October/November 2021 Issue by HousingWire

October/November 2021

HOUSINGWIRE MAGAZINE ❱ Octobter/November 2021

A New FHFA?

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HOUSINGWIRE EDITOR-IN-CHIEF SARAH WHEELER MANAGING EDITOR JAMES KLEIMANN HW+ MANAGING EDITOR BRENA NATH SENIOR REAL ESTATE REPORTER MATTHEW BLAKE SENIOR MORTGAGE REPORTER GEORGIA KROMREI MORTGAGE REPORTER MARIA VOLKOVA LEAD ANALYST LOGAN MOHTASHAMI MEMBERSHIP COORDINATOR SARAHI DE LA CUESTA CONTRIBUTORS SETH APPLETON, ROMI MAHAJAN, STACY MARSHALL, DAVID H. STEVENS

REALTRENDS DIRECTOR OF REAL ESTATE MARK ADAMS EDITORIAL DIRECTOR TRACEY VELT DIRECTOR OF CREATIVE SERVICES BO FRIZE PROGRAM MANAGER LIZ SMITH FINLEDGER DIRECTOR OF PRODUCT HOLDEN PAGE ASSISTANT EDITOR ALEX ROHA REVERSE MORTGAGE DAILY EDITOR CHRIS CLOW

HW MEDIA CORPORATE CEO CLAYTON COLLINS COO DIEGO SANCHEZ DIRECTOR OF FINANCE ANDREW KEY DIRECTOR OF GROWTH CAREN KARRIS DIRECTOR OF EVENTS TRACY GARCIA CREATIVE EMILY CARPENTER MARKETING PROGRAM MANAGER LESLEY COLLINS CLIENT SUCCESS DIRECTOR HALEY HESS WEB DIRECTOR BRENT DRIGGERS PRODUCT MANAGER MATTHEW STAFFORD GROWTH COORDINATOR SYDNEY SMITH EVENTS COORDINATORS KATIE GALBRAITH CLIENT SUCCESS COORDINATORS SETH FREEDMAN, ELIZABETH LEDOUX BUSINESS ANALYST WHITNI ROWE SALES SVP SALES AND OPERATIONS JENNIFER WATSON LAWS CALIFORNIA CHRISTI HUMPHRIES SOUTHEAST TAMARA WREN GREAT LAKES & NORTHEAST MICHAEL ORME SALES STRATEGY ASSOCIATES AMINA JAHIC, LINDSLEY HARRIS PODCASTS AND MULTIMEDIA DIGITAL MEDIA MANAGER ALCYNNA LLOYD JUNIOR DIGITAL PRODUCER ELISSA BRANCH

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CONTENT SOLUTIONS MANAGING EDITOR MALEESA SMITH CONTENT EDITOR JESSICA DAVIS ASSISTANT CONTENT EDITOR JORDAN WHITE WEBINAR MANAGER ALLISON LAFORGIA

HOW TO REACH US LETTERS TO THE EDITOR EDITOR@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) 870-4572 ADVERTISING CLIENT SUCCESS CLIENTSUCCESS@HOUSINGWIRE.COM

OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2021

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

A year of transition 2021 HAS BEEN A YEAR of transition. We’ve

This month’s issue also features our distin-

been transitioning to a new White House admin-

guished list of Vanguard winners. HousingWire

istration, transitioning away from a refinance mar-

has long been dedicated to “moving markets

ket and cautiously transitioning back to meeting

forward,” and this list of 50 winners encompass-

in person. And now, the year is almost over, with

es what that looks like in action. These are the

only one more magazine issue left until we cross

executives who have become leaders in their

over into 2022. But before we head into the new

respective fields within housing and mortgage

year, this issue will focus on what today’s hous-

finance. And most notably, they’re the people

ing leaders and regulators are zeroed in on and

laying the foundation for the future of our indus-

the current state of housing.

try. Starting on page 42, you can read through

Addressing one of the biggest questions

their incredible accomplishments.

around where housing stands, the first feature in this issue looks at Sandra Thompson, the Federal Housing Finance Agency acting director, and her plans for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Mark Calabria, who led the FHFA before Thompson, was You can go to page 36 to learn how priorities have shifted since Calabria left the position.

Brena Nath HW+ Managing Editor @BrenaNath

Tweets From The Streets On this Women’s Equality Day, we celebrate the progress we have won, while advocating for the progress that remains.@HUDgov will continue this work to drive change through forging a stronger, more prosperous, and more equitable America for generations to come. 7 45 135 by @SecFudge

OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2021

The information contained within should not be construed as a recommendation for any course of action regarding legal, financial or accounting matters. All written materials are disseminated with the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering legal advice or other professional services. HW Media does not guarantee the accuracy of information provided, and is not liable for any damages, losses or other detriment that may result from the use of these materials. © 2021 by HW Media, LLC • All rights reserved

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pushing for GSE reform up until he was replaced.

Kristen Sieffert 2 0 2 1 H W VA N G U A R D WINNER

Thank you, Kristen. Thank you for the passion and dedication you bring to everything you do. For boldly guiding us with vision and brightly lighting the path forward for our industry. For your commitment to changing the game and drive to transform modern retirement.

Thank you for leading with resiliency in the face of the unexpected and unprecedented. For digging deep to overcome obstacles and shouldering immense pressure with a smile. For your uplifting spirit and relentless focus on the positive, no matter the challenge.

Thank you for showing us how to remember the human in every decision we make. For being an unstoppable force for good that puts people above profits. For reminding us there’s hope, joy, and magic in what we’re out to achieve.

Thank you for caring. For always looking out for your own with kindness, grace, and steadfast support. For aiming us at the stars and fostering a culture of excellence and impact that makes us all proud. Thank you for being our inspiration. Our courageous leader and friend. Our Vanguard. With gratitude,

Your Family at FAR

UNPARALLELED EXPERTISE AND TECHNOLOGY BACKED BY 30+ YEARS OF EXPERIENCE POST-CLOSING SERVICES FOR MORTGAGE SERVICING, LENDERS AND THE CAPITAL MARKETS SECTOR

Oct/Nov 2021

People Movers

12 After being identified as a replacement in 2015, Scott Durkin took over as CEO of Douglas Elliman.

Take 5

14 If he wasn’t running a billion-dollar business, he’d choose to be a librarian. Can you guess who this is?

Hot Seat

16 Allied Solutions discusses the current and future landscape of challenges facing mortgage servicers.

Launches

18 Citi, CredEvolv and Finance of America Reverse launch new products, platforms and offerings.

Event Calendar

8 ❱ HOUSINGWIRE

Inside Agent

22 The featured home is a 119-year-old Victorian whose client was the agent’s teacher.

Local Intel

24 This is probably not the time to buy your Aspen dream home, but what about buying in Arizona?

Trade Desk

88 As the demand for new homes increases, the NAHB chairman talks about the need for new workers.

Real Estate

92 A look at the problem with banning pocket listings and the history behind NAR’s mandate.

Mortgage

96 How will a noncompete ban impact the mortgage industry and what happens to workers who do sign?

Fintech

100 Inside Figure and Homebridge’s massive bet on blockchain. Will other lenders follow?

Kudos

104 JPMorgan Chase commits $3 million to appraiser diversity, supporting a growing movement.

Parting Shot

106

The Mortgage Bankers Association’s Annual Convention and Expo is returning to San Diego.

At NAR’s recent conference, one session’s candid discussion left an immeasurable impact.

OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2021

features

36 A new FHFA? With former FHFA Director Mark Calabria no longer in charge of the agency, what does the future look like for the entity that oversees Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac?

Vanguard Q&A

2021 Vanguard winners

HousingWire Vanguard winners discuss the latest market trends and what to watch for in 2022.

This year’s list includes 50 of the greatest leaders in the housing industry. These are the people who are moving markets forward and defining what the future holds for the industry.

Origination Platforms & Solutions Special Reports

How DocMagic is helping accelerate digital closings

These companies offer innovative solutions so lenders can deliver a better customer experience and grow their businesses.

The next generation of appraisers

New MISMO standards are critical

Proptech partnerships

Racial bias in GSE underwriting?

By Stacy Marshall

By Seth Appleton

By Romi Mahajan

By David H. Stevens

OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2021

9 ❱ HOUSINGWIRE

DocMagic works with clients to make digital adoption as simple as possible.

PEOPLE MOVERS

Scott Durkin

| Douglas Elliman | CEO

Scott Durkin was appointed CEO of Douglas Elliman. In 2015, the long-time Douglas Elliman leader was identified as a replacement for former CEO Dottie Herman. Durkin first joined the company as executive vice president of acquisitions and growth. He was promoted to chief operating officer in October 2016 and named President in 2017. Durkin will continue to lead the brokerage, its operations, technology initiatives and strategic growth efforts.

Lorie Helms |

Cherry Creek Mortgage |Chief Technology Officer

Cherry Creek Mortgage named Lorie Helms, 20-year mortgage technology veteran, its new chief technology officer. Most recently, she was chief information officer at Covius (formerly LenderLive), where she managed the firm’s IT infrastructure, proprietary software development, business intelligence and data security. She also served as CTO at Stewart Lender Services (formerly Allonhill). Helms is tasked with leading Cherry Creek’s IT operations, software development and project management teams.

Kelly Isikoff |

Common Securitization Solutions | Chief Information Security Officer

Common Securitization Solutions announced that Kelly Isikoff joined the firm as chief information security officer. She brings a blend of deep technical skill, practical business focus and strong security expertise to CSS. Isikoff’s background includes serving as the Cyber Security Business and Strategy Advisor for the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. In her new role, Isikoff will lead a holistic Information Risk team, ensuring the integrity, availability and confidentiality of the company’s data and processes.

Jon Ziglar |

RentPath | CEO

Redfin company RentPath named a new CEO, appointing Jon Ziglar to the executive position. Ziglar is tasked with growing the business by delivering more value to property managers and consumers. He joins the company from ParkMobile, where he has been CEO and a board director since 2015. While he was at ParkMobile, the business grew its customer base by over 800% while expanding its products beyond on-street parking to include event and airport reservations, electric vehicle charging and toll payments.

Liz Bryant |

Citi | Head of Mortgage Sales

Citi announced it appointed Liz Bryant, industry veteran, as the new head of retail mortgage sales for the U.S. Bryant will be joining the St. Louis-headquartered lending operation following a long career at Wells Fargo — the top depository bank by mortgage origination volume in the U.S. Prior to joining Citi, Bryant was national sales manager and an executive vice president. Before that, she ran the San Francisco-based lender’s retail fulfillment and home equity division.

John Aslanian |

SimpleNexus | Chief Revenue Officer

Continuing its string of executive-level announcements, SimpleNexus promoted John Aslanian to chief revenue officer. Aslanian has been with the company since 2019, originally joining as senior vice president of sales. His contributions to the company resulted in two years of record-breaking revenue growth for the firm. As an established sales veteran with more than two decades of experience in the mortgage and software industries, Aslanian will continue to help the company in its mission to elevate the homeownership experience.

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Steven Plaisance |

Gateway First Bank | President of Mortgage Banking

Steven Plaisance was named president of mortgage banking at Gateway First Bank after serving as interim president since February. Under Plaisance’s leadership, Gateway is able to align its retail, correspondent, operations, secondary and servicing channels under one umbrella. Plaisance is a key part of the executive leadership team, helping to define and set the course for mortgage activities across all spectrums. Most recently, Plaisance worked at Arvest Bank as president and CEO of Arvest Bank’s mortgage banking division.

OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2021

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UDAY DEVALLA Chief Technology Officer Honored Winner HW 2021 Vanguard Awards

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TAKE 5

Willie Newman President, CEO of Homepoint

From running a billion-dollar corporation to being a respected expert and innovator in the mortgage industry, Willie Newman leads one of the nation's largest mortgage lenders and servicers. With more than 25 years of experience, Newman — president and CEO of Homepoint and 2020 HousingWire Vanguard winner — strategically built the company to handle the rapid changes of the housing market. Under his leadership, loan volume has nearly doubled every year since inception, and thanks to this approach, Homepoint continues to find new ways to work and communicate with partners and borrowers during a period of economic disruption. Below, Newman answers five questions that give an inside look at his life.

1. If I had picked a different career path I would be a... librarian. All those books to read!!

2. My guilty pleasure is...

binge-watching obscure shows on Netflix. Really, anything with a British/Australian accent involved.

3. People would be surprised to know I...

am an introvert. I only play an extrovert 12 hours a day!

4. After I am finished with my career I hope people remember...

how I treated whomever I interacted with. I would hope they say “with dignity, respect and interest.”

5. I would tell my younger self...

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to practice patience and humility. Boy, was I lacking in both!

OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2021

“Do the right thing for the right reason and the rest will take care of itself.” —Bruno Pasceri, President, Incenter

Thank you, Bruno, for creating a culture and a company that we are all so proud and honored to be a part of. The Incenter Leadership Team

incenterms.com

HOTSEAT

SPONSORED CONTENT

Philip Reinking Senior Vice President of Mortgage Services

Allied Solutions

he housing industry experienced dramatic growth during the COVID-19 pandemic. With fluctuating volume, mortgage servicers are still struggling to effectively scale their business. Tack on the challenges presented by not being able to connect in person, and it’s clear that servicers are navigating a unique set of obstacles. Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like the world is going back to normal anytime soon. As the COVID-19 situation evolves, the industry will continue to need a solution that keeps borrowers, lenders and servicers connected, regardless of where they’re located.

HousingWire recently spoke with Philip Reinking, senior vice president of Mortgage Services at Allied, about the current and future challenges facing mortgage servicers. During the conversation, Reinking highlighted the products Allied offers that benefit servicers and provide a better experience for borrowers. HousingWire: What challenges are mortgage servicers facing this year? Philip Reinking: Mortgage servicers are facing substantial growth but a lack of talent in scaling business growth. We have deployed components and services that have changed our strategy while still offering boutique solutions to our clients' growth goals.

Q&A

HW: How is Allied Solutions tackling these challenges? PR: For the last 20+ years, the lender-placed tracking methodologies have remained largely stagnant. Seeing a better way, Allied has revolutionized mortgage tracking. Our solution prioritizes the borrower experience and promotes a “self-cure” to insurance resolution with a multi-channel campaign that includes both digital and print touchpoints with consumers. HW: How have you seen technology impacted by COVID-19? PR: Much like the rest of the mortgage market, we’ve seen

growth during the COVID-19 pandemic. Robotic process automation has been a necessity due to minimal in-person interactions during the pandemic in 2020 and has continued in 2021. It’s more important than ever for your bank to invest in solutions to reach new consumers and meet their expectations of convenient, modern banking and lending. Our suite of full-service insurance monitoring and direct escrow disbursement solutions are turnkey and ready for implementation; but, we recognize each lender is different, so Allied remains capable of crafting solutions to fit your needs. HW: What is Allied Solutions doing differently than the rest of the mortgage lending market? PR: Allied differentiates themselves among the market by being innovative, forward thinkers and continuing to grow in an ever-changing market, while remaining dedicated to our clients. Allied offers a hybrid solution that improves the touchpoints beyond first class postal mail with email, text, and APIs for mobile banking platforms. Additionally, we offer a flexible property tracking platform that tracks by property address and loan number, reducing letters sent and providing a better borrower experience. Lastly, we have dedicated, in-house compliance department, maintaining regulatory changes to program implementation.

"It’s more important than ever for your bank to invest in solutions to reach new consumers and meet their expectations of convenient, modern banking and lending."

MOMENTUM REFRAMED Stewart has dramatically increased its skill and scale since setting out to become the premier title services company two years ago. We’ve made strategic acquisitions and investment in valuation and appraisal, automated search products, digital closing solutions and enhanced signing options to advance our vision of streamlining, digitizing and modernizing the end-to-end real estate transaction. We’ve done all this to be a better partner and help you close more loans quickly. The momentum is undeniable, and we’re just getting started. This is the new Stewart. Redefined and moving ahead. Visit stewart.com/hw1 to learn more.

LAUNCHES

Finance of America Reverse

Rocket Homes

Finance of America Reverse announced the development of a new reverse mortgage education platform, which is designed to equip the company’s wholesale partners with relevant, customizable, educational materials that can expand product knowledge and provide better potential service to clients. The new platform, dubbed “Finance of America University,” launches alongside additional new offerings, including the introduction of an enhanced “Policies and Procedures” Documents Center on its “Xcelerate” Wholesale Portal. “The audience is predominantly sales and operations professionals. Individuals can pick and choose classes that they need at that moment to enhance their reverse knowledge, or they can also enroll in one or more learning pathways,” Lorraine Geraci, vice president of learning and development at FAR, said.

Rocket Homes has plans to start iBuying. The Detroit-based company declared its intention to “combine every aspect of home selling and buying into one simple, customizable platform.” These ambitions are similar to an array of other companies, including Zillow and real estate brokerage Compass. But Rocket’s announcement provides a couple of specific ways it wants to cut into the real estate market and challenge traditional agents. Foremost is the ability for a home seller to work with an in-house Rocket real estate agent who is in downtown Detroit and will receive a commission of 1.5% of the sales price. This remote agent would do many functions of a physically present salesperson. Rocket is additionally offering a traditional agent service. The company plans to continue their program of recommending agents through the Rocket Homes Verified Partner Agent Network program. Rocket also announced a soon to-be-released iBuyer program.

VISA The buy now, pay later space has grown into a multi-billion dollar industry, and as of a couple of months ago, it’s got a new entrant: Visa. The digital payments giant announced a partnership with banking tech solutions and provider i2c to launch a point of sale installments capability for their users in North America. Coined “Visa Installments,” the tech enables issuers to offer installment plans for their cardholders under their existing credit account lines, and for participating merchants to display the installment plans to eligible cardholders. However, the tech does go both ways. Participating i2c issuers offering Visa credit cards will also have the capability of providing users with the BNPL option upon checkout.

Citi Citi announced the launch of its new digital platform aimed at connecting small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) with regional, local and community banks. Coined Bridge built by Citi, the tech will connect SMEs looking for loans of up to $10 million with local lenders. The Bridge platform is currently in its pilot program stage — integrated with 18 banks across the Southeast and Rockies regions, including Alabama, Colorado, Georgia, Louisiana and Tennessee. Richard Banziger, head of U.S. commercial bank for Citi, said in the release, “As both a lender and a community stakeholder, we have a deep understanding of the problems businesses face when trying to navigate the borrowing process.” The company has been working to bolster digital trends for some time now but has continued to invest millions of dollars in minority depository institutions.

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CredEvolv Instead of waiting for credit standards for agency-backed mortgages to relax, two industry veterans launched a startup to help credit-impaired borrowers rise to meet them. Jeff Walker and Steve Romano founded CredEvolv, a startup that facilitates credit counseling to transform borrowers that were declined credit into mortgage-ready leads for lenders. Its cloudbased platform uses public data and proprietary analytics to help borrowers repair their credit. CredEvolv also seeks to help lenders ensure that they are not discriminating during the loan process, unwittingly or not. Walker, former senior vice president of origination at Fannie Mae, will serve as the company’s CEO, and Romano, who was previously executive vice president of BBMC Mortgage, as its president. As part of its launch, CredEvolv acquired Get Credit Healthy.

OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2021

EVENT CALENDAR

LISTEN NOW

ALTA ONE October 12 - 15, 2021 Cost to attend: ALTA member: $1,195 | Non-member: $1,695 Presented by ALTA LOCATION: NEW ORLEANS, LOUISIANA The American Land Title Association announced it is returning to in-person conferences, releasing the details for its annual ALTA ONE conference. However, for those who would still prefer to attend the conference virtually, the conference does include a virtual track option for a lower rate. The theme of this year’s conference is ALL IN, as the conference focuses on helping attendees hone in on their skills and position their company for continued success. Throughout the four-day conference, attendees will learn about the latest trends and policies shaping the industry. Session topics include lead generation, cybercrime, digital closing, fair housing and more.

MBA Annual Convention and Expo 2021 October 17 - 20, 2021 Cost to attend: MBA Member: $ 1,395 | Non-member: $ 3,495 Presented by MBA LOCATION: SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA The Mortgage Bankers Association’s Annual Convention and Expo is returning to San Diego, as attendees gather in person in October to network and conduct business with industry peers, innovators and experts. The lineup for conference speakers includes Robert Broeksmit, MBA president and CEO, Susan Stewart, SWBC Mortgage CEO, Sandra Thompson, Federal Housing Finance Agency acting director and Malcolm Gladwell, New York Times best-selling author. During the four-day event, attendees will hear updates on top issues impacting the industry and learn new, critical information that will help take the industry into the year ahead.

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Event TIP

NewRez, Shelter Mortgage on the rise of joint ventures BY ALCYNNA LLOYD Looking back over the last year, there has been significant momentum in joint ventures as some of the industry’s biggest companies partner to elevate their businesses and drive revenue. In a Housing News podcast, HousingWire Editor in Chief Sarah Wheeler interviews Michael Iorio, senior division manager of joint venture at NewRez, and Randy VandenHouten, executive vice president and chief financial officer at Shelter Mortgage, about the popularity of joint ventures in the housing space. During the episode, Iorio and VandenHouten explain what makes a great partnership from their perspective. According to Iorio, the most important factor in determining whether or not a joint venture will succeed is the level of engagement between partners. “I’d say, first and foremost, it’s partner engagement,” Iorio said. “Why is that partner interested in the joint venture?” “Today, there are many companies that are interested in the JV space because of the additional revenue it can bring into their organization,” he said. “It allows a lot of our partners to pay for other things that are more core to selling or listing homes, but going back to the partner engagement, truly, why are they there?” Iorio claims if the relationship isn’t focused on the development of the overall team but instead solely on revenue, the partnership is not only in jeopardy but ultimately doomed. “If they’re just there for the dollar, that falls apart over time,” Iorio said. “But if they truly have a vested interest in hiring, leadership and building a culture by spreading the word within their agent community about why a referral to the mortgage partner is important, that’s when you have a good partner.” If you are interested in learning more about this budding market and why joint ventures are taking off, tune into this insightful conversation. Scan the QR code to listen now!

“Virtual conferences need to create the same captivating impact as in-person conferences. It is imperative to visualize and assume the same audience engagements and rapport between panelists. Do not make it more formal because it's virtual, infuse the same levity and brevity like the in-person conferences.” - Karthik Kumar, Global Mortgage Practice Head at Tata Consultancy Services

OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2021

Congratulations! AmeriHome is proud of its 2021 HousingWire Vanguard Award Winners!

John Hedlund

Karen Postiglioni

MD, Chief Operating Officer

EVP, Consumer Direct

amerihome.com | correspondent.amerihome.com © 2021 AmeriHome Mortgage Company, LLC, A Western Alliance Bank Company. Information herein intended solely for mortgage bankers, mortgage brokers, financial institutions and correspondent lenders. Licensed by the Department of Financial Protection and Innovation under the California Residential Mortgage Lending Act, License #4131116. NMLS #135776.

INSIDE AGENT

Adam Dow

Dow Realty Group Keller Williams adam@adamdow.com 17 Forest Road Wolfeboro, New Hampshire 03894 $899,000 7 bed 2.5 bath 3,800 sqft

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ADAM DOW is a ninth-generation resident of Wolfeboro, New Hampshire, and the home featured here is a 119-year-old Victorian whose client was Dow’s firstgrade teacher. Wolfeboro is a resort area by Lake Winnipesaukee that typically has a population of less than 7,000 in the winter but swells to almost 30,000 in the summer. Lately amid COVID-19, more people, often Boston natives, stay in Wolfeboro for good. That combined with the lack of new homes — “It is very hard to get permitting done for new construction,” Dow said — has driven inventory down. According to Dow, normally Wolfeboro has more than 100 homes for sale, but today it has about 15-30 homes available. Dow got a business degree from the University of New Hampshire, and said that afterward, “I figured I’d never return to Wolfeboro. I’d go out to Boston, and go to the corporate world.” But the broker decided that Wolfeboro was a good place to raise a family, and he saw an inside track into real estate in 2003 when listings and marketing were moving away from print. “I was heavily invested and committed to being online,” Dow said. Dow joined Keller Williams in 2013, and his team now has 18 agents. The broker’s clients are “people who may want to pay a little extra to be near a lake or mountain.”

OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2021

LOCAL INTEL

By: Matthew Blake

Aspen, Colorado

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This is probably not the time to buy your Aspen dream home. According to a report produced by Douglas Elliman and real estate appraisal company Miller Samuel, single-family home listings sloped down 58% year-over-year in July 2021 to a paltry 20 total in the famous ski-resort town. Single-family homebuyers who entered contract, meanwhile, slalomed to 12 total in July compared to 46 a year earlier, per the report. Of those 12 homes purchased, 10 cost at least $5 million. The slightly more affordable Aspen option are condos. Thirty-three condo contracts were entered in July and 20 were in the $2-$4 million range. “New listings within both property types fell sharply from the same period last year,” said study author Jonathan Miller, “keeping upward pressure on prices.”

Greer, Arizona

Dana Hubbell is a broker in Chandler, which lies just southeast of Phoenix. But her team of 10 agents is also doing business a few hours north. “I got a call from somebody, ‘I’m calling on your cabin in Greer, Arizona. I will buy it sight unseen,’” Hubbell said. “I was shocked by how many people just wanted to get away from where they were. Some people want to move to small towns where they don’t require masks and vaccines.” Greer is an unincorporated community in Apache County, Arizona, near the New Mexico border and the Little Colorado River. Its closest towns are Pinetop and Show Low, which encircle the Apache Native American reservation. Hubbell said that her team can have an advantage on local home sellers because she places her home on the regional Multiple Listings Service. “Some agents around there go rogue and throw up signs without listing,” Hubbell said.

OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2021

Plymouth, Massachusetts

“It’s still a strong seller ’s market,” said Ryan Cook, a broker at HomeSmart First Class Realty. “But it’s shifting.” Cook runs a brokerage office outside of Boston. According to the Greater Boston Association of Realtors, the median price of a Boston area home soared 14% to $761,000 from May 2020 to May 2021. But Cook has observed a change. “There has been a softening,” he said. “Outside of a couple of pockets there are now two or three offers instead of 15-20.” Some buyers, Cook said, have cold feet. “A buyer can only be pushed so far. You go in and you start to be discouraged. I blame that not on the consumer — the consumer is not the expert — but on the agent.” An agent’s job is to put matters into perspective and prevent situations like a buyer waiving a home inspection, Cook said. But too many, “Have gotten caught up in the hysteria.”

Newcastle, California San Francisco, California

In the last nine months of 2020, a California Policy Lab study noted that San Francisco lost 38,000 people out of its population of 874,000. Also, according to a San Francisco Chamber of Commerce report from this summer, 40% of 500 San Franciscans surveyed said that they planned to leave, citing a lower quality of living. Still, residents must be accustomed to a quite high quality of living, because the average median home price is now at $1.5 million, according to Zillow. “It’s still high as hell here,” said Heidi Mueller, a broker at the San Francisco office of Engel & Volkers. Mueller acknowledged that during the pandemic’s nadir, there was noticeably less demand in the condo market. “But people are coming back. People that can afford to live in San Francisco still want to.”

OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2021

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Newcastle is a town of just over 1,000 people, but it lies at an increasingly hot spot of California real estate — an area northeast of San Francisco that is attracting people moving out of that urban core. Specifically, Newcastle is 31 miles northeast of Sacramento, California’s once sleepy capital. “A lot of the buyers are moving away from inner city San Francisco,” said Darryl Rogers, president-owner of Better Homes and Garden Real Estate’s local franchisee Reliance Partners. “Sacramento is reaping the awards. We’ve got great jobs there, a lot in the medical health field.” Indeed, while California’s overall population inched down in 2020, the Sacramento metropolitan area’s population grew 12,750 people, according to state Department of Finance numbers. And the city’s home prices continued an upward trajectory that is sharp even by Golden State standards.

COMMENTARY

ecruiting the next generation of appraisers Why the industry is ripe for the next generation of diverse talent to enter By Stacy Marshall

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The appraisal industry’s lack of diversity — in terms of age, gender and ethnicity — and the growing number of appraisers exiting the profession as they reach retirement age have been well-documented issues. But now that the industry is keenly aware of these problems, what can be done to turn awareness into action to effect positive change for the next generation of appraisers? Before we dissect this question, let’s revisit the numbers.

“the family business.” Young entrants into the field often have family members and mentors who they can turn to for advice as they consider if an appraisal career is right for them. Alternatively, for those who do not have a blueprint to follow, it is much more difficult for this career path to be viable or for it to be on the radar. This has led to a “sea of sameness” in the industry. Considering the growing need to fill the appraiser talent pipeline, this presents an excellent opportunity for young, diverse entrants to enter the profession, specifically some of the communities hit hardest by pandemic job loss.

THE CURRENT STATE COVID-19’S IMPACT Data from the Appraisal Institute reveals there Women, Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC) and are around 78,000 active real estate appraisers younger workers were disproportionately impacted by job loss in the U.S. On the surface, this may seem and job insecurity due to COVID-19. According to McKinsey & like a robust number, but when you take into Company data, women left the workforce at higher rates than consideration that their male counterparts since the start of the this number has been pandemic (56%), despite making up just 48% dwindling at a rate of of the workforce; Black and Hispanic workers 2.6% for the last five faced 1.6 to 2.0 times the unemployment rates years, the reality of the of their white counterparts; and 27% of people “Considering the issue sets in deeper. aged 18 to 24 faced unemployment as they growing need to In terms of age sought out work in a shaky economy. fill the appraiser and ethnic diversity, What’s more, as the economy begins to talent pipeline, this there is also room for rebound, these impacted groups are likely to presents an excellent improvement. Since trail recovery by 18 to 24 months compared to opportunity for young, 50% of active appraisers their counterparts. And while unemployment diverse entrants to are between the ages and job security presented a major threat to of 51-65, most are the economy, another emerging trend has enter the profession — nearing retirement. Most been disrupting the American workforce — specifically, some of the appraisers are also white “The Great Re-evaluation.” The pandemic communities hit hardest males (77% male, 85% was a catalyst for millions of Americans to by pandemic job loss.” white). re-evaluate their career paths and what’s How exactly did we get important to them in terms of work/life balance. here? The adage “you Many employers are feeling the effects of a can’t be what you can’t mass talent exodus that has ensued over the see” certainly applies last few months as employees seek out new and lack of general awareness of an appraisal opportunities that offer greater flexibility. career, and all it has to offer, is something that These challenges, while daunting, present a unique opportunity has been pointed to time and time again. for the appraisal industry to be a part of the solution. An appraisal For example, an appraisal career is typically career, by design, checks off several career wish list items for

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“It’s time we amplify all the benefits of an appraisal career to a new generation of diverse entrants so it is no longer the ‘best kept secret’ in the housing industry.”

THERE IS ONLY ONE WAY TO EAT AN ELEPHANT…ONE BITE AT A TIME It will take the industry’s collective commitment to attract and retain young people and diverse talent to the appraisal field. While there is no silver bullet to achieve this, the industry is making strides. For example, The Appraisal Institute has several initiatives and scholarship opportunities designed to foster diversity and inclusion in the profession. To name a few, the Appraiser Diversity Initiative with Fannie Mae and the National Urban League was designed to attract new, diverse talent to the appraisal field while helping to overcome barriers to entry. The Appraisal Institute Education and Relief Foundation Minorities and Women Education Scholarship and AI Course Scholarship help defray costs, and participation in CareersBuildingCommunities.org, a resource for high-school and college-aged individuals to explore various career paths in the real estate sector, including appraisal, also helps. While these initiatives are commendable, there is still more work to be done if we hope to attract the next generation of appraisers, who have high expectations for what they want from a career.

Appraisers, AMCs and corporations who employ appraisers can: •

•

Conduct outreach to local high schools and colleges. Offer to speak to classes or set up a table at a career fair to spread the word about the many benefits of an appraisal career (of which, there are many). Bolster digital efforts to reach young people where they are. Be a source of education to help new entrants navigate the complexities of entering the field. Host a Q&A session over Facebook live, do a video content series featuring appraisers’ perspectives and insights, host a webinar to provide education to the next generation, offering tips and tricks for breaking into the industry, etc. Step up to the plate. Open your arms to appraiser trainees. Create internships and opportunities for young people to complete some of their appraiser trainee coursework before they’re ready to enter the field to help set them on an early path of success. Additionally, consider creating scholarships within your organization for appraiser trainees to help defray costs. Double down on D&I efforts, but don’t do it in a vacuum. Consult with appraisers and trade groups who are a part of and directly serve the diverse communities you wish to reach. This will help you can gain a deeper understanding of what is important to these demographics in terms of career path, flexibility, etc. Be an ally. Be passionate and vocal about increasing diversity in the appraisal field. Provide mentorship to new entrants, BIPOC and women, who often face more hurdles entering the field than their counterparts (those with family mentors to turn to, or others who look like them).

WHAT’S NEXT? It’s time we amplify all the benefits of an appraisal career to a new generation of diverse entrants so it is no longer the “best kept secret” in the housing industry. But how? Concerted efforts, big and small, can make a difference.

Stacy Marshall is vice president of customer experience at ServiceLink, a provider of digital mortgage services to the mortgage and finance industries.

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many job seekers today — flexibility, stability and high earning potential are all hallmarks of an appraisal career. Additionally, as the industry sets its sights on appraisal modernization and hybrid appraisals become more commonplace, digital natives’ millennials and Gen Z have the opportunity to carve out their own niche in the industry as new valuation technology comes into play.

COMMENTARY

ew MISMO standards are critical to a growing PLS market Here’s how the industry can weigh in on the standards By Seth Appleton

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Prior to the Great Recession, private label securitizations (PLS) constituted a majority of all residential mortgage-backed securities (RMBS) issued. In the intervening years, the makeup of the RMBS market has changed significantly and, today, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and Ginnie Mae are responsible for approximately 99% of RMBS issuance. For a variety of reasons, including recent policy changes at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that cap second home and investor property loan volumes and growth in jumbo loan volume driven by increasing home prices, there has been renewed interest in the PLS market and its future growth. Fortunately — MISMO, the real estate finance industry’s standards organization — is here to help market participants navigate any uptick in PLS activity from a data perspective. Since 2018, MISMO has been developing a modern, standardized data set to facilitate the electronic exchange of information to the credit rating agencies that analyze risks in mortgage assets. I am pleased to announce that MISMO will make this new standard available for public comment.

MISMO’S PLS INITIATIVE Data comparison and evaluation are essential for credit rating agencies to analyze risks in mortgage assets. In fact, the secondary market for the securitization of mortgages requires data to be shared among parties in order to rate the underlying assets. Industry professionals rightly recognized that the lack of a standard had created a void in the secondary securitization market and turned to MISMO to develop a business solution. MISMO’s Private Label RMBS Valuation workgroup is collaborating across the real estate finance industry — including originators, issuers, rating agencies, due diligence third party reviewers, and investors — to develop a data exchange standard that permits the electronic exchange of mortgage asset data to the rating agencies, and we are committed to working with important stakeholders, such as the Structured Finance Association (SFA) to ensure that this standard meets the needs of the entire market. MISMO’s new standard will improve the quality and consistency of the data sent to the rating agencies, which will in turn lead to faster, more efficient, and more accurate due diligence for private label RMBS. What makes MISMO’s PLS initiative unique is that it creates a comprehensive disclosure package to help eliminate any confusion and inconsistency due to data in the ratings applied to securitizations. MISMO sees this dataset as a combination of an updated version of the American Securitization Forum (ASF) dataset, which has not been updated in years, merged with the

“Since 2018, MISMO has been developing a modern, standardized data set to facilitate the electronic exchange of information to the credit rating agencies that analyze risks in mortgage assets. ”

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• •

“What makes MISMO’s PLS initiative unique is that it creates a comprehensive disclosure package to help eliminate any confusion and inconsistency due to data in the ratings applied to securitizations.”

PL RMBS ASF Mapping Specification v1.0 MISMO PL Rating Agency Standards iGuide v1.0

THE IMPACT OF STANDARDIZATION So, why is this so important? Since the Great Recession, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and Ginnie Mae have all made significant strides towards greater standardization of the mortgage data they handle, including through the use of MISMO. Among other benefits, this level of standardization promotes enhanced data quality and consistency, which allows for greater operational efficiency and transparency in the secondary market. Similarly, if market participants are going to

truly capitalize on the increased volume of loans for which PLS may be the best execution in the secondary market — the second home, investor property, and jumbo mortgages mentioned earlier — then it needs the increased capacity and efficiency that comes from data standardization. Without such standards, there will be a substantial bottleneck as each transaction will require 100% due diligence and manual processes. Will MISMO’s Private Label RMBS standard fully revitalize the PLS market? Not on its own, but it will eliminate a key barrier to the development of a more robust PLS market and it is worth noting that in addition to MISMO’s work, the Mortgage Bankers Association and SFA have been working to address other issues necessary to revitalize the PLS market. We encourage all interested parties to visit www.mismo. org and register your comments once the standard is released for public comment. As part of our collaborative model, we are committed to engaging with the entire industry to make sure this standard meets the needs of all market participants.

Seth Appleton serves as president of MISMO. He has spent his career advancing housing initiatives that benefit consumers, including on Capitol Hill as chief of staff for U.S. Congressman Blaine Luetkemeyer, a senior member of the House Financial Services Committee and former chairman of the Housing and Insurance Subcommittee and Financial Institutions and Consumer Credit Subcommittee.

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supplemental dataset required by rating agencies in various forms. MISMO’s PLS initiative creates data specifications for the rating agencies’ RMBS reporting requirements and provides an iGuide (implementation guide) for rating agencies, third-party reviewers (TPR), lenders and vendors. The end-result is that the rating agencies and TPRs can better rely on the data they receive via MISMO’s standard and can more accurately rate mortgage assets. A key benefit of having a defined MISMO extract from an originator’s loan origination system (LOS) to feed to the TPR is that it allows for consistent data ingestion for comparison and evaluation. Industry professionals will soon be able to access and use the MISMO Rating Agency Reporting Standardization package. It includes:

COMMENTARY

ood governance and good housing: Public-private partnerships in proptech PropTech is a booming area for entrepreneurs and investors alike By Romi Mahajan

The U.S. housing market is one of staggering proportions. With more than 100 million homesteads and an aggregate value approaching $40 trillion, housing is the largest single asset class in the country. While the numbers are stratospheric, the importance cannot be encapsulated in mere economics. For most families, the house is their largest investment and the one that radiates the most with life. Who are my neighbors? Where do my kids go to school? Am I safe? Is the air quality good? Am I close to work? These questions govern the quality of life, and as a result, housing is crucial to the very fabric of democracy itself. Economists and commentators of all

lives are connected symbiotically, and because of this, the housing market merits focus and attention. THE HOUSING ECOSYSTEM In reality, the housing marketplace is the aggregation of several aligned actors. According to Quantarium Chief Operating Officer, Malcolm Cannon, “The housing ecosystem, particularly a well-functioning one, is a collection of many cooperating entities, including private companies, government bodies, and entrepreneurs focused on improvement.” In the U.S., the market is a product of competing companies, a diverse base of buyers and sellers, the stewardship of the GSEs and a whole host of newly founded companies looking to transform different links in the long chain of ownership, transaction and equity building. The Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman wrote

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“There’s no one company, or even an aggregation of companies, that can achieve ‘good housing’ without the regulatory framework, stewardship, economic stimulus and mandate of equity provided by the government.”

backgrounds have long understood this. Entire economic cycles are attributed to the amplitudes of the housing market. In recent memory, the 2008 recession was put squarely on the housing market and the derivatives and instruments concocted by Wall Street to transact on top of the market. While a recession ensued and has since passed, the fates of those who lost their homes are not all as rosy as the stock market indices might indicate. Put simply, housing and peoples’

an aptly named tract “A Company is not a Country” some years ago. While his concerns were larger, this idea appropriately characterizes housing. There’s no one company, or even an aggregation of companies, that can achieve “good housing” without the regulatory framework, stewardship, economic stimulus and mandate of equity provided by the government. As such, public-private partnership in this space suggests that good governance and good housing are twins. Some specific areas of partnership are: • Maintenance of a transparent, liquid housing market • Enforcement of fairness in the entire ecosystem

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Focus on buyers’ rights Adoption of vetted technologies

and

tested

While there are countless other areas for public-private partnership, these four are crucial. 1. Transparent and liquid housing market: The housing market is a bellwether for the entire economy and is a key element in society. In order for the market to function well and in a sustainable manner, a variety of otherwise conflicting variables have to be harmonized. Private organizations — in any part of the ecosystem — have to comply with regulations, prescriptions and general rules set by the government and the GSEs in order to ensure the minimization of market abuse or collusive behavior. Transparency and liquidity are key elements of any properly functioning marketplace. 2. Fairness: While the government makes laws centered on fairness and non-discrimination, private parties often work extra-judicially. The recent spate of incidents regarding unfair appraisal/valuation for homes belonging to People of Color, the devastating statistics on Black homeownership and equity in the U.S., the notorious persistence of redlining, zoning and other geographically-based modes of discrimination illuminate the need for both regulation and enforcement. In addition, they suggest strongly that those forms of systematic “unfairness” that are “built into the system” can be revisited and addressed by both existing players and the new wave of proptech companies looking to undo the errors of yesteryear. 3. Buyers’ rights: In a fast-moving, highdollar market, the rights of buyers have to be explained clearly and enforced by government agencies. These include both positive rights and negative rights. Positive rights include public-private partnerships that enable homeownership and reduce friction and costs while negative rights include rights to redress and disclosure. 4. Technology adoption: A little acknowledged but clearly borne out of historical facts is that the government is a larger risk-taker and more entrepreneurial than private organizations. In her

ground-breaking book “The Entrepreneurial State,” Mariana Mazzucato lays down this irrefutable case. New technologies that can serve, disrupt, enhance and change the housing market and the entire set of processes that govern the ecosystem should be vetted and adopted by the government institutions, who remain the biggest players in the housing market. Related to this is the public sector’s role in ensuring fair data access and accuracy in the data sets it uses to make decisions. BALANCING THE PUBLIC AND PRIVATE SECTOR There are many pillars on which a solid housing scenario rests. The variables that govern the strength of these pillars traverse economics, law, demographics, social geography and operations. In each element of the ecosystem, government entities play a crucial role, sometimes of enablement and sometimes of constraint. It has become a truism in all capitalist economies that the lack of regulation and enforcement creates both the conditions and the manifestations of the “yo-yo effect.” A strong marketplace cannot have a high amplitude and constant oscillation. Proptech companies must understand this inherently since they are in the business of real estate, which is simply too important of a sector to be left to only one set of parties to manage. A number of entrepreneurs have built incredible companies in the space that have closely hewed to their mission of democratizing access to homeownership and the creation of generational equity. These entrepreneurs will create sustainable and successful long-term businesses in concert with the public sector, via public-private partnerships. Walter Allen, HouseAmp president, sums it up nicely, saying, “Public sector partnerships with private companies of all sizes can together ensure that the U.S. housing market remains strong while continuing to improve with regard to fairness, equity and wealth creation.” As the 2020 U.S. Census results show, the country is getting increasingly diverse, across races and ethnicities. This diversity extends to other categories as well: class, gender, sexuality, creed and more. With diversity, there comes opportunity and complexity. With the multitude of cultures that participate in the housing market, both scale and niche opportunities abound for entrepreneurs. This is why proptech remains an excellent and rewarding area of investment and underscores the fertile role of the government and GSEs in this crucial component of the American experience.

Romi Mahajan is the CEO of KKM Group, a boutique consulting firm that offers marketing, strategy and content guidance to executives.

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• •

COMMENTARY

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s there racial bias baked into GSE underwriting? Industry leadership needs to align on addressing the homeownership gap By David H. Stevens

A syndicated article on racial bias from The First, I take issue with the article for a few reasons. HMDA data Markup, published a couple months ago by ABC shows outcomes across a variety of variables, including race, news, AP, Market Watch and more, has drawn a but does not show FICO information. Obviously to anyone in the great deal of attention from trade groups, policy business that’s a big deal given that FICO is a threshold data makers and housing advocates with support point that determines eligibility for a mortgage. from some and attacks from others. Second, the reporters looked at conventional loans only, The story, “The secret bias hidden in mortgagemeaning loans only from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and did approval algorithms,” included statements from not include loans from FHA/VA/USDA. This is important as FHA fair housing activists who concluded that there in particular has a much higher mix of successful mortgages to is “systemic racism” in the mortgage process. minority borrowers. On these two points alone, the MBA and But the same story got pushback from the MBA ABA were on point that the conclusions were skewed because and the ABA, as well as the CHLA, arguing that they missed these key points. the data was selective and produced a biased The authors argued that the MBA had been one of the conclusion. The MBA was clearly agitated organizations working to ban the publication of FICO scores in by the story to the point that they put out a HMDA reporting, but I agree with the MBA’s reasoning here. With public statement which sits on the elements reported to HMDA, should FICO their website and was sent out have been included in public reporting, privacy to newslink subscribers stating, risk would be dramatically heightened. This “This is a relatively in part, “from the beginning, we doesn’t, however, excuse the authors from at new world of explained to The Markup that least acknowledging why this data element is automated its analysis of HMDA data, and so important. underwriting engines its pre-determined conclusions Now, with all that said, let me articulate that by intent may not regarding mortgage lending, fail why I believe, as I said in my quote, “This is a discriminate but by to take into consideration several relatively new world of automated underwriting effect likely do.” key components that form the engines that by intent may not discriminate but backbone of lending decisions, by effect likely do.” including a borrower’s credit score and credit history.” RISK-BASED PRICING I also was quoted in the article stating, The GSEs risk base price their mortgages while FHA flat prices “This is a relatively new world of automated theirs. The result here is that borrowers who have FICO scores underwriting engines that by intent may not below, say, 720 with a high loan to value (LTV) will often find a discriminate but by effect likely do.” better deal by going to the FHA. Where I take issue with the GSEs’ In an effort to unpack this debate and give at pricing methodology is how they combine loan-level pricing least one additional perspective that defends adjustments (LLPA’s) on top of base g-fees for low downpayment both viewpoints in different ways, let me borrowers at levels that some have stated seem excessive. highlight why I believe that there is a level of The GSEs have private mortgage insurance to protect racial bias and discrimination in the manner their losses down to about a 65% LTV even with a minimal by which the GSEs price and underwrite downpayment from the borrower. With private capital protecting mortgages, which is likely to push more minority losses down to almost catastrophic risk levels in the event of applicants to an FHA mortgage or perhaps end default, why then do they charge such exorbitant premiums on up without a mortgage at all. top of that coverage?

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CREDIT SCORING The use of credit scores in underwriting took hold in the mid- to late 1990s as a standard for evaluating willingness to repay a debt. FICO is the standard used for this process and while the GSEs argue that they use their own credit scoring methodology in their underwriting systems, the lender still uses FICO to set floors, establish pricing and more. There are two issues here. First, the GSEs have not updated their AUS models with updated FICO models, let alone the fact that they refuse to even pilot alternative models such as vantage score, which claims to be able to score thousands of more borrowers that today are denied access to credit. Second, the FICO model does not give value to timely payment of rent, utilities, cell phone bills and other consistent payments made by people that are not captured in a score. While Fannie Mae should be applauded for their recent announcement that they may include rent history in a credit score, that is too recent an announcement to assess the effectiveness. The challenge here is the underbanked Americans who make timely payments but have no credit, or perhaps less than the multiple lines that produce a high FICO score, will have greater difficulty getting a mortgage. This has a particularly greater impact on Hispanic and African Americans whose scores may be lower simply because their proven history of repayment does not fit into a scoring model.

2 OF 3 RULE In January of this year, just before Mark Calabria left office, the FHFA, Treasury and the GSEs finalized an amendment to the Preferred Stock Purchase Agreement (PSPA) that did a number of things affecting second homes, 2-4 units, cash sales and more. But in addition, the rule caps purchases from any lender, “to a maximum of 6% of purchase money mortgages and maximum of 3% of refinancing mortgages over the trailing 52-week period can have two or more higher risk characteristics at origination: combined loan-to-value (LTV) greater than 90%; debt-to-income ratio greater than 45%; and FICO (or equivalent credit score) less than 680.” This rule remains in effect today. This 2 of 3 factor rule will clearly have a greater impact on first-time homebuyers and minorities who are more likely to hit at least two of these caps at higher rates than white non-Hispanic borrowers. Many argue that this is all ok, that the GSEs are quasi private companies and have set standards based on their view of risk and that the FHA, VA, and USDA can help provide options should a borrower not qualify for a conventional mortgage. I am not here to argue either for or against this argument. But none of this changes the outcome. The effect of some of these policies will produce a selection bias in terms of outcomes. Earlier this year, a publication from the Harvard Joint Center For Housing Studies concluded that Black borrowers get charged higher rates across all income levels. In the research piece they acknowledged that “many other factors affect interest rates including wealth, debt, credit score, downpayment, mortgage amount and duration.” But the research also concluded that “Black homeowners have experienced systemic barriers to homeownership and wealth-building opportunities that have limited their ability to access credit, which is a key component in receiving low mortgage interest rates.” When I read the MBA response to the article from The Markup, I thought that this was a classic response from the trade association that represents the industry, and in reading their comments, I agreed with the concerns that I stated at the onset of this commentary. But I would argue that the gap in homeownership rates by race, credit scoring methodologies and pricing structures should be an area where industry leadership aligns with consumer advocates to argue for change. When I started my career as a loan officer, there were no credit scores. The philosophy was that no credit wasn’t necessarily bad credit, and underwriters could make judgement calls to approve a loan. However, this resulted in racial bias as well. Technology and scoring takes color out of the decision-making process, but that does not mean it’s not without flaws. There should be as much effort to calling out these flaws as there is in defending industry from the points made in this story.

David H. Stevens has held various positions in real estate finance, including serving as senior vice president of single family at Freddie Mac, executive vice president at Wells Fargo Home Mortgage, president and COO of the Long and Foster Realty Companies, assistant secretary of Housing and FHA Commissioner, and CEO of the Mortgage Bankers Association.

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For example, on a 95% LTV purchase with a 640 FICO, there is an additional 275 bp fee added on top of the base g-fees and MI expense. The reason this is done is simple, the GSEs believe, as stated in public testimony by FHFA, that the counter-party risk of the MI companies is not sufficient to protect that first loss in a deep recession, as MI companies can fail and might not pay claims. But in recent years, the GSEs have established new capital requirements on MI companies to protect against a significant event, making me question why they still have not modified the aggressive LLPA structure to account for that deep first-loss coverage. Simply put, many low downpayment borrowers are hit with additional costs from MI and LLPAs that will result in higher rates or perhaps forcing them to FHA. And low downpayment borrowers have higher concentrations of minority applicants thus in part contributing to denial rates.

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A new FHFA?

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Here’s where the FHFA is headed under Sandra Thompson

OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2021

Editor’s note: This story was written in early September. As the magazine was going to press, it was rumored that the Biden administration was going to announce a permanent FHFA director, but at deadline, no announcement had been made. Check housingwire.com for the latest version of this story.

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By Georgia Kromrei

early five years after the global financial crisis, lenders and the government-sponsored entities were still negotiating who would bear responsibility for defaulted loans. The negotiations centered on the Federal Housing Finance Agency’s Representation and Warranty Framework, which gives lenders assurance, under certain conditions, that the GSEs would not make them buy back a loan. The Mortgage Bankers Association had already been in negotiations with the GSEs, but sources told HousingWire they had reached an impasse. The stakes were high for the mortgage industry: The government-sponsored entities had just made lenders repurchase billions in such loans. In just the first quarter of 2012, Fannie Mae had $14.6 billion in outstanding repurchase requests. Many of the loans had deficiencies, such as lack of verification of income. At the time, the industry argued that forcing too many loan repurchases would have a chilling effect on mortgage originations and severely damage the relationship between the GSEs and lenders. Sandra Thompson, then at the FHFA, engaged the MBA directly, brought them to the table with FHFA, and was instrumental in subsequent changes to the program. The program protects lenders from the threat of repurchase requests in the event of a default, after 36 months of borrower payments. Thompson’s collaborative approach with industry stakeholders represents a departure from her predecessor, Mark Calabria. Industry sources said that while Calabria was often eager to make public speeches, he cared little for insight from others because he was singularly focused on recapitalizing the GSEs to free them from conservatorship. In contrast, Thompson, now acting director of the agency that regulates the two quasi-federal entities which secure half of the nation’s $11 trillion mortgage market, kicked off her tenure with a listening tour. She and her team have in recent weeks held Zoom meetings with numerous trade groups, including the MBA, the National Association of Realtors and mortgage lenders. “She has been in touch with us, not to say, ‘What should I do?’ but, ‘How should I implement it?’” said Bob Broeksmit, president of the MBA. The relationships Thompson has cultivated with industry stakeholders play an important role in her regulatory

vision for the agency. In her first two months leading the agency she has spoken about access to credit and the racial homeownership gap, made on-time rental payment history part of Fannie Mae’s underwriting process and signed a historic interagency fair lending agreement. But Thompson’s FHFA is just as focused — if not more so — on safety and soundness. At a virtual listening session just six days into her tenure as acting director, Thompson spoke about the racial homeownership gap and expanding access to credit. Those themes were in step with a steady drumbeat from the Biden administration about addressing the racial homeownership gap. For those who argue she is disproportionately focused on the affordability portion of her mission, especially given her public actions and statements as acting director so far, Thompson gave a clear message. “As a regulator, I know what expanding access to credit looks like. And I know what irresponsible lending looks like,” Thompson said. “Irresponsible lending is not an expansion of access to credit.” For champions of expanding access to credit at all costs, her message was a wet blanket. But it was music to the ears of those who are equally concerned about not expanding access to credit too sharply. Ed DeMarco, president of the Housing Policy Council, who was acting director of the FHFA from 2009 to 2014, said her statement stood out to him as reflective of the “balance and the duality for the vision and what she sees as FHFA’s responsibility.” “Safety and soundness and access to credit are not mutually exclusive, but reinforce each other,” DeMarco said of Thompson’s remarks. “You don’t come in and blow up underwriting standards in order to expand access to credit.”

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“Safety and soundness and access to credit are not mutually exclusive, but reinforce each other. You don’t come in and blow up underwriting standards in order to expand access to credit.” - Ed DeMarco

WHAT DO YOU WANT? INFORMATION Soon after meeting an economist at a conference nearly a decade ago, Thompson, then an FHFA official, picked his brain about the minutiae of a regional economics topic: short sales, the economist recalled. Keeping a close eye on happenings in the industry has been a recurring theme throughout Thompson’s tenure at FHFA. Industry outreach is also a longstanding practice at the

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Sandra Thompson, Acting Director, Federal Housing Finance Agency

agency, according to Naa Awaa Tagoe, acting deputy director for the division of housing mission and goals, the division Thompson led before she ascended to acting director. While the FHFA does not work directly with lenders, it “recognizes the importance of creating policy that is not unnecessarily disruptive to the market.” In an interview with HousingWire, Tagoe said that FHFA tries to “stay close to the industry.” "We have outreach, we meet with lenders and servicers, we meet with mortgage insurers, and we get their feedback that way,” Tagoe said. Over the years, Thompson has often been instrumental in that outreach, to both the industry and in coordinating with the GSEs. In her previous role at FHFA, she worked very closely with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, according to Jeffrey Walker, who was Fannie Mae’s head of single-family until he left to found credit counseling startup CredEvolv. “The last couple of years under [Calabria] were relatively frenetic, with such a fast pace of edicts and initiatives,” said Walker. “[Thompson] was always there to navigate the public policy changes.” Multiple people who have worked with Thompson, who requested anonymity either because they do business with the GSEs or work with the FHFA, described Thompson as an imminently qualified regulator whose understanding of capital markets is well-known. She also has a reputation for keeping her cards close to the vest, multiple sources said. A former Fannie Mae official, who frequently worked with Thompson and her team, recounted that Thompson, early on at FHFA, questioned the GSEs’ purchase of any loans exceeding the 43% debt-to-income ratio. Thompson was concerned about portfolio risk, the former Fannie official said. Multiple sources said Thompson does not like surprises — which was on display one year, when Freddie Mac went to market with a product without making Thompson’s team aware, a former GSE official said. “People worry about regulators being captured by the agencies they regulate,” said one former GSE official. “That is not Sandra Thompson. She knows what her role is. She doesn’t put up with nonsense.”

While there are certainly very few people who have the experience Thompson does, she may not be gunning to be appointed permanent director. Because of statutory limits on salaries of political appointees, were Thompson to be appointed and confirmed, her salary would be limited to significantly below her current salary of $272,774. ON THE AGENDA While the industry consensus, overwhelmingly, is that Thompson is exceptionally qualified to steer the FHFA, she has her work cut out for her. In recent years, both of the GSEs have experienced a brain drain. Part of the reason so many people have departed, particularly at the executive level at Fannie Mae, is because of restrictive salary caps that have been in place under conservatorship. Fannie Mae employees make much more than their conservators do at FHFA, by several multiples — a tension that is not uncommon between regulators and the industries they oversee. But compared to the private sector, it’s a pittance. The other, and perhaps equally important dynamic leading to the talent exodus, is a stifling culture. In the past few years, the FHFA has discouraged innovation to carry out affordability goals. Much of that discouragement came directly from the top of FHFA, sources said. It is too soon to tell if FHFA will be able to correct that trend. But innovations such as allowing ontime rental payments to figure into Fannie Mae’s underwriting process could help boost morale among public servants. The FHFA declined to comment on the brain drain. Another challenge the agency faces is what to do with an agreement put in place with the U.S. Treasury — the preferred stock purchase agreement — which placed a cap on GSE purchases of higher-risk loans. FHFA declined to comment on its stance on whether it would seek to change the PSPA with the Treasury or what its timeline might be. The higher-risk loan limits may pose a challenge for the GSEs when combined with FHFA’s new proposed affordability benchmarks. Tagoe acknowledged that making the goals while staying under the higher-risk loan caps could place the GSEs in a tough situation. "As the market evolves, [the GSEs] respond and they have

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“People worry about regulators being captured by the agencies they regulate. That is not Sandra Thompson. She knows what her role is. She doesn’t put up with nonsense.” - Former GSE official

OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2021

a number of levers to ensure that they're meeting their safety and soundness goals of building capital but meeting their mission activities, which includes housing goals,” said Tagoe. “They've done this year in, year out. Every now and then sometimes there's a goal or two that they don't make. But the management teams at both enterprises take that mission requirement really seriously." The January PSPA amendments also capped the amount of non-owner occupied home loans the GSEs can purchase. Maria Fregosi, lender Homepoint's chief investment officer, said that it’s a complicated issue, and while people are sometimes wary of the GSEs financing “investor properties,” the proceeds of those loans are crucial to subsidize loans to lower and moderate-income borrowers. “In the past, one of the ways the agencies supported the low to moderate-income borrower was through ‘non-owner loans,’ because they could get more margin, charge a higher rate and use that money to support a low income borrower,” said Fregosi. “I’m hoping there will be a more holistic view and more opportunities to do higher margin products.” While the FHFA declined to clarify its stance on the higher-risk loans, it is possible that Thompson expects the GSEs to accomplish their affordability goals by working with lenders to find ways to de-risk loans to underserved borrowers. Factoring in on-time rental payments, taking into account alternative forms of income or developing loan-counseling products for underserved borrowers could help on that front. Tagoe said that as the agency takes actions to expand access to credit — such as with the ontime rental payments program — it is intensely focused on safety and soundness. "When we're thinking about expanding access to credit, it's on the margin and it's doing it in a really safe and sound way,” said Tagoe. “So this is not just sort of a broad opening of the credit box, this is really laser focused on the margin, and really carefully considering what I would say are additional factors or compensating factors."

The industry will also be closely watching the outcome of a new memo of understanding between FHFA and the department of Housing and Urban Development to cooperate on fair lending examinations, share information and resources. Some have suggested that the agreement signals that there will be heightened scrutiny surrounding the GSEs’ underwriting systems. A recent report by investigative data journalism outlet The Markup analyzed conventional loans and found that even when many factors were held constant, borrowers of color saw much higher rates of denial. The mortgage industry has criticized the analysis, which did not look at Federal Housing Administration or Veterans’ Affairs loans. Those programs typically loan to low- and moderate-income borrowers. The report, which did not take into consideration credit scores in the analysis, criticized the GSEs for using an outdated credit score that does not include utility and rental payments. An FHFA spokesperson said that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are in the process of evaluating new credit score models. Tagoe said that the agreement between HUD and FHFA does not mean there will be more scrutiny of the GSEs’ underwriting algorithms, but is intended to formalize sharing of resources, such as supervisory data on fair lending examinations of the GSEs that would not otherwise be available. HUD already analyzes changes to the underwriting process to ensure there is not disparate impact. And, if disparate impact were identified in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s underwriting, the FHFA would bear some responsibility. The GSEs craft their underwriting guidelines based on mandates from their conservator. “A lot of the policy around risk-based pricing is informed at a 30,000 foot level by FHFA,” said Walker, now of CredEvolv. “There’s a thorough fair lending review within each GSE every time there’s an adjustment to the [Desktop Underwriter] or Loan Product Advisor. So it’s hard to say there hasn’t been some level of understanding.”

OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2021

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“A lot of the policy around risk-based pricing is informed at a 30,000 foot level by FHFA. There’s a thorough fair lending review within each GSE every time there’s an adjustment to the [Desktop Underwriter] or Loan Product Advisor. So it’s hard to say there hasn’t been some level of understanding.” - Jeffrey Walker

Ted Ahern Rob Barber Nicole Beattie John Berkowitz Michael Blake Cindy Buhr Danny Byrnes Carmine Cacciavillani Sean Cahan Bill Decker James Deitch Uday Devalla Kristen Estrella John Fraas

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Anthony Frederick Trevor Gauthier Jason Gesing Ben Graboske John Hedlund Michael Hutchins Aaron King Pat Kinsel Alex Kutsishin Samantha Manfer Devi Mateti Terri Merlino Samantha Meyer

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Austin Niemiec

OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2020

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John Paasonen Bruno Pasceri Fiona Petrie Karen Postiglioni Eric Ray Steve Reich Steven Schachter Cathleen Schreiner Gates Phil Shoemaker Kristen Sieffert Baron Silverstein

59 60 61 62 63 64

Steve Smith Patrick Stone Ike Suri Terry Theologides Joe Tyrrell Dale Vermillion Jeffrey Walker Joe Welu Sue Yannaccone Brian Zitin

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65 66 67 68 69

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2021 James O’Bryon

Defining leadership Introducing HousingWire’s 2021 Vanguard winners By Brena Nath

you were tasked with defining the word “leadership,” how you explain what it means? Ifwould The word encapsulates so much, and yet according to MerriamWebster, it can be summed up as “the power or ability to lead other people.” If it’s simply the ability to lead others, the list of HousingWire Vanguard winners would be a lot longer. If it’s based on the ability to grow a company, cause or initiative, the housing industry would be filled with leaders, as it continuously broke record after record last year. While all of this fits the standard definition, the word leadership that I’m referring to here is the type of leader that many of us are inspired by and aspire to be — a Vanguard leader. The following pages highlight 50 of the greatest leaders in the housing industry. They’re the executives who are changing the foundation of the industry.

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To highlight a couple of the quotes that explain this best, John Berkowitz, co-founder and CEO at OJO Labs, when talking about his secret to his success, said, “My biggest secret to success is that I’m willing to take a community approach to building a company.” James Deitch, CEO at Teraverde, said his secret is believing team members are capable of extraordinary contributions. Along similar lines, Cathleen Schreiner Gates, CEO at SimpleNexus, said, “When I was promoted to my first management role, I was advised to find ways to leverage the talents and passions of the individuals on my team versus having everyone adhere to a single definition of what success looks like.” It’s answers like these that showcase what it means to be a Vanguard. They’re people who are not only moving markets forward, but they also are bringing an amazing team of talented individuals along with them for the ride. Congratulations to this year’s class of honorees.

OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2020

Rob Barber

Chief Investment Officer

CEO

Guaranteed Rate

ATTOM

AS GUARANTEED RATE CHIEF INVESTMENT OFFICER, Ted Ahern uses his experience and expertise to collaborate with the management team to help steer the company to success. His work on the leadership team over the past year played a significant role in ensuring that Guaranteed Rate emerged financially stronger than ever before after a period of unprecedented uncertainty. During his 16-year tenure with the company, he has helped craft and implement numerous financial strategies and acquisitions, and his commitment to growth has helped the company expand from a handful of offices to more than 850. Guaranteed Rate has enjoyed exponential growth throughout Ahern’s tenure. Since he joined the firm in 2005, he has worked to build strong relationships that have led to highly successful joint ventures. The complexities and nuances of Ahern’s role necessitate a broad network of expert contacts, and his affability and good nature help him successfully manage this role. Ahern’s background in finance, banking, trading and the capital markets has helped the company thrive through varying business cycles. Because of his broad experience, he is adept at jumping in to assist with almost any situation, whether it involves supporting companywide or departmental decisions. Aside from Guaranteed Rate, Ahern serves on the Chicago Regional Advisory Committee of The Ireland Funds America, which raises money for charities in Ireland. He is on the Men’s Golf Committee for the Lurie Children’s Pro Amateur Golf Championship, which raises money for the Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago. He also taught economics at Lake Forest College for eight years.

AS CEO OF ATTOM, Rob Barber directs the enterprise, data and product strategy, customer acquisition and service, as well as corporate management teams, for the property data provider. Barber also leads the company’s corporate M&A strategy. Barber’s true passion for property data guides ATTOM’s team of forward-thinking experts, committed to being the one source its customers need for real estate data solutions that impact decisions, innovation and profits. This enthusiasm continues to motivate the company’s growing team of data experts dedicated to ensuring ATTOM’s key stakeholders — ranging from customers to subsidiary partners — achieve success through a culture of integrity and excellence in a positive and collaborative environment. Through Barber’s leadership, ATTOM maintains its mission to serve as a transformative information and property data services organization that fuels innovation, growth and strategy for its customers. ATTOM’s customer relationships and continued success are essential in fueling Barber’s and the entire ATTOM team’s daily passion for data innovation. Barber’s tireless pursuit to further ATTOM’s mission as a leader in real estate information drives ATTOM to consistently redefine the future of data solutions. Under Barber’s direction to further the company’s expansion initiatives and demonstrate its ability to deliver new data solutions, ATTOM continues to innovate with its advancements in technology and data delivery solutions. Through advancements like ATTOM Table of Data Elements, various analytics-driven tools, and new data delivery solutions offering immediate access to property data, Barber has maintained the company’s focus on its investment in data elements and its commitment to investing in people elements.

What has been your secret to success?

What’s the best advice you’ve ever received?

“I try to make a contribution every day. If you do that for a long enough time, it adds up. I’m a marathoner, not a sprinter.”

“A great piece of advice, especially when young, is to “pay yourself first.” This means taking some of your earnings and investing it before you have a chance to spend it. If a person builds this habit early in life, then the compounding effect of time will be a great ally.”

OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2020

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Ted Ahern

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Nicole Beattie

John Berkowitz

EVP, Servicing

Co-Founder and CEO

Rocket Mortgage

OJO Labs

AS EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT, Nicole Beattie leads servicing at Rocket Mortgage, and she has been with the organization for more than 17 years. Beattie and her team managed a portfolio of more than $467 billion in serviced loans in the first quarter of 2021, a massive amount of volume, while maintaining an impressive level of client experience. As a result, Rocket Mortgage is the country’s fifth-largest mortgage servicer. For all four years that she has led the team, J.D. Power has named Rocket Mortgage the nation’s top mortgage servicer for client satisfaction — and has received the accolade a total of eight years, every year the company was eligible. These awards, coupled with an unmatched 90plus percent retention rate as of the first quarter, represent her leadership and commitment to the industry and the homeowners that Rocket serves. Thanks to Beattie’s proactive work in 2020, her team was able to educate Rocket Mortgage’s serviced clients who were impacted by the pandemic and help them decide the best solutions for their specific situation. As the pandemic began to affect homeowners, Rocket Mortgage released an automated system to quickly assist them. While many lenders were experiencing several-hour wait times, Rocket Mortgage clients were able to log in to an online portal containing educational resources and an online solution to apply for a forbearance plan. Beattie and her team exemplified the difference it can make when a mortgage servicer provides best-in-class technology and caring team members — both of which resulted in forbearance rates 35% lower than the industry average.

AS CO-FOUNDER AND CEO OF OJO LABS, John Berkowitz is fundamentally transforming the way consumers buy and sell homes. Over the past year, Berkowitz scaled OJO Labs to reach millions of new consumers to support homebuyers and sellers, removing barriers to homeownership through personalized guidance and matching consumers with the right industry expertise. Most notably, Berkowitz and his team are addressing the pervasive inequity in the real estate industry head on. With Berkowitz at the helm, OJO Labs is on a mission to close the gap in homeownership so that all people — regardless of race, class or gender — can experience the physical, financial and emotional haven that home provides. A tenacious leader, Berkowitz will stop at nothing to ensure the safety and well-being of his employees, his community and the broader real estate industry. The past 12 months have presented unprecedented challenges — from a real estate market turned upside down by the pandemic to widespread power outages and freezing temperatures in the state OJO Labs calls home. At the same time, Berkowitz put the well-being of his employees first. OJO Labs implemented an entirely new remote work program, consisting of home office and wellness stipends, a revamped holiday schedule — with longer breaks, new holidays and time off for days of service — and an initiative that gives employees meeting-free blocks every week.

What one habit has made a crucial difference in your success?

What has been the secret to your success?

“I have built a strong habit of prioritizing my time to get maximum value and output. A mentor of mine once told me that what you choose to spend your time working on is equally as important as what you choose not to spend your time working on.”

“My biggest secret to success is that I’m willing to take a community approach to building a company. You have to be comfortable with recognizing you don’t know everything and be open to constantly learning new things from experts and other CEOs and entrepreneurs.”

OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2020

Cindy Buhr

President Capital Markets

EVP, Compliance and Legal

Fairway Independent Mortgage

PrimeLending

AS PRESIDENT CAPITAL MARKETS at Fairway Independent Mortgage, Mike Blake is known as the “professor” because of his level of knowledge and passion for his industry. Blake’s ability to take in information on hundreds of programs — all with multiple execution options and consistently determine the best path — is a trait that makes him a stand-out executive. Blake is a resource not only for Fairway but also for the industry as a whole. When the GSEs, PLS and MSR market participants need market intelligence from a lender on the primary market, Blake is the go-to for information. Because Blake is known for his transparency and accuracy, he is highly sought out by others for his perspective. While the last 12–16 months in the capital markets have been chaotic with hundreds of changes, Blake’s greatest qualities, such as his leadership, speed, availability and technical knowledge, have been on display to Fairway’s 10,000 plus teammates and its industry partners. With Blake leading Faiway’s efforts, the company has minimized losses when losses were a certainty, and he has maximized gains by finding opportunities others didn’t see. Blake’s balance and focus on maintaining a risk-mitigating hedge strategy has safeguarded the company during the most volatile time. Blake took quick action to minimize margin calls, securing liquidity in MSR sales (when there was none in the market), and played a critical role in establishing a large credit facility in case Fairway was to be under further liquidity pressures.

CINDY BUHR leads PrimeLending’s legal and compliance departments in addition to passionately championing an inclusive, empowering work environment for all. With more than 30 years of experience as both inhouse counsel and a litigator, Buhr brings a unique perspective to her leadership roles, including general counsel, corporate secretary, board director, strategic executive team member, risk committee member and other interdisciplinary workgroups and projects. Buhr’s direction and team-centric philosophy has propelled PrimeLending’s growth forward for more than a decade. The consummate problem-solver, Buhr ensures her teams stay in front of the ever-changing legal and regulatory landscape so they can educate and guide production and operations. During her tenure, Buhr has built the legal department from the ground up with a belief that meeting regulatory and compliance standards is a team effort and that leadership plays a fundamental role in establishing a people-centric culture. As a leader, Buhr has fostered a work culture that encourages open lines of communication and finds solutions that fundamentally do the right thing for the customer while staying within the bounds of regulatory guidance. Under her leadership, the legal and compliance departments are known as trusted advisors who will walk side-by-side with stakeholders, provide the necessary information and guardian the best interests of all involved. This mentality cultivates an environment where there is a personal commitment to adhere to legal and regulatory compliance requirements at every level of the organization.

What has been your secret to success?

What has been the secret to your success?

“Hard work, determination and a great team are key components to success.”

“Building a strong team begins with hiring the right people. Skills are part of the equation, but, more than that, you want a team player that can work in a collaborative environment and is passionate about serving others. I strive to create a team environment where people feel valued in their contributions.”

OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2020

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Michael Blