of the origination focus was driven by conforming balance loans in 2020. As those refis dry up, the focus could shift to the jumbo or non-conforming market as lenders were simply overrun last year and couldn’t keep up with volumes.

MAY 2021

Mortgage Backed securities (MBS) are exposed to various risks including but not limited to credit (risk of default of principal and interest payments), market, interest rate, prepayment, and reinvestment risks. Unless issued by GNMA, MBS’s are not backed or guaranteed by any government agency. Actual payments received from a MBS frequently differ from the terms stated at purchase. Payments consist of pass through income and principal repayment, can fluctuate over time, and receive no special tax treatment.

Changes in interest rates can affect the value and maturity date of a MBS. Prepayment caused by the underlying mortgages being unexpectedly paid off or refinanced is likely and will result in an unpredictable rate of income payment and principal repayment. Fixed-income securities (or “bonds”) are exposed to various risks including but not limited to credit (risk of default or principal and interest payments), market and liquidity, interest rate, reinvestment, legislative (changes to the tax code), and call risks. There is an inverse relationship between interest rate movements and fixed income prices. Generally, when interest rates rise, fixed income prices fall and when interest rates fall, fixed income prices generally rise. Short-term bonds with maturities of three years or less will generally have lower yields than long term bonds which are more susceptible to interest rate risk.

Links are being provided for information purposes only. Raymond James is not affiliated with and does not endorse, authorize or sponsor any of the listed websites or their respective sponsors. Raymond James is not responsible for the content of any website or the collection or use of information regarding any website’s users and/ or members.

Raymond James & Associates, Inc., member NYSE/SIPC. Bio: John Toohig is a managing director at Raymond James, a board member and president of Raymond James Mortgage Company, Inc and head of the Whole Loan Group.

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Source: New York Fed Consumer Credit Panel/Equifax *Credit Score is Equifax Riskscore 3.0)

Performance in the sector has been better than expected, largely driven by stimulus and forbearance coming out of Washington and by all accounts there is more of that on the horizon. Recent Q1 announcements by the Biden administration have further extended the forbearance periods out through June 30 of 2021 and who doesn’t expect that can to get kicked further?

When you have names like Bank of America with a 52% loan to deposit ratio at the start of 2021, you expect spreads for both whole loans and bonds to continue to grind tighter in the absence of enough supply to soak up the excess deposits.

All of these factors leave execution in the secondary market for both whole loans or through securitization with a strong tailwind at its back. It’s never been a better time to be a seller of mortgages in the secondary market.

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REUTERS / CARLOS BARRIA - stock.adobe.com

HUD Secretary Marcia Fudge

MAY 2021

The homeownership opportunity conundrum WHAT CAN THE HUD SECRETARY DO TO HELP?

By David H. Stevens, CMB

of policy arenas where the debate over the lack of single-family inventory for sale raises concerns that a tax credit would simply exacerbate the already challenging environment that some argue is artificially inflating home values.

This leaves people asking: Why is there a need to focus on this gap and can anything substantive actually be done?

But we need to be asking this: As long as we have a society that, whether intentional or not, disenfranchises a portion of its citizens from the most basic opportunity to build wealth and shift a generations-long paradox for the better, can we ever move the needle on the color boundary in homeownership?

MAY 2021

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F

irst, let’s set the record straight. Homeownership is critical to wealth creation, especially for establishing inter-generational wealth in America. When looking at net worth, even considering the fact that there can be periods of volatility, the ability for Americans to own a home has proven to be the best method for establishing a financial reserve for passing onto the next generation and to tap into for other financial needs.

The debate that has occurred over the decades about renting vs. owning is answered with data. But it is true, not all should own or perhaps are able to own. But if you are able own a home, can qualify and commit to ownership, there is a strong argument to support doing so.

One of the conundrums of homeownership is that it is limited to certain individuals meeting the necessary criteria. Unfortunately, in the U.S., these limits often reflect the ethnic divides that make up the nation. Today, white non-Hispanic homeownership rates are above 70%, while Hispanic and Black rates sit in the sub 50% levels. For Black homeownership in particular, there has been little improvement in the homeownership rate at all.

I would argue that public policy has actually eroded the strength of forceful leadership needed to make any dent in this area.

An effort to address this gap is once again being discussed by the new administration. President Biden, in fact, had a plank in his campaign calling for a $15,000 first-time homebuyer tax credit. The proposal has been met with resistance in a variety

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WHY THIS MATTER IS BASIC TO OUR NATION As the National Association of Homebuilders pointed out in their February 2021 Eye on Housing, “For 2019, the median net worth of homeowners was $255,000 and the median net worth of renters was lower ($6,300).”

With homeownership rates significantly lower for minorities, the net effect is that wealth creation is an impairment to providing opportunity for the long run. In fact, the ability to own a home for all Americans is where the most important asset is created.

The Federal Reserve’s survey of consumer statistics reflects that the primary residence is the single-greatest asset held by Americans. Yet with less than half of minorities versus two thirds of white non-Hispanics getting access, the long-term implications are important to consider. Homeownership, however, is even more critical to wealth building for minorities.

In fact, as the NAHB article shows, “Household wealth for these groups (Black/African American, Hispanic/Latino, and other ethnic groups) heavily relied on the value of primary residence.”

Richard Green, director of the University of Southern California Lusk Center for Real Estate, created a research paper for the Department of Housing and Urban Development on why homeownership makes a difference. He started with a focus on family impact, pointing out that, unlike renting, owning brings longevity.

“This longevity indicates parents can assure that their children remain in a stable environment, and, more specifically, can remain in a school district that their parents find desirable,” Green states. While his conclusions pointed to shortfalls in rental protections for Americans and the need to consider long-term protected leases to keep families stable, the impact of a stable living environment is proven.

A piece by Habitat for Humanity references multiple research papers that show how homeownership produces better health outcomes, greater educational achievement, more security and safety in the living environment and creates a pathway out of poverty in the form of long-term wealth building.

In a piece I published in HousingWire following the pullback of HUD’s anti-discrimination rule (Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing), I lamented former President Trump’s tweet that stated, “I am happy to inform all of the people living their Suburban Lifestyle Dream that you will no longer be bothered or financially hurt by having low-income housing built in your neighborhood.”

He added: “Your housing prices will go up based on the market, and crime will go down. I have rescinded the Obama-Biden AFFH Rule. Enjoy!”

I lamented over this because the intent of the anti-discrimination rule was to require those in real estate to be accountable for the effect of their polices and not just the intent not to discriminate. The fact is that unless we can change the paradigm of disenfranchisement in economic opportunity in America, we risk the perpetuation of outcomes that produce societal divisions and prejudice along ethnic and color lines. To put it another way, by focusing on creating more opportunity to narrow the wealth opportunity gap, we can produce better overall outcomes for the nation as a whole.

Enter Tai Christensen and the story the Washington Post published last year titled, “One Home, a Lifetime of Impact.” It’s the

story of her great grandmother Mary Pherribo and her husband George, who purchased their first home in 1936, changing the outcome for their family for generations to come. Christensen currently serves as the director of government affairs and diversity, equity and inclusion officer at CBC Mortgage Agency.

The Pherribos had been born to parents who were slaves. The simple fact is that their father, who became a chef after emancipation and upon his death in 1901 was able to leave a house for each of his eight children, began a waterfall of passing forward to future generations the value of homeownership and the ability to pull out of the spiral of poverty that grips far too many who never get the opportunity.

However, the author, Michelle Lerner, adds to the story of Christensen’s family, stating how this is the exception and not the rule to America’s story. Lerner states, “Unfortunately, that pattern of homeownership and generational wealth building is broken for many Black families. In the first quarter of 2020, 44% of Black families owned their home, compared with 73.7% of white families, according to the Census Bureau. The gap is wider in some cities, with just 25% of Black families owning a home in Minneapolis compared with 76% of whites, which is the widest gap in U.S. cities.”

ADDRESSING THE GAP The gap in access and opportunity is one that many lenders, Realtors and homebuilders would prefer to be left to academics and policy wonks. After all, why is this issue so important to them?

These are “for profit” entities who want to sell every home and every loan they can. The answer is simple, really: The fact is that the system is rigged against creating opportunity.

“The homeownership gap between Blacks and whites is larger today than it was in 1934, which is when the Federal Housing Administration was established,” says Donnell Williams, president of the National Association of Real Estate Brokers. The proof is in the pudding, and despite bold statements and all good intentions, little to no ground is being made here.

So, what are some of the challenges and potential solutions?

None of this can be done without first addressing leadership and authority. Here is my short list.

MAY 2021

1. HUD Secretary This nation needs a centralized and authoritative housing policy leader. Today, housing policy is completely fragmented over multiple agencies with varying programs and levels of authority. It starts with the role of the HUD secretary. This role has been vastly watered down over the past decades.

The secretary used to have authority over the FHA and the GSEs’ mission responsibilities, that is no longer the case. The secretary used to have authority over regulatory policy for all lenders under the office of regulatory affairs, where polices like RESPA and the SAFE Act sat. But these have been moved to other agencies, mostly the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Today, HUD Secretary Marcia Fudge has control over the FHA single family and multifamily programs, FHA manufactured housing, some health care and nursing home financ-

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Former HUD Secretary Ben Carson.

Held office from 2017 to 2021.

MAY 2021

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ing, and then the subsidy programs used for community development block grants, along with other efforts such has the rental housing subsidies provided through the budget.

For this to be a cabinet level position, one that sits at the same table as the U.S. Treasury Secretary, is alarming. This cabinet-level seat should be able to coordinate the vast resources focused on the government’s housing programs.

For this or any other president to make a serious attempt at driving change, there needs to be a serious and substantial recognition in the “management by committee” implications of this morass of institutions, all with overlapping authorities and with no one truly in charge of producing change.

President Biden could push for some steps to address this paradigm, and with his very seasoned team, many of whom dealt with these issues during the Obama administration, there is an opportunity to at least call this what it is — a policy conundrum with no clear leadership or authority.

tasked with devising incentives to meet the supply shortages of the nation.

The funds planned for the first-time homebuyer tax credit might have far better use in being targeted to home building for first-time and first-in-a-generation homebuyers using alternative mortgage instrument targets and more. Another consideration should be given to new ideas or re-generated ones from the past, like shared equity programs to advance ownership in resale housing stock.

The needs are enormous. Following World War II, William Levitt built seven large subdivisions for returning soldiers and their families with cheap loans provided by the Veterans Administration. It was huge and created a solution for many.

But to highlight the dramatic historical failure of this approach and to highlight the history of systemic racism in opportunity, no people of color were allowed to buy one of these homes.

2. Housing Supply Housing supply needs federal leadership and state-level involvement. From land acquisition to occupancy, the timeline and cost has gotten so long that the marginal return on building entry-level housing has become uneconomic.

Add to this the huge construction cost increases for supplies, and it’s no surprise that home building has been targeted to higher price points.

A larger and emboldened HUD secretary could lead this through an office of housing supply that would be tasked to work with states and homebuilder organizations and be

3. The credit evaluation system The credit evaluation system is discriminatory in its effect.

What is reported to Fair Isaac or other credit bureaus may not reflect the full credit profile, and thus, may skew a score lower or perhaps not provide one.

In fact in a research paper published by Lisa Rice, vice president of the National Fair Housing Alliance, and Deidre Swesnik, director of public policy and communications at the National Fair Housing Alliance, the view was straight forward, “Our current credit-scoring systems have a disparate impact on people and communities of color. These systems

Former HUD Secretary Julián Castro.

Held office from 2014 to 2017.

MAY 2021

are rooted in our long history of housing discrimination and the dual credit market that resulted from it.”

Rent payments, cell phone bills, utility payments, wifi, cable and more can all show a pattern of credit repayment, yet these are not included in any scoring model. For some families that are “under banked,” or may have come here from countries where credit is not trusted, or simply may believe that credit is a bad thing, our system needs to find a way to provide an opportunity to use those other forms of regular payment to approve a loan.

Decades ago, when we underwrote loans before scores existed, we looked at the actual report and allowed for borrowers to tell their story. No credit was not bad credit. The thin file borrower needs a real solution, not an exception, but a true underwriting policy that does not result in denial or extraordinary credit overlays.

MOVING TOWARD WEALTH CREATION We are long past calls from presidential candidates for single solutions to bridge the gap in wealth creation in the country. Housing has proven to be, over the long term, the most meaningful asset a family can hold. It creates better health, education, and safety outcomes for a family. The biggest gap we face is the force of leadership.

If we are going to turn the page, it will need to be initiated by first making the leader of housing policy a role that has teeth.

Instead of watering down the role of HUD secretary, it is time to beef it up. Consolidating programs and clearly assigning authorities can create accountability.

Today, when asked what’s causing the continued failure to meet the desires of so many families to own a home, the standard reply is, “It’s a lot of things.” When there is no accountability and limited or defused leadership on the subject, there is no one who feels accountable or capable to move the ball forward and execute.

This conundrum cannot be solved by a tax credit or some new mortgage product. This conundrum requires focus and leadership. And the inability to gain ground on this will only continue producing pockets of social unrest and continued divisions in this country.

While these things will always exist, meaningful work can be done to change the cycle of inopportunity that is pervasive along class and color boundaries in homeownership in this nation.

Bio: David H. Stevens, CMB, is a housing policy finance advisor. He is the former president and CEO of the Mortgage Bankers Association and former commissioner of the Federal Housing Administration

MAY 2021

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4. Appraisals Appraisal outcomes can be discriminatory. There is simply too much research that shows how home appraisal values can change simply because of the owner of the home, the homebuyer or the neighborhood, and its residents solely due to color.

Earlier this year, there were many stories published about discrimination in appraisals based on race, such as an article in the New York Times titled, “Black Homeowners Face Discrimination in Appraisals,” where these homeowners, a mixed-race couple, swapped out all the Black family photos for white family members only and hid the Black family member photos in order to get a better value on the second appraisal after being concerned with the low value on the first one.

The dependence on human judgement in appraisal can sometimes come with negative outcomes. The separation of the home on-site property review, measurements and photos, might be better served if separated from the individual doing the actual valuation so as to remove any color blinders in the process.

5. Down payment A down payment continues to be one of the single greatest barriers to entry in buying a home. As shown in the chart from the Economic Policy Institute, whites not only start off with more wealth regardless of inheritance, but when provided an inheritance, they, on average, benefit greatly.

Black families benefit very little in comparison. The lack of inter-generational wealth accumulation in this nation among minorities has a cumulative affect over generations by extending the opportunity gap. There have been many articles on the value of down payment assistance programs in eliminating this gap.

In fact, last year 40% of all FHA purchase transactions had some form of down payment assistance. The challenge in DPA programs generally is the inconsistency in application across the country. HUD could play a role here, as could FHFA, by establishing program requirements for DPA if used on one of their products.

This could include standards for underwriting, housing readiness education, loan terms, servicing standards, etc.

If each of the many hundreds of housing finance agencies and governmental entities at the state, county, and municipal level all adhered to the same underwriting approaches, the ability of lenders to adapt their multi-state or national platforms to these programs might be improved.

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ignificant technology trends continue to change the way people interact and work, and collateral valuation is no exception. First American continues to innovate its valuation business by delivering instant access to property data, improving collaboration among appraisers, appraisal management staff and lenders, and implementing cutting-edge quality assurance tools. This results in increased efficiency and greater accuracy, leading to an excellent customer experience.

First American offers an integrated suite of staff and network appraisal products and services, including standard appraisals, collateral inspection services and hybrid valuations through First American Mortgage Solutions’ Appraisal Management Company (AMC) and the First American Staff Appraiser Company. This unique valuation offering is bolstered by the industry’s largest, most comprehensive database of property and homeowner information and recorded document images.

Traditionally, appraisers gather information manually in the field and return to their desktop for data entry. However, both First American’s network and staff appraisers receive a comprehensive property data report before inspection, allowing them to better understand the subject property, establish comparable data and quickly identify potential complexities. Leveraging the company’s proprietary technologies – ACI Sky Delivery and ACI Sky Review – helps speed up the process and provides easier access to data for assessing the property.

ACI Sky Delivery applies dynamic rules to identify exceptions and render real-time results, while ACI Sky Review offers an interactive window into the appraisal report, empowering greater quality control. These features enable quick and efficient review of the reports and increase the quality of the services First American provides through both its AMC and Staff Appraiser Company.

Angie Marks works alongside executives to strengthen customer relationships and collaborate across departments to create operational efficiencies and improve end-user experience.

MAY 2021

Even as First American continues to innovate its technology, the company relies extensively on its vetted panel of experienced and knowledgeable appraisers to deliver a robust, high-quality valuation. Using the First American valuations platform, network appraisers are more efficient, and their valuations are more accurate.

“Our applications incorporate the country’s largest property database and our innovative QC technology in everything we do,” said Peter Krumm, chief appraiser, First American Mortgage Solutions. “Appraisers can choose to use the information provided or amend it based on their inspection and expertise. With built-in, automated quality controls, appraiser reports are checked as they are submitted, helping them adhere to lender requirements. Not only does this cut down on the back-and-forth between valuation experts, lenders and borrowers, it also boosts efficiency and improves accuracy, which ultimately reduces inconveniences for homeowners.”

“We understand how important data integrity is to our clients,” said Angie Marks, national sales director, First American Mortgage Solutions. “We are always seeking ways to leverage technology to eliminate data omissions and compliance issues. With the implementation of recent technology enhancements, pre-delivery report rejections have decreased by 42%.”

By leve r a g i ng au t om a t ion, F i r s t American’s AMC lessens the administrative time spent on reports, reduces revision rates and generates a paper trail for quality assurance.

“Our valuations technology and automation solutions not only help First American deliver a better experience for our lender and AMC customers,” said Matt Hocevar, senior director of valuations and head of First American Mortgage Solutions AMC. “But these solutions also help us achieve it faster and with higher quality.”

- SPECIAL REPORT -

Sponsored Content

Incenter’s virtual appraisal solution brings “armslength” photos back to the remote inspection process

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s many housing professionals saw firsthand, the valuation process was disrupted by the coronavirus pandemic. With social distancing and lockdown orders, appraisers struggled to determine a home’s value without being there in person.

To help mitigate these pain points, Incenter Appraisal Management is offering remote BPO and remote inspection capabilities paired with AVMs. These virtual solutions enable lenders and servicers to get their eyes on a property, regardless of whether they can appraise it in person – as long as the homeowner has access to a cell phone.

“Unlike any bifurcated or traditional ‘in-person’ inspection product, the inspector, agent or appraiser is able to see and view the images and video of the home by using the homeowner like a ‘human tripod,’” explained Mark Walser, president of Incenter Appraisal Management.

From an accuracy perspective, the pictures and images generated are geo-location coded and meta-tagged, and the inspector can see and mark up the images in real-time without the risk of missing something out of frame. Not only does this solution benefit the inspector but also the borrower. They don’t have to have someone physically visit their home and they don’t have to download an app or do any of the work themselves.

“This remote process makes for 100% accuracy and zero possibility of image manipulation from the person at the property holding the camera,” Walser said. “This also ‘future-proofs’ the inspection process from any potential negative impacts like pandemic lockdowns or natural disasters.

As long as there is someone at the property, an inspection can be done in hours or days, not weeks.”

The remote BPOs and remote inspections keep the process going, even during

INCENTER www.incenteram.com

THE EXECUTIVE:

MARK WALSER PRESIDENT OF APPRAISAL MANAGEMENT Mark Walser is responsible for overseeing operations, sales and technology for the company nationally and supporting its sister brands.

“It’s a game-changer for consumers and speeds up the inspection process while also keeping the homeowner and inspector safe.”

- Mark Walser, President of Appraisal Management

a lockdown.

Using this technology, homeowners, lenders and inspectors don’t have to worry about putting off the inspection process or skipping it altogether. The many applications for financial institutions of this technology include Home Equity Lending to Insurance inspections.

“It’s a game-changer for consumers and speeds up the inspection process while also keeping the homeowner and inspector safe,” Walser added. “Our solution brings back the notion of ‘arms-length’ images to a remote inspection process, which is something the industry definitely needs right now.”

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Incenter’s Remote BPO and remote inspections don’t require homeowners to download mobile applications and take pictures on their own. The inspector attesting to the home inspection or the real estate agent performing the BPO Inspection is able to take the pictures they want via the owner’s camera. This process speeds the return of accurate broker price opinions and inspections to the lender, without borrowers or third parties visiting the property or manipulating the images, introducing a crucial “arms-length” component of the process previously unavailable in a mobile inspection performed with a homeowner.

MAY 2021

- SPECIAL REPORT -

Sponsored Content

NATIONWIDE APPRAISAL NETWORK (NAN) www.nan-amc.com

THE EXECUTIVES:

JONI PILGRIM FOUNDER AND CEO Joni Pilgrim oversees all day-to-day operations and executes on NAN’s vision and mission to revolutionize the way appraisal management companies operate.

STEVE SUSSMAN CHIEF BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT OFFICER Steve Sussman develops and fosters longterm relationships with new and existing clients, and takes the necessary time to understand their challenges to offer solutions.

CARI PINKERT

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FOUNDER AND CHIEF INFORMATION OFFICER Cari Pinkert is responsible for optimizing and managing the overall operation of NAN’s IT department and the technology development of both internally-facing and externally-facing systems.

Nationwide Appraisal Network’s valuation solutions allow lenders to select appraisers based on performance

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ith an increased demand for appraisals, the need for efficiency during the appraisal process is greater than ever. Nationwide Appraisal Network (NAN) is an industry-leading appraisal management company providing residential and commercial valuation services in all 50 states. NAN’s advanced data and predictive analytics provide lenders with a suite of valuation solutions that help streamline the appraisal process, and stakeholders in this industry seek out AMCs who are at the forefront of innovation. NAN offers a combination of technological innovation and common-sense efficiencies, which add up to a true competitive advantage for its lender/broker partners.

NAN’s valuation solutions give lenders the chance to evaluate, select and manage appraisers based on their quality and performance. NAN utilizes technology that evaluates appraiser key performance indicators (KPIs) in real-time and generates a score based on quality and performance milestones, including turn times, CU scores, an on-time percentage, and even a percentage of value disputes.

“It’s one thing to be able to leverage technology to optimize the selection of appraisers for the best possible outcome, but to consistently raise the bar on turn times and communication to create a flawless customer experience every time – that’s what sets us apart,” CEO Joni Pilgrim said.

“We work to modernize the way appraisal management companies provide valuation services through innovation, transparency, accountability and world-class service.“ NAN’s suite of solutions ensures compliance with federal and state guidelines. In terms of performance, it decreases turn times, while increasing appraisal quality and reliability at the same time. By removing subjectivity from appraiser selection and replacing it with a transparent, objective approach, NAN improves the quality and performance of the appraisal process.

MAY 2021

“It’s in our DNA to always be on the forefront of technology, and our usage of advanced data and analytics, along with performance-based appraiser incentives, has not only allowed us to raise the bar on turn times and report quality but allows our clients to truly hold us accountable and review our performance in real-time,” said Steve Sussman, chief business development officer.

NAN’s predictive analytics allow files to be assigned to the best performing appraisers in each market based on thousands of data points. By leveraging KPIs for all local market appraisers, appraisers are dynamically scored in real-time, and NAN seeks the highest-scoring appraiser for each assignment.

“What differentiates us can differentiate our lending partners too. It’s the difference between a regular AMC and a ‘smart’ AMC,” Founder and Chief Information Office Cari Pinkert said. “We listen to our clients and pivot quickly. By investing in business intelligence tools, NAN transforms appraiser selection and increased efficiencies for lenders.”

The technology ensures a compliant method of selection based on past performance and predictive analytics, and NAN’s concierge approach to service allows them to combine that data-driven approach with a genuinely human touch. The result is a seamless experience for the broker/lender community, where appraisals are completed efficiently, without sacrificing quality.

“Our lender partners are always in the know and can focus on what really matters, which is closing loans. What we do as a leading national AMC provides our clients and their borrowers peace of mind,” Sussman said. “They can close confidently, knowing the best lending decision was made for the biggest investment of their life because we were able to ensure a top-quality appraisal report completed by the most qualified appraiser for the job.”

- SPECIAL REPORT -

Sponsored Content

R

eal estate technology has changed the appraisal piece of the “supply chain.” rapidly over the last few years, and It combines Valligent’s innovative virtual property valuation is no exception. appraisal technology, which allows an inToday, borrowers and lenders alike expect spector to walk through a home virtually, an easy and expedited home loan experi- take photos and assign a condition rating ence. And to make that happen, lenders to each room, with Quantarium’s indusneed a solution that streamlines the ap- try-leading and highest-ranked automated praisal process and eliminates potential valuation cascade.

This valuation solution uses Quantarium’s mistakes.

Appraisals are often time-consuming. AI to understand and optimize information Efficient data collection with aggregation based on the specific neighborhood, zip and next-generation market analytics can code and county level.

QV M Insig ht s drastically impact leverages real-time the closing pro streaming data process. Quantarium, “QVM Insights delivers a vided by Valligent, an artificial intellistandardized, consistently combined w ith gence and RE data repeatable valuation process proper t y- centr ic analytics company, that dramatically reduces risk data. It also facalong with Valligent and offers seamless technolotors in the effects Technologies, a valgy to speed up the revaluation of foreclosures, reuation technology process.”-Jeremy McCarty, Cocent sales and other innovator and an Founder and CEO of Valligent data inputs from appraisal managevirtual inspection ment company, created QVM Insights. QVM Insights combines to room-by-room condition. Using this invirtual inspection technology with indus- formation, QVM Insights arrives at a valutry-leading automated valuation services ation outcome.

“QVM Insights delivers a standardized, for professionals in the real estate ecosystem. Through the power of Quantarium’s consistently repeatable valuation process AI, combined with Valligent’s virtual in- that dramatically reduces risk,” Co-Founder spection insights, this solution incorpo- and CEO of Valligent Jeremy McCarty said. rates real-time updates of a property’s con- “From cutting-edge virtual appraisal techdition to provide the most comprehensive nology to AI-driven Quantarium Valuation Services Platform, QVM Insights offers and accurate digital RE valuations.

“From independent professionals to seamless and innovative technology to mortgage companies, banks and GSEs, speed up the revaluation process.”

The typical appraisal process can be time the QVM Insights solution applies to vast swaths of the residential real estate foot- intensive and take weeks to months to comprint,” Quantarium CEO Clement Ifrim plete. Consumers, lenders, regulators and said. “QVM Insights provides the most com- GSEs all demand and deserve exceptionprehensive snapshot available today and al velocity, accuracy and breadth in their sharpens the overall property valuation valuation solutions. Integrating a virtual, process, as well as provides access to the automated-yet-accurate and inexpensive industry’s latest and most comprehensive solution is key to increasing efficiency. QVM Insights provides accelerated valuations to property insights.”

QVM Insights is an easy-to-use, accu- increase loan approval rates and help lendrate and technology-driven way to manage ers retain customers.

MAY 2021

QUANTARIUM AND VALLIGENT TECHNOLOGIES www.quantarium.com www.valligent.com

THE EXECUTIVES:

CLEMENT IFRIM CO-FOUNDER AND CEO OF QUANTARIUM Clement Ifrim is a visionary entrepreneur, 15 year Microsoft veteran and computer research scientist who co-founded Quantarium along with colleague John Smintina, Ph.D.

JEREMY MCCARTY CO-FOUNDER AND CEO OF VALLIGENT Jeremy McCarty is a leader in developing next-generation property valuation solutions in conjunction with his co-founder Jeff Wickham.

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QVM Insights from Quantarium & Valligent Technologies delivers a standardized valuation process to reduce risk

- SPECIAL REPORT -

Sponsored Content

RADIAN www.radian.com

THE EXECUTIVES:

KADE CLARK SVP, RED BELL REAL ESTATE, A RADIAN COMPANY Kade Clark is responsible for the daily business operations of Red Bell Real Estate.

KATIE BREWER SVP, VALUATIONS SERVICES OPERATIONS

T

o effectively complete the valuation professional to physically visit the property.

“With up-to-date photos, mapping and process, lenders and mortgage companies need access to accurate data. satellite imagery, property histories and adRadian’s Red Bell subsidiary offers two val- ditional data, RIV gives clients the informauation services powered by real estate data tion they need to make informed decisions and cutting-edge proprietary technology, to about property condition, property price help lenders and other real estate profes- and the most relevant comparables,” said sionals make decisions quickly and confi- Katie Brewer, Radian’s SVP of Valuations dently: Radian Automated Valuation Model Services Operations.

Both the Radian Automated Valuation (AVM) and Radian Interactive Value (RIV).

Red Bell’s automated valuation solutions Model (AVM) and Radian Interactive Value leverage large-scale data from over 400 (RIV) are used by clients in the mortgage MLS’s, covering over 90% of the U.S., and and real estate industry. When deciding use sophisticated analytics to quickly and between the two, clients can choose the accurately price virtually any single-fami- service that best fits their unique needs.

“If users are looking to review their entire ly property in the country. Each service is portfolio value or make a quick decision uniquely suited to a variety of use cases. on a HELOC for exThe Radian AVM ample, we would recleverages Red Bell’s ommend the AVM,” dat a set a nd ad“Clients choose us for the Clark said. “For a va nced modeling speed, accuracy and covermore interactive exto accurately price age of our solutions, but properience that gives a l m o s t a ny s i n viding an excellent user expethe user control to gle-family properrience is also very important review property dety on-demand. The to us” - Katie Brewer, SVP of tails and comparaRadian AVM is indeValuations Services Operations bles for instances pendently tested and such as valuation approved by Fitch Ratings as an approved supplier of AVMs rebuttals or setting a listing price for an for residential mortgage-backed securities individual home, the RIV is the best option in the marketplace.”

(RMBS) transactions.

In addition to providing comprehensive “The Radian AVM offers speed and accuracy that makes it an indispensable tool data and analysis, Radian and its subsidifor use cases such as bulk portfolio valua- ary companies also work with an extensive tion and HELOC decisioning,” Red Bell Real list of tech partners to ensure clients can streamline their workflows.

Estate SVP Kade Clark said.

“Clients choose us for the speed, accuraRadian Interactive Value also incorporates Red Bell’s data set in an interactive cy and coverage of the solutions we offer, format that can be accessed from any de- but providing an excellent user experience vice. The RIV is based on community-spe- is also very important to us,” Brewer said. cific data that provides a tailored, in-depth “In addition to redesigning several of our analysis of a particular property, as well as services last year, in the coming months we the rental environment surrounding it to will be unveiling a newly designed Radian help clients perform expert property-specif- AVM that will enhance the experience for ic analysis, without the need for a valuation our customers.”

60 ❱ HOUSINGWIRE

Katie Brewer defines and creates innovative approaches to property valuation in order to ensure quick delivery, optimal quality and client satisfaction for all valuation services.

Radian’s valuation services leverage large-scale data to accurately price virtually any home in the country

MAY 2021

- SPECIAL REPORT -

Sponsored Content

Reggora’s appraisal platform provides automatic status updates to all stakeholders to increase transparency

T

THE EXECUTIVES:

BRIAN ZITIN CO-FOUNDER AND CEO Brian Zitin is responsible for the company’s overall vision and direction, ensuring Reggora stays focused on serving the best interests of the industry and its customers.

WILL DENSLOW CO-FOUNDER AND CTO Will Denslow leads all engineering strategies and initiatives, ensuring Reggora delivers innovative, agile and scalable solutions to its lender customers and appraisal vendors.

KEVIN FLYNN VICE PRESIDENT, PRODUCT Kevin Flynn leads product innovation and development for Reggora and works with a team of people focused on user feedback to ensure the best possible product is delivered to customers.

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here’s no denying the complexity of al waivers and new appraisal flexibilities the appraisal process. With so many spurred by COVID-19. Using Reggora’s people involved – including the ap- platform makes it easier for mortgage praisal desk, loan operations, loan offi- lenders to process more appraisals and cers, underwriters, the IT/product team, increase their loan capacity. Reggora also borrowers and appraisal vendors – there’s helps appraisers themselves spend less room for error that could negatively impact time on tedious tasks and more time focused on appraisals. the home buying experience.

“The FHFA Request for Input on ap“Appraisal is one of the most time-consuming and inefficient parts of the lending praisal indicates that significant changes process,” said Brian Zitin, co-founder of are likely to hit the industry sooner than ma ny expected, Reggora. and it will be vital “In order to help for lenders and apthe mortgage inpraisers alike to dustr y reach its “The future of mortgage will leverage a platform m i s sion of t he be digital, unlocking new like Reggora’s to ‘o n e - d a y m o r t ways to leverage data and shift to new ways gage,’ we’re hyanalytics. Reggora is excited of doing business,” p e r- fo cu s e d on to be one of the few vendors Zitin said. streamlining the positioned to help lenders Reg gor a ’s ap entire appra isal immediately capitalize on this praisal platfor m process.” new era of lending.” i nc lude s a usReggora is driv- Will Denslow, Co-Founder and er-friendly intering appraisal inCTO face, robust and novation with a seamless integramodern platform tions and the abilfor mortgage lenders and appraisal vendors. The platform ity to streamline workflows and increase streamlines the entire appraisal process appraisal capacity.

Reggora also provides automatic status with advanced automation, major LOS and POS integrations, and customizable updates to all stakeholders to create transparency and accessibility through its LOS workflows.

Lenders and appraisers using Reggora’s and POS integrations.

“We are excited to help lenders become platform benefit from algorithmic appraisal ordering, advanced payment process- more strategic about the way they maning, and automation across appraisal re- age their appraisal operations,” stated Will view, appraisal delivery, status updates, Denslow, co-founder of Reggora. “The fuand more. The technology enhances effi- ture of mortgage will be digital, unlocking ciency, resulting in faster turn times and new ways to leverage data and analytics a better experience for everyone involved. to power things such as appraisal vendor Reggora is designed for the future of selection, risk management and quality valuation, which is expected to embrace assurance. Reggora is excited to be one new synergies between technology, data of the few vendors positioned to help lendand human intelligence. This is already ers immediately capitalize on this new era taking shape through growth in apprais- of lending.”

REGGORA www.reggora.com

MAY 2021

- SPECIAL REPORT -

Sponsored Content

VALUELINK SOFTWARE valuelinksoftware.com

THE EXECUTIVES:

FARRUKH OMAR COO Farrukh Omar founded ValueLink Software in 2009. At ValueLink, Omar oversees all aspects of the operations, including product development, technology and infrastructure.

AQIL AHMED SVP OPERATIONS Aqil Ahmed oversees the day-to-day operations, manages the sales and operations teams and is directly involved in formulating the sales strategy.

BILL OMAR

ValueLink Software’s all-in-one valuation management solution includes a full spectrum of appraisal products

V

aluations are one of the most important parts of the loan process, and often the most time-consuming as well. Appraisals that contain errors or are not delivered on time can cause delayed closings or, in some cases, result in the loan falling through altogether.

The valuations industry is currently undergoing major changes. A declining population of appraisers coupled with a surge in origination volumes has accelerated efforts to modernize the valuation process.

These include shifting from traditional appraisals to alternative valuation products like Hybrids, Inspections and AVMs, where deemed suitable, to expedite the valuation process and reduce costs of origination.

ValueLink Software provides the industry-leading all-in-one valuation management solution that enables lenders and appraisal management companies to not only manage traditional appraisal products but also a full spectrum of modern valuation products like hybrids, inspections and AVMs in a unified platform.

Aqil Ahmed, SVP Operations at ValueLink Software, emphasized the importance of cost-effective alternatives to traditional valuation solutions at a time when loan originations are increasing rapidly during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Lenders are facing significant technical bandwidth constraints in the current environment,” Ahmed said. “Our unified valuation management platform offers lenders a wide spectrum of valuation solutions that are tailored to their requirements. Because of this solution, our customers have experienced up to a 40% improvement in order turn-times and significant operational

SVP CLIENT RELATIONS

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Bill Omar oversees the company’s support and onboarding teams and is involved in the technology behind ValueLink products.

MAY 2021

efficiencies.”

Innovation is at the heart of ValueLink and enables the company to quickly respond to the changing needs of the industry. With the onset of the pandemic, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac introduced temporary flexibilities to the valuation process which paved the way for advancements in the process. Within a month of the social distancing guidelines issued by the FHFA, ValueLink introduced a mobile-based remote property inspection tool, HomeView, which enables homeowners to easily collect information and photos of the property and submit it to the appraiser.

Valuelink offers seamless integration with over 40 Loan Origination Systems, and Valuation Ordering Platforms. Its customers love the fact that they can simply plugand-play with their origination platforms and deliver a user-friendly, transparent, and efficient experience to their customers.

With over 50 in-built reports, a powerful Report Builder tool and intuitive Analytics, ValueLink provides the most comprehensive suite of business intelligence tools to users. With data at their fingertips, customers can make faster, more informed decisions when planning for growth.

“At ValueLink, we see the challenges associated with valuations as our biggest opportunity and firmly believe innovation will help eliminate these bottlenecks. We are uniquely positioned to cater to the complete valuation spectrum by providing Lenders and AMCs an all-in-one solution to manage traditional and modern valuation products while delivering a cohesive experience to their consumers,” added Farrukh Omar, COO at ValueLink Software.

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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.

AIME......................................65 ALTA......................................65 MBA ......................................66 NAHB ....................................66 NAMB ....................................67 NAMMBA...............................67

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NAR.......................................68

MAY 2021

TRADE DESK

Marc Summers

President Association of Independent Mortgage Experts

AIME members, This month AIME is highlighting the expertise exemplified by members of the broker channel each and every day in order to ensure our community remains the best option in the home-buying market. The housing industry currently is going through a period of rising interest rates, which has created an unprecedented opportunity for brokers to succeed in a purchase-focused market that requires unique skills and knowledge that only professionals from the wholesale channel can provide.

This knowledge will require blending digital and scalable business models with increased personalized communication and providing community-based experiences. This will be crucial for mortgage professionals to master. AIME is laser-focused on these tasks by providing consumer education, advanced access to technology through the Brokers are Better Network and encouraging the industry to invest in the channel and advance

broker market share.

It is crucial for brokers to invoke curiosity to find problems before they exist and to use creativity to solve them as a means to put on full display all the progress we have made as a community. Above all, mortgage brokers must provide direction to teach others how to do both of those things in order to maintain the visibility of brokers across the country.

The wholesale channel is starting to see significant investment in how the industry interacts with customers and how to create a truly tailored and personalized experience for them. As we move into the second half of 2021, brokers are already providing access to the best rates and customized experiences in the mortgage industry, and we are determined to continue doing so. It is AIME’s mission to make sure consumers know they will win even more when we help level the playing field for brokers to be able to compete at scale.

ALTA members, Members of the American Land Title Association are doing good deeds every day, everywhere. At a recent ALTA event, ALTA Past President Mary O’Donnell had the honor of announcing the first full round of grants awarded by the ALTA Good Deeds Foundation. The foundation received more than 50 grant applications, and the foundation board was immensely pleased to give out 21 grants total.

The foundation awarded one emergency grant to the Harper Volunteer Fire Department in Harper, Texas, following February’s horrendous ice and snowstorms.

Additionally, the foundation bestowed 20 charitable grants to recognized 501(c)(3) organizations. In total, the foundation donated $125,000.

O’Donnell had the opportunity to speak with ALTA member Aaron Davis, CEO of AMD Enterprises, a business conglomerate based in Florida, when she revealed the emergency grant.

Davis took a leave of absence from his business to volunteer in Harper, TX. Although he was raising funds for a small town that was running out of food and had no potable water, Davis also helped the volunteer fire department cut down trees, clear brush and do whatever else necessary to assist residents.

American Land Title Association

During their conversation, O’Donnell and Davis remarked on the giant hearts and boot-strap attitudes of the people in the title industry.

Davis’ actions were “really indicative of our industry,” O’Donnell said. “When things are down, [title industry professionals] jump in and help.”

“We ‘roll them sleeves up’ and just get it done, don’t we?” Davis agreed.

Although the foundation board certainly felt blessed, we were not shocked at the money the foundation raised for these types of grants or how we read in grant applications, time and time again, the lengths to which ALTA members would go to volunteer and serve their local communities.

While the ALTA Good Deeds Foundation awards grants twice a year, the a s s o cia t ion ’s mem bers are doing good deeds ever y day, evCEO erywhere.

American Land Title Association

Diane Tomb

MAY 2021

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Association of Independent Mortgage Experts

Robert Broeksmit

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President & CEO Mortgage Bankers Association

Mortgage Bankers Association

TRADE DESK

MBA members, It is hard to believe this spring marks one year of the COVID-19 crisis.

Amidst the death, sadness, and financial difficulties placed on too many Americans, we can find inspiration in the courage, leadership, and decisive action taken by medical professionals, first responders, the federal government and, yes, the mortgage industry.

The ongoing collaborative efforts between our industry and Congress, the White House and government agencies have led to financial relief and certainty – at an uncertain time – for millions of struggling homeowners and renters.

Over the last year, MBA has championed several policies and processes aimed at helping Americans. These have included support for mortgage forbearance; emergency rental assistance; and a national, uniform moratorium on evictions and foreclosures.

Additionally, we have worked alongside Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, FHA, VA, and USDA to create more uniform loss mitigation options, allowing servicers to

NAHB members, As prices for materials like lumber, cabinets and appliances have soared and delivery delays have worsened, builders are seeing far-reaching consequences that can add thousands of dollars to the price of a typical new home. Many are experiencing additional challenges from appraisal standards that make it difficult to recognize the full impact of these factors on a home’s value.

A top priority for me as chairman of the National Association of Home Builders is to help tackle the housing affordability crisis. In this case, that means providing important information to members about the three different appraisal approaches: sales comparison, cost and income methods.

It is important that builders understand that it is acceptable — sometimes essential — for a builder to speak with the appraiser and provide relevant information needed to perform an accurate assessment of value.

NAHB has created a web page - Understanding Appraisal Approaches – to help builders create an “appraisal binder” that provides a cost breakdown of all materials used in the construction of the home. This

help borrowers more effectively. We also spearheaded numerous consumer awareness campaigns designed to help consumers who could not make their mortgage or rent payments understand their options.

Most recently, the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 delivers essential relief to millions of individuals and families affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, including homeowner and renter assistance, additional unemployment and direct assistance, and other support to businesses and state and local governments.

MBA will continue to monitor developments regarding mortgage forbearance, which our weekly data shows is, thankfully, declining as more individuals get back to work.

I remain optimistic that continued household support and the increased accessibility of COVID-19 vaccines will provide a shot in the arm to consumer confidence and lead to faster job growth and a healthier economy and country.

information will assist the appraiser in balancing the market value of the home with what it cost the builder in materials to construct it.

Under the cost approach, the appraiser estimates what it would cost to rebuild or construct an equivalent structure. Because this component of valuation considers the costs of materials used to construct the property, it is often very helpful in analyzing the value of a newly constructed home.

The cost approach to value is always used in combination with the sales comparison approach — with greater weight or emphasis given to the sales comparison approach, per Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac guidelines.

Builders should also incorporate existing home sales as comparable if there is a lack of new construction comps that can be used. Working together with all members of the home building community we can better provide much-needed housing at a price more families can afford.

National Association of Home Builders MAY 2021

Chuck Fowke

Chairman National Association of Home Builders

President National Association of Mortgage Brokers

NAMB members, 2020 was a challenging year as COVID-19 impacted all of us, personally and professionally. Despite the challenges, the National Association of Mortgage Brokers had an outstanding virtual NAMB National. We appreciate everyone who participated in that first-of-its-kind event. The nationwide pandemic, while difficult, has taught us all about resilience, flexibility and compassion.

Now, as we are months into 2021, we acknowledge and understand that COVID-19 is still with us. It continues to affect many decisions regarding travel and event attendance; however, NAMB is optimistic that vaccines will be widely available for our industry well before October and NAMB National 2021

NAMMBA members, “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know.” At the National Association of Minority Mortgage Bankers of America, we think it’s both.

We are dedicated to bringing more women and people of color to the table when it comes to the real estate, mortgage and finance industry.

But we can’t stop there. We want to make sure that they are supported by training as well as networking, career and growth opportunities.

That is why every year, we hold NAMMBA CONNECT, an industry conference designed to give trainers, NAMMBA partners and stakeholders the opportunity to pitch their company culture, training, and advice to the best and brightest.

Dovetailing with MISSION 2025 and Talent Hub, we bring over 30 chapters from across the country to 7 cities over the course of 3 months to participate with our partners at NAMMBA CONNECT and NAMMBA CONNECT Tours.

is perfectly timed for everyone to get back out and be together. We are looking forward to a LIVE event.

NAMB is monitoring the CDC requirements for personal safety and compliance and will take all necessary steps to protect our attendees and exhibitors.

The venue, Caesars Palace, is also taking special precautions with sanitizing stations, distancing, mask requirements, and more. I encourage you to read all about their safety protocols at www.caesars.com/health-and-safety.

We appreciate your continued support and look forward to seeing everyone in Las Vegas, Nevada, in October.

Please send all questions or comments regarding NAMB National to support@ namb.org.

With close to 50 new partnerships since January 2021, we are looking forward to our 5th Anniversary, next level conference from September 16-19 in Atlanta, Georgia at the Westin Buckhead Atlanta.

“The conference blew me away. I was taken aback by just really the passion of all the people. To be learning alongside some of the best people in the industry has been really phenomenal,” stated a conference participant.

NAMMBA CONNECT 2021 provides training, education and professional development to anyone in the real estate, mortgage and finance industry. This is your opportunity to connect with industry stakeholders, world class trainers and peers from across the country. Registration opens in early May.

National Association of Minority Mortgage Bankers of America

MAY 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, With the hope that the worst of the pandemic appears to be behind us, staff and leadership at the National Association of Realtors have begun to shift attention away from determining how we navigate COVID-19 to asking how we can lead the economic revival we’ve all been expecting.

At NAR, that process starts and ends with our advocacy team, which since this virus first arrived has been hard at work ensuring the protection and preservation of America’s real estate industry.

From Capitol Hill and in the federal agencies dotted across Washington, D.C. to numerous state capitols and governor’s mansions, our voice has been both consistent and essential – not only to protect housing but to keep the nation’s economy afloat.

This May, we welcome tens of thousands of real estate professionals to the 2021 Realtors Legislative Meetings & Trade Expo. This is the second straight year in which NAR has hosted these meetings virtually, having enjoyed record participation in 2020 and expecting even greater turnout this time around.

The conference, which in a normal year is held on site in Washington, D.C., gives Realtors from across the coun-

try an opportunity to meet with their representatives and present a unified voice for real estate throughout the halls of Congress.

In the 117th Congress, NAR’s federal advocacy focus is centered around four key themes: improving access to homeownership, enabling a quick recovery after the COVID19 pandemic, ensuring fair housing for all, and building strong and resilient communities and businesses.

With an intentional, unwavering commitment to these four policy areas, NAR will work hand-in-hand with legislators and policymakers to reinforce the housing market and reinvigorate commercial real estate, leading our industry out of this pandemic just as it has steered us through the past 14 President months.

National Association of Realtors

Charlie Oppler

National Association of Realtors

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MAY 2021

A podcast focused on female financial empowerment featuring HousingWire's Sarah Wheeler and Brena Nath.

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MORTGAGE

MAY 2021

MORTGAGE

UWM & Rocket both declare victory in broker war WHERE DID THE BIG BROKER SHOPS END UP?

B

efore T hur sday, March 4, John was an unabashed fan of United Wholesale Mortgage. His West Coast brokerage shop sent tens of millions of dollars in loans to the wholesale mortgage

giant in recent years.

He also believes UWM President and CEO Mat Ishbia is sincere when he says the ultimatum was issued to protect the broker channel from existential threats, specifically from Rocket Mortgage and Fairway Independent Mortgage.

“It’s honestly an excellent company,” he said of UWM. But as of March 15, he decided to no longer do business with the lender, which originated over $182 billion in mortgages last year and is easily the biggest producer within the space.

“The reason I do this, the reason I’m a broker,

"...what he did is anti-choice, anti-consumer and it isn’t aligned with our values."

MAY 2021

is because I believe in choice – it’s that simple,” said John, whose real name is being withheld by HousingWire so he can speak openly about his decision.

"So Mat can talk about how he’s doing this to protect brokers and all, but I just felt like what he did is anti-choice, anti-consumer and it isn’t aligned with our values. So yeah, we’re not going to sign.”

Ishbia, whose company went public in January and is valued at $16.58 billion, made arguably the biggest hardball play in the history of the broker channel in issuing his ultimatum on Facebook Live.

At stake is the business of about 3,000 brokers who use UWM, Rocket and/or Fairway.

In Ishbia’s estimation, these two companies, which both have retail operations, are trying to cut the broker out of the mortgage equation. Rocket is training real estate agents to originate loans, and Fairway is trying to poach loan officers, he claims.

And if such moves go unchecked, brokers could find themselves an endangered species in a decade, Ishbia believes.

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BY JAMES KLEIMANN

72 ❱ HOUSINGWIRE

MORTGAGE

In the wake of an ultimatum that mortgage brokers couldn’t use Rocket Pro TPO and Fairway Independent Mortgage while still sending loans to United Wholesale Mortgage, Mat Ishbia declared victory.

In a statement issued after the March 15 deadline, the president and CEO of UWM said that more than 10,000 broker shops have pledged to no longer work with Rocket and Fairway, whom he said have been working behind the scenes to destroy the broker channel.

“I’ve received hundreds of calls and emails from mortgage brokers across the country and have been blown away at the positive response we’ve received, along with the sheer number of shops who have locked arms with us because they felt it was the right thing to do,” Ishbia said.

“We’re going to be able to look back at this as a pivotal moment that helped catapult independent mortgage brokers’ growth.”

However, such a declaration leaves out important context. Before Ishbia issued his ultimatum on March 4, UWM worked with roughly 12,000 broker shops. Though Ishbia initially said the edict would force about 3,000 brokers to make a decision, UWM later said 4,600 broker-owners were affected. Of those 4,600, UWM said about 3,000 accepted the addendum.

About 400 declined to sign and 1,200 never responded, which means they are not able to send new loans to the Pontiac, Michigan-based lender.

Critics of the move say that roughly two weeks after the ultimatum was issued, UWM now has 1,600 fewer brokers that can send loans to the mortgage giant, which does more purchase business than any other company in America.

While Rocket and Fairway can generate business in retail and consumer direct channels, UWM’s path for growth relies exclusively on increasing the number of brokers and cementing more of them as clients. The broker channel is currently around 20% of the overall mortgage

“Rocket Pro TPO has already grown its market share since UWM’s announcement."

market. Ishbia wants it to be one-third of the market by 2025, with UWM at roughly 50% of marketshare in wholeasle.

Like UWM, Rocket, easily the biggest mortgage lender in America having originated about $320 billion last year, expressed similar jubilation. “ R o cket Pro T P O has already grown its market share since UWM’s announcement and will continue to do so in the weeks, months and years ahead,” a company spokesman said. “More than 9,000 brokers stood up and said no to UWM’s ultimatum. They see the writing on the wall and are not signing up to become a controlled loan branch of UWM. In addition to our thousands of tried-andtrue broker partners, we had hundreds of new brokers submit an application to partner with us as they chose freedom over mandates. In fact, two of the largest broker owners who previously did no appreciable business with our company rejected UWM’s addendum and are now building a relationship with Rocket Pro TPO.” Who gained more than they lost in this skirmish? Are there any winners? It depends whom you ask.

I

Ishbia knew he was never going to get 100% of the 4,600 brokers to sign the addendum; he was hoping for 80% to sign the addendum. UWM believes that at least half of the 1,200 who haven’t answered will eventually agree to not work with Rocket and Fairway, pushing the figure even higher.

In Ishbia’s view, he needed to do something bold to hobble Rocket and Fairway, whom he believes represent an existential threat to the mortgage broker and therefore, the future of his business.

In that regard, UWM believes the gambit

MAY 2021

MORTGAGE

your business, day by day. Sending them loans is like the slowest suicide mission ever.”

channel, which is a better avenue to win purchase business as refinancings wane.

Other big lenders that used UWM,

"If you allow that to happen once, who knows what they’ll do in the future?"

T

The biggest brokerage firm up for grabs was undoubtedly Thuan Nguyen’s LoanFactory, headquartered in San Jose, California. Nguyen himself was the top loan originator in the broker space in 2020, personally originating over $1 billion, the majority of which were refinancings.

Last year, his brokerage directed roughly $3 billion in closed loan volume to Rocket Pro TPO, UWM, Homepoint (a pure-play wholesaler), Carrington, Sprout, Kind Lending and a few other select lenders.

He’s also expanding. Nguyen, who also licenses and sells his own proprietary technology to broker shops, has massively increased his footprint. LoanFactory outposts are now in 20 states.

Nguyen told HousingWire at the time that it was a difficult decision, not one he wanted to make. Forced to choose, he went with Rocket Pro TPO. Given how much business he did with both lenders, he was in a no-win situation.

“Some MLOs and branch managers are not happy,” he said. “It creates a lot of internal issues.”

Rocket claims that it retained 22 of its top 25 broker partners. Those large players are critical to Rocket’s goal of expanding market share in the broker

MAY 2021

Rocket and/or Fairway that elected not to sign the addendum include Charlottebased Lemonbrew, a tech-heav y mortgage brokerage that is expected to do over $1 billion in originations this year; LoanPronto, another North Carolinabased lender that’s among the country’s biggest mortgage brokerages. Californiabased firms LoanMonkey and Preferred Financial Group also declined to sign the addendum.

HousingWire couldn’t immediately determine if Arizona-based Barrett Financial Group, one of the nation’s top brokerages, elected to sign the addendum, which stipulates that any broker could be penalized as much as $50,000 in violations per month. UWM and Rocket both declined to name the firms that either signed the addendum or declined to sign.

UWM still has many heavy-hitters who have sworn off using Rocket and Fairway: C2 Mortgage and Nexa Mortgage. It also pulled in Jay Shalaby’s E Mortgage Capital and United Wholesale Lending as part of the ultimatum.

Still, many large brokerages resented being forced to make a decision and deal with the fallout.

“I wasn’t going to let someone with his own agenda strong-arm me,” one top broker-owner who didn’t sign the addendum told HousingWire. “If you allow that to happen once, who knows what they’ll do in the future?"

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has been a success. Ishbia now has assurances that 3,000 or more brokers who did business with Rocket no longer will.

Ishbia, whose battles with Rocket are becoming legendary, has accused his arch-rival of paying real estate agents to become loan officers, which cuts brokers out of the equation. (Rocket denies the accusations and says only 90 real estate agents originate their own loans with them.) And Fairway, Ishbia said, has tried to poach LOs from brokers to join Fairway’s retail operations. (Fairway declined to comment on the accusation, though it released a statement saying it supports a broker’s right to choose which lenders it partners with.)

“Listen, everyone can do what they want, but here’s my perspective: I’ve got your back. UWM isn’t adding any other lenders,” Ishbia told brokers in a video.

“These are the two we are focused on.

Is this legal, am I allowed to do this? Of course it’s legal. We’re saying we’re only going to partner with people that are allin. And if you’re all-in, our definition is you’re not working with the enemy of the broker channel.”

Ishbia has likened the struggle to the National Association of Realtors not treating Zillow as a threat to real estate agents. “In the same type of way, we’ve got your back and always will,” he told agents. “This decision was made for the greater good of the broker channel...we’re not telling you what to do. It’s your choice, your option. We’re basically stating our business plan, our philosophy, which is ‘don’t help the enemy of the channel.'”

Numerically, Ishbia has a lot of support, particularly among the contingent of “allin” brokers affiliated with AIME. “You’d have to be out of your mind to side with Rocket in all this,” one Midwest mortgage broker-owner told HousingWire. “Or you’re so blinded by the money right now and don’t think about the future. It’s like, they’re literally killing

74 ❱ HOUSINGWIRE

REAL ESTATE

MAY 2021

REAL ESTATE

Where real estate agents fit into Zillow’s grand vision AGENTS CONCERNED ABOUT IBUYING, MOVE TO BROKERAGE

Z

illow is the elephant in the room, and Mynor Herrera doesn’t know whether to feed it, ignore it, or find a mouse.

Herrera at first felt he needed to work with Zillow, and he sent a check to the company each month in exchange for leads. But the head of Mynor & Associates, a Keller Williams affiliate in Bethesda, Maryland, grew frustrated.

“We used to attribute 25% of our business to Zillow,” Herrera said. “But they were constantly changing their fee structure, so we couldn’t count on it. Also, we figured they would wake up one day, and say, ‘Hey, we’re a brokerage.’”

Zillow, for years, made money selling leads to real estate agents, a practice that agents like Herrera already felt ambivalent toward.

But Zillow has changed.

“We used to attribute 25% of our business to Zillow” -Mynor Herrera

MAY 2021

In 2020, the three-year-old Zillow Offers program, where Zillow itself buys a home and then resells it, made up the majority of both company revenue and expenses. That’s despite the company pausing the iBuying program for four months amid the pandemic.

In January, Zillow opened brokerages in Atlanta, Phoenix, and Tucson, which focus on finding new buyers for Zillow Offers-purchased homes.

Rich Barton, company CEO since 2019, declared during a February earnings call that Zillow is pivoting from a media business to a transactional one. Barton spoke of a “one-click nirvana,” where real estate transactions can be exhaustively completed through the Zillow website or app.

Wall Street is buying what Barton is selling.

Zillow’s market cap has increased at an almost preposterous rate, with the company valued at $38.5 billion on March 10, four times its valuation a year ago.

Agents, however, aren’t sure where they fit into Zillow’s transformation.

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BY MATTHEW BLAKE

REAL ESTATE

Some see Zillow Offers and entry into brokerage as another attack.

“I hate Zillow. They are coming to eat our lunch if we let them,” said Frederick Warburg Peters, of Warburg Realty in New York City.

But others say they can keep pragmatically benefiting from a newlook Zillow.

“The only thing guaranteed in this business is change,” said Tony Rench, of Rench Real Estate in Denver. “It’s best to embrace Zillow rather than to complain.”

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E

Even before iBuying and one-click eternal salvation, there existed “a lovehate relationship between many agents and brokerages with Zillow,” said Ygal Arounian, an equity analyst at Wedbush Securities.

That ambivalence lies in the company’s DNA. Launched in 2006 by Barton, exCEO Spencer Rascoff, and Lloyd Frink, Seattle-based Zillow has consistently kept its focus on the homebuyer.

But Zillow’s growth was bankrolled not by customers but rather brokerages and agents. Agents such as Rench use Premier Agent, where they sign contracts to buy leads.

The more Rench pays Zillow, the more contacts he gets from customers interested in homes. Rench paid $24,000 over the past three months, he said, in order for Zillow to call him a “Premier Agent” that gets leads. The agent claims he netted $77,000 in commission income from those leads.

For years, Premier Agent was Zillow’s bread-and-butter. It operated at a profit in 2020, generating $1 billion, a 35 % leap from 2019.

“Not enough agents admit they pay

Zillow for leads,” Rench said.

Others, though, have long felt exploited

by Premier Agent.

It is the agent, these critics note, who enters information and pictures of a home into a National Association of Realtorsrun Multiple Listings Service.

Zillow, in turn, plucks the data from the regional MLS, places it on Zillow’s website, and then sells the leads to Premier Agents.

“I have never bought space on Premier Agent,” said Michael Nourmand, a broker at Beverly Hills’ Nourmand & Associates.

“I am not interested in them repackaging their data and selling it to me.”

But in parts of the country like Bowling Green, Kentucky, “The big boys are the premier agents,” said Garry Gevorgiyan, an agent at Coldwell Banker.

From 2018 to 2020, Gevorgiyan said he paid $2,000 a month for leads and snared a positive return on his investment. But Gevorgiyan stopped using Premier Agent this year, he said, as Zillow upped its fees.

N

Nine-point-six billion. That number hits as hard as a Joel Embiid elbow.

Zillow had 9.6 billion visits to its website in 2020, by far the most of any real estate company. They had 236 million unique monthly visits, compared to Redfin’s 49 million. According to a Google Trends report, more people in 2020 searched “Zillow” than “real estate.”

“Zillow has this monstrous brand awareness and people thunder to their website,” said Steve Murray, co-founder and senior adviser at RealTrends.

But Zillow’s monstrous traffic figures haven’t necessarily translated into huge revenues.

For example, save for Premier Agent,

MAY 2021

the company collects little from ad revenue – the banner and pop-up ads for sunglasses and mattresses that permeate media websites.

Zillow said it doesn’t do general ads because it would dampen the customer’s experience. “We are really committed to making real estate and shopping easier,” said a company spokesperson.

Instead of more ads, Barton envisions Zillow as a party to more home sales.

After all, Zillow’s own economists peg the total value of all U.S. homes at $36.2 trillion dollars.

“If Zillow can use their capital and name recognition to get just 4 to 6 % of market share, boom, they could stay a profitable company,” Murray said.

Under Barton, Zillow has ramped up a few transaction services including loan originations, and the company has said some planned new hires will enter its mortgage arm. Also, in February, Zillow acquired ShowingTime for $500 million, a portal that agents use to schedule home showings — and an accumulator of data related to those showings.

IBuying, though, is where Zillow has really put its money.

Zillow made over $1.7 billion in revenue from the sale of 5,337 homes in 2020, with an average sale of $320,500. The company’s total 2020 revenue was $3.3 billion.

But between the purchase of 4,162 homes, plus repair of current Zillowowned home inventory, Zillow spent $2 billion on the iBuying program, resulting in a $241 million loss.

The company’s overall 2020 net loss was $162 million. In other words, Zillow would have been slightly profitable were it not for its iBuying mega-ramp-up.

IBuying is enjoying a moment in the sun. Opendoor shares trade on the New York Stock Exchange, newer companies like Knock are knocking on the space, and Redfin upped its own iBuying.

Some of these companies vow to upend

REAL ESTATE

P

“Premier Agents are responsible for our biggest business today,” declared a Zillow spokesperson.

While, yes, Zillow Offers is bad news for a sales agent, the company deems it a rising transaction-tide that will even lift agents’ boats.

“There is potential for meaningfully more growth” in Premier Agent, the spokesperson said, as Zillow “makes more connections between our highintent customers and our best-in-class, high-performing agents.”

Plus, Zillow has no immediate plans to recruit a stable of in-house agents, perhaps another hopeful sign for Premier Agents.

Agents interviewed aren’t sure how threatened to feel by Zillow Offers. But the emerging consensus is that even if they have a role in iBuying, it’s at odds with what makes being an agent lucrative – and fun.

Adam Dow, broker at Dow Realty Group in Wolfeboro, New Hampshire, bowed out of Premier Agent last year, lamenting that its fees and structure (for example, a Zillow customer rep started talking to leads, instead of routing the lead directly to him) kept changing.

But Dow also cut ties because of the company’s move to transactions, and he knows New England rivals who have done the same.

“I think Zillow is now a competitor of

mine,” Dow said, adding, “There’s a conflict of customers” as, by directly buying homes, Zillow undermines listing agents.

Also, finding a buyer for homes on Zillow Offers, is, frankly, unappetizing – from Zillow potentially not getting right a home’s value, to the upkeep of an empty abode, to working on a home that Zillow accurately valued only because of its reliable blahness.

“You could see the iBuyer program working in a place where all the homes are the same, and can be easily valued, but it’s tough,” Dow said.

T

The way Yousuf Hafuda sees it, iBuying “couldn’t be further apart” from Premier Agent, and Zillow’s primary function as a listing website.

“One is asset-heavy and dependent on arbitrage,” the Morningstar equity research analyst said. “The other is asset light and depends on a tech solution.”

Zillow could turn a profit, Hafuda said, if they focused on Premier Agent and related media businesses.

But Zillow seems seduced, Hafuda added, drawn in to the tantalizing trilliondollar figure that is the U.S. real estate market, and businesses like Amazon that became profitable by doing it all.

Murray of RealTrends concurred.

“They don’t pay the earnings game,” he said. “They play the ‘some day we will be the Google of the world’ game.”

Beyond grow, grow, grow and one-click nirvana – “We imagine a future where the real estate transaction is as easy and transparent as a pizza tracker on your phone,” a spokesperson said – Barton hasn’t articulated an end game for the company’s own liberation from losses.

MAY 2021

Pressed on how iBuying could become profitable, Zillow referred to a shareholder note from last November: “Most sellers are also buyers, so as more people consider selling to us, we are able to create a flywheel effect when they go to buy their next home.”

The letter went on, “We are building adjacent services in both mortgages and title and escrow,” and plan to, “spread our low customer acquisition cost across all these services.”

So, Zillow wants to do it all in real estate.

And the role of agents in this isn’t nothing.

But agents’ role seems more like one worker on an assembly line, instead of a hand-holder amid the dynamic, stressful and inefficient process that is the home sale.

“At the end of the day, I still believe it comes down to relationships,” said Herrera of Mynor & Associates. “This is hundreds-of-thousands or millions of dollars you’re investing.”

“I mean, you go on Web MD right now, and figure out how to remove your kidney stones. That doesn’t mean it’s advisable," he said.

77 ❱ HOUSINGWIRE

the traditional agent model. Opendoor CEO Eric Wu once said in an interview, “It’s good to be hated by some agents.”

Zillow, on the other hand, is “careful to walk a fine line,” said Arounian of Wedbush, between growing transactions and “their Premier Agent business.”

REAL ESTATE BROKERAGE

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Real Estate Brokerage MAY 2021

REAL ESTATE BROKERAGE

Inside eXp Realty’s stunning growth A QUIET LEADER AND CONTROVERSIAL RECRUITMENT MODEL

G

lenn Sanford cuts a modest figure. Nope, wait, eXp Realty‘s Glenn Sanford isn’t cutting any real life figure at all.

It’s annual report time, and Sanford, the CEO of eXp, is cataloging the company ’s eyepopping growth onscreen as a cartoon avatar during a cloud-based earnings call that looks like Second Life or The Sims.

Since Sanford founded the company in 2008, most everything eXp (the name is because Sanford once looked in a dictionary and liked “exp” words – expert, expand, exponential...) is over the cloud.

Here’s a residential real estate brokerage that owns no property, has no franchisees or branches, and leases nary an office save its Bellingham, Washington, headquarters.

Sim Sanford is small amid a huge, animated podium, and also offers small, pointed assertions.

“They have a good story, and good talent, and they have taken full advantage of that.”

-Steve Murray

MAY 2021

Instead of vowing exceptionalism (an “exc” word), Sanford wants eXp to fit in.

“Our model is now recognized as a totally viable and legitimate model for the entire industry,” Sanford said on a call in March.

In a phone interview days after that, Sanford again is low-key. He politely answers questions like a local that’s giving directions, chalking up eXp’s profitability swing to “slight tweaks” in the business model.

But eXp has actually been on a rampage.

The company reported a profit in each quarter of 2020, including April through June when real estate was in COVID-induced panic mode. Revenue and sales volume grew 90% for the year.

Agent head count doubled to 48,000 salespeople in less than two years as eXp Realty plucked agents from brokerages including Sanford’s old employer, Keller Williams.

“I mean, they are just absolutely ravaging Keller Williams,” said Nick Solis, an industry consultant at One80 Realty in San Francisco.

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BY MATTHEW BLAKE

REAL ESTATE BROKERAGE

And the eXp share price has shot up 1,500%, from trading at $3.66 on the Nasdaq stock market in March of last year to $55.79 at close of business March 17.

The company’s market cap hovers around $8 billion, four times the Wall Street value of Realogy, the No. 1 U.S. brokerage by sales volume.

“They have a good story, and good talent, and they have taken full advantage of that,” said Steve Murray, co-founder and senior adviser at RealTrends.

Within the next few years eXp could be one of the top three brokerages in the country, Murray said, duking it out with the likes of Realogy, Keller, RE/MAX and Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices.

Pretty impressive for a business criticized for having a pyramid-esque structure.

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W

When you turn away from the festival booths that read “Agent count!” and “Stock price!” in dayglo neon, eXp Realty is a money-making but lean operation.

The company recorded $1.98 billion in 2020 gross revenue. But that figure includes the agent ’s cut of sales commission, plus agent’s revenue from the recruitment of other agents (more on agent recruitment later).

Agents in the U.S. get an 80% cut of their commission, with 20% going back to the company. And money toward eXp is capped at $80,000 of an agent’s gross annual commission.

When agents’ commission income is deducted, eXp generated just $159.6 million in 2020 revenue.

But the cloud-based company’s nonagent operating expenses were just $128 million. The biggest cost was payroll, as eXp’s employee headcount leaped 42% to 900 in 2020. There are also managing

brokers in each state. Without physical offices, the next biggest expense was “software equipment.”

That led to eXp Realty reporting $31.0 million in net income, a turnaround from losing money between 2009 and 2019.

“They have hit a critical mass of agents willing to adopt to the platform,” said Hannah Bomze, the co-founder of real estate app Casa Blanca, and a former Compass agent. “Having a cloud-based infrastructure proved very smart.”

The small tweaks Sanford alluded to include trimming agents’ discount to buying company stock. The company is recruiting agents in nine countries, and splits in countries including Mexico, Brazil, and South Africa hew closer to 70% agent, 30% eXp Realty.

Wall Street, Sanford argued, wants a real estate outfit with a legit tech valueadd. And becoming profitable “created a big shift in investor perception” for a company that until 2018 traded on a Canadian penny stock exchange.

S

Sanford peppered his answers with little self-aggrandizement, and his flourishes of salesmanship are more idiosyncratic than anything.

For example, Sanford touted eXp’s $7 million purchase last year of Success magazine, a Plano, Texas-based publication featuring self-help listicles and panels hosted by former swimsuit model Kathy Ireland with “lifestyle entrepreneurs.”

“It is the longest running personal development brand,” Sanford said – an entry point to a “$14 billion personal development market.”

Success magazine is great for eXp’s virtual agent training, Sanford declared.

MAY 2021

But the CEO interrupts his own pitch with the quip that agents will buy-in if he asks, “Hey, do you want to be on the cover?”

“I wouldn’t necessarily call Glenn a stoic individual,” said James Dunn, an eXp agent based in Los Angeles. “Because I think he has a passion for what he’s doing.”

Dunn said that he took to Sanford, “Because his tone is different and kind of vibes with me. I try not to be too high or too low.”

Sanford, who is 53 years old, graduated from the University of Oklahoma with a degree in computer science and economics. After a try as a dot-com entrepreneur, he became a real estate agent at Prudential in 2002 and moved to Keller Williams in 2004.

On LinkedIn, Sanford does brag about his Keller days, writing, “I ran one of the top 50 real estate agent teams in the country doing over $60,000,000 a year in production my fourth full year in the business” By what was to be year five, Sanford left and started eXp Realty.

He denied a rift with Gary Keller, noting Keller’s book, “The Million Dollar Real Estate Agent,” is taught in eXp’s training classes. But Sanford acknowledged he is driven to improve on Keller’s model.

(Keller Williams declined to comment on Sanford and eXp Realty beyond referring to the company’s own accomplishments from the past year. “We have nothing to add,” a spokesperson said.)

In building eXp Realty, Sanford exerts almost complete control. He, along with ex-spouse Penny Sanford, Jason Gerber, who is eXp’s vice-president of business development, and board member Gene Frederick, own 58.4 % of the company’s stock. There is no independent board of directors.

Sanford is “always having conversations with agents, brokers, and staff,” and those factor into eXp’s direction. However, Sanford said he is introverted, and spends

REAL ESTATE BROKERAGE

S

Sanford’s biggest strategic decision – or “1A” with choosing to operate virtually – is running what’s politely called a “multilevel marketing plan,” according to Yousuf Hafuda, real estate equity analyst at Morningstar.

“I wouldn’t categorize it as a pyramid scheme, although the terms are somewhat conflated,” Hafuda said. “But you are using your own workforce to recruit agents, so there is a pyramid-type element.”

Here’s how it works.

An eXp agent who recruits an agent to join eXp gets part of that recruit’s commission from each home sale. The precise cut depends slightly on how many salespeople the “sponsor” agent has recruited. But it usually comes to about 3.5 % of total commission.

That 3.5% – eXp is quick to note – does not come out of the recruited agent’s 80% commission split, but rather eXp’s 20%.

The company’s financial reports do not break out the agent revenue sharing program. Sanford approximated the figure as over $10 million a month out of eXp’s operational budget.

Sanford staunchly defended revenue sharing.

“It is fundamentally the thing that I wanted in a real estate brokerage,” he said. “At Keller Williams, there was a profit share plan. It wasn’t very profitable for me.

If it was, I would still be an agent there.”

Keller’s plan is based on profits instead of revenue. In other words, if the company lost money, the agents earn nothing for their recruitment efforts.

Money made from recruiting at eXp, then, is unlike any national brokerage, said Solis of One80 Realty. And that can make eXp’s workforce aggressive.

“Agents are very incentivized on recruiting,” Solis said. “For a while that was the big knock on eXp – that you are not going there to sell real estate, you’re going to recruit agents.”

The annals of YouTube are filled with eXp agents discussing their recruiting triumphs. Kyle Handy of San Antonio said that he made over $100,000 a year from revenue sharing (revenue sharing is capped so the sponsor agent cannot make more than $2,800 a year from who they recruit).

Sanford doesn’t apologize “for our agents being enthusiastic in growing the model.”

Hafuda of Morningstar saw nothing to ring the alarm about eXp’s agent recruitment, but noted, “It’s certainly not the predominant business model, and is a little fishy.”

One way that eXp Realty tries to normalize these triangular hierarchies is make them tantamount to franchises, branches, or agent teams.

Dunn, a former Keller Williams agent, was lured to eXp by Las Vegas agent David Golden, who’s brought dozens of agents to eXp (This is after Keller rewarded Golden a “black belt” for his agent recruiting there).

Golden has incentive that Dunn performs well, like a brokerage head might. And now Dunn is looking to recruit agents himself.

“I don’t have the high amounts of capital needed to start a brokerage,” Dunn said, “And I think this creates a new entrepreneurial path.”

MAY 2021

B

Brokerage is not a zero-sum market.

While eXp Realty plundered thousands of agents from Keller Williams (both companies declined to provide an exact figure), Keller reported a 2% uptick in 2020 salesforce count to 176,000 agents worldwide.

And though eXp lapped Realogy on Wall Street, that New Jersey-based brokerage conglomerate still boasts six times as many agents, and annual sales volume more than twice the $72 billion eXp reported for 2020.

Brokerages are riding a sales boom.

Agent license registrations are at a 15-year-peak, Sanford himself noted, along with home sales volume. But there lies concern that boom times never last, and more specifically that inventory hasn’t kept up with demand (one industry observer noted there may be more agents than listings).

One worry for eXp Realty is that one-size-fits-all commission splits and indiscriminate agent recruitment puts a ceiling on their growth by turning off mega-agents in luxury markets.

“I don’t think they can make a dent in New York City,” said Bomze, the former Compass agent. “It ’s very hard to penetrate that market, and eXp is more mass market.”

Sanford does not see eXp’s limited luxury presence as a big problem.

The company is also in early stages of iBuying as it keeps an eye on Zillow.

“When I think about competitors, I think of Zillow more than Keller or RE/MAX,” Sanford said. “Eventually Zillow will just make moves that challenge the real estate model.”

“The brokerage world is still very brickand-mortar,” Solis said.

That said, Solis added, “They are not going to be back-sliding because everybody is within six feet.”

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a lot of time alone, processing data.

“Ultimately,” he noted, “I’m the one who is making the strategic decisions.”

By Rebecca Ayers

with Catherine Dahl CEO, Beanworks

Women in Fintech: The journey to a global expansion strategy Dahl led her company to 77% growth in 2020 Although accounts payable automation software company Beanworks saw a decline in revenue in Q2 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, it was then able to persevere through the tough quarter to see its best sales year ever, Beanworks CEO Catherine Dahl said in an interview with HousingWire sister company, FinLedger.

After muscling through Q2, the company saw sales accelerate and 2020 revenue grew 77% year-over-year, Dahl said.

Canada-based Beanworks is a cloud-based company that helps businesses with their purchase-to-payment processes by getting rid of paperwork and manual processes and reducing invoice processing costs. The company claims it can reduce invoice processing costs by 86%. Nineteen percent of all manual expense reports include an error, according to the GBTA Foundation.

In November 2020, Beanworks launched its expense reimbursements feature that aims to help companies automate how they receive and process employee expenses.

Going forward, Beanworks expects to ramp up its hiring as well. The company currently has about 90 employees, but in the next three years Dahl expects the company to grow to 200 people, hiring folks across its revenue team along with their R&D department.

Dahl, who is a CPA, CMA with more than 25 years of operational accounting and management experience, spoke with FinLedger about strategy ahead, Beanworks expanding geographically and advice for women in the field.

HousingWire: How was the year 2020 for Beanworks?

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Catherine Dahl: We had our best sales year ever, and it sets us up for success in 2021. And the trend is continuing in 2021. We ended up ahead of the revised plan for 2020 from a financial perspective, which was phenomenal. We still had strong growth here. We were able to keep all of our team and actually grow the team throughout the year.

HW: What is your strategy for the company this year?

so you get an all things AP in one place. We are launching a new user interface. We are also moving to a global strategy in 2021. We’re in North America and very lightly outside of North America, but we will be working with a new partner and moving into a much more global footprint in 2021.

HW: When you say you’re doing a global expansion, where outside of North America are you expanding into?

CD: We’ve just started to put a footprint in Asia Pacific into the Australia and New Zealand markets. We’re going to continue there, and we’re looking at moving more strongly in the U.K. and European markets.

HW: What is your advice for Women in Fintech?

CD: The biggest problem is we women tend to be more cautious, which makes us good leaders and makes our companies more successful because we take more calculated risk vs. our male counterparts at times.

But sometimes that can also lead to a woman being more cautious about self-promotion and more cautious about their own confidence level — that they can or can’t do something, which can lead to the wrong impression at a board level.

For example, from a CEO’s perspective, I know I brought myself through a transition to get away from feeling like I underplay everything and the imposter syndrome to then bring myself to a place of confidence, where I can stand in front of my board and say, “This is the right strategy. This is what we need to be doing” and have full confidence.

CD: After we added a new module called expense management that we launched in December, part of our strategy for 2021 is to continue launching that in the marketplace,

MAY 2021

with Kamna Mittal Senior Vice President of Mortgage Lending for Guaranteed Rate Affinity

The journey to becoming a top-producing female loan officer What will define the market in 2021?

Last year was a monumental year for Kamna Mittal, senior vice president of mortgage lending at Guaranteed Rate Affinity, as she climbed the loan officer ranks at the company and reached the company’s Chairman’s Circle for the first time. The accomplishment makes her one of the company’s top producing loan officers for last year.

HousingWire: What does a successful loan officer in 2021 look like to you?

Kamna Mittal: It’s like you are building a house. You need to lay a foundation, and then brick by brick, or wall by wall, you put together things to build a home. This is the same approach. Even in 2021, if I need to be successful, it’s all the effort and the things that I have done over the years and am continuing to do moving forward that would help me become a good loan officer. And one of those things that I firmly believe is the importance of persistence.

There have been times that I followed a real estate agent for over four years not asking them for business, but just gently reminding them with my cards or sending a bottle of wine, like just doing something a little different. Be honest, be transparent with them. You just have to keep doing what you need to do to be persistent in your approach and not to give up.

KM: The industry is so male dominated, but what has helped me is to keep maintaining my focus and be myself.

I have equally respected and valued my work as I would have valued my family.

One of my mentors once told me that if you put in seven or eight hours every day, like you’re going to an office, you will see the results. And that’s what it has been. It’s believing in myself, never giving up, being honest and being persistent.

HW: What do you think it will take to get more women loan officers in the industry?

KM: I think as women, we get overwhelmed sometimes.

Normally, what I’ve seen is that women feel overwhelmed and just using the word sales can be stressful, but it’s the mentality.

We can educate ourselves and change that mentality.

We are already ready to handle the stress and the pressure in everyday life, and we handle it much better. It’s just believing in ourselves and a lot of goals.

HW: Last year brought a huge refi wave from low interest rates, what do you think will define the market in 2021?

KM: This year, most of our pipelines will be 50/50 between purchase and refinance. And it’s true, like even before 2020, when the rates were not low, our business was 50/50 purchase and refinance. We see that coming back in 2021. We will still get a good amount of refinancing because there will always be some people who need to refinance. The rates are still low, but they are not below 3% anymore. Our focus will be primarily on purchases.

HW: The mortgage industry is historically male dominated.

What advice would you give to women loan officers?

MAY 2021

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Mittal originally joined Guaranteed Rate Affinity over two years ago after seeing the success of other loan officers at the company.

“I was craving to get to the next level,” said Mittal when asked what brought her to the company. “I was growing in my career. I clearly knew that I had the right skills, but I might not have the right tools.

“I wanted to be part of an organization that could give me the right tools to get to the next level,” she said.

HousingWire interviewed Mittal to learn more about her journey to reaching the Chairman’s Circle, along with her thoughts on becoming a top-producing female in the mortgage space.

KUDOS

The need to give back Real estate brokerage donates portions of home sales to charities

By Tim Glaze

kud

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After 35-plus years in the corporate world of sales and management, Rick Avery decided to make a change.

“It was my wife who suggested real estate would be a good fit for me,” Avery said. “I was always intrigued by the process of buying and selling homes whenever we moved, and with her blessing, I decided to make the move into real estate.”

Avery, who lives in Denver, had but one caveat: he wanted to help others, in some form or fashion, in his new line of work. So, he immediately began researching charities to donate to, and how to go about getting involved with nonprofits through real estate.

“I decided that donating a portion of my commission to charity in the name of my clients was a clear differentiator and it also helped to make our community stronger, one home at a time,” he said.

That catchphrase – “making our community stronger, one home at a time” – became the tagline for the Giving Back Group. According to Avery, upon buying or selling a home, the group donates 20% of the commission to a local charity or nonprofit of the client’s choosing.

RE/MAX Alliance, Avery’s brokerage, was more than happy to get involved, he said. And the response he’s gotten from clients has reinforced the idea as a good one. To date, the Giving Back Group has donated nearly $24,000 to 11 different organizations.

“I met with a number of charities to discuss the concept, and got very positive responses,” Avery said. “I realized that these organizations could help spread the word to their communities. And while we have a number of charity partners, where we make the donation is always up to the client, regardless of the source of the lead.”

At 20% of his commission, Avery stands to donate thousands of dollars per house. In the midst of a busy seller’s market, home prices are sky-high and, in Avery’s own words, it’s nearly impossible to get a house for under $300,000. After the dust settles on selling a home worth around $475,000 – the current average home price in Colorado – Avery said he ends up donating around $2,400 to charity.

The process is straightforward, Avery said. The donation can be made to any 501(c)(3) organization, and the group currently has a list of local affiliated organizations it considers partners. While it’s not required to donate to these particular partner groups, their main objective is to spread the word among their network as an added bonus.

“We let the clients know these reputable organizations have been our biggest advocates and we love generating donations in their name, but we will happily donate to any

qualifying organization they want us to,” Avery said. “To date, we have donated to many partner and non-partner charities.”

Customers are made aware early in the process that a possible charitable donation is of no cost to them, Avery said. It’s simply part of RE/MAX’s regulated process of implementing new engagement opportunities while also helping non-profits that might be stretched thin on resources.

The customer response has been outstanding, Avery said, even in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, which turned the housing industry upside down with low inventory and skyrocketing home prices.

“If anything, COVID’s made us stronger as a team and for our overall outreach,” Avery said. “The organizations we target to support are taking the hit on funding and resources, and we do our best to fill in the gap and support them through these times.”

Charities and nonprofits have been searching for ways to raise money during the pandemic when so many are out of work. Donations from groups like the Giving Back Group go a long way in sustaining the aid these groups provide.

The Giving Back Group itself made an immediate impact.

Avery’s first-ever donation made through the program was to a national advocacy organization based in Boulder, Colorado in the amount of $2,139.20. It wasn’t until months later, however, that he realized how much of a difference that donation made.

“Later that year, [the company we donated to] sent me their annual report, and it included a list of their major donors that year,” Avery said. “And much to my surprise, my donation was included in the list of their top 2% of donors.

It was at that point that I realized that the GBG model could really make an impact.”

Avery’s Giving Back Group partner and broker, Victor Pereira, was especially touched by a donation made to Rocky Mountain Village Easter Seals – a place Pereira worked prior to coming to RE/MAX – to help fund their existing camp program that’s tailored to kids and adults with disabilities.

“The idea behind giving back to an organization that helped me grow has been extremely rewarding,” Pereira

MAY 2021

dos

KUDOS

“We are in a good place right now to really scale our efforts,” Avery said. “The Giving Back Group’s business model is simple. The donation addition to our regulated process is for engagement opportunities, and for us to create a diverse approach to funding for nonprofits that are stretched thin on resources.”

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said. “In general, my favorite part of being a part of the Giving Back Group is the call I make to the organization letting them know that our buyer chose them. The gratitude we receive to support them in continuing running their programs and services means everything to us.”

And during these unprecedented times in America, any amount helps, the duo said.

MAY 2021

parting shot

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❱ CONQUERING THE YEAR-ROUND PURCHASE MARKET After a record-breaking year for the housing finance industry in 2020, the last spring home-buying season turned to summer, to fall, winter and back to spring in the blink of an eye. And with it, there came new challenges, new technology and new competitors to flood the market. To break down the whirlwind that was 2020 and how it will impact 2021, HousingWire virtually hosted an ensemble of housing experts at HousingWire’s annual Spring Summit.

Above is HW Media CEO Clayton Collins and HousingWire Editor-in-Chief Sarah Wheeler during the live event.

MAY 2021

PRESENTS

ALL EYES ON PURCHASE JUNE 17, 2021 | LIVE EVERYWHERE

for registration details, visit housingwire.com/engage

It’s a new era for our industry.

You have a voice in where we’re heading next.

Exciting new things are coming for Rocket ProSM TPO partners – more tech, more connections, more portal capabilities, more products and more competitive pricing, and our commitment to growing your business is stronger than ever. We’re leveraging our brand to help you build yours.

Let’s build the future of our industry together. We know brokers can.

Learn more at RocketProTPO.com.

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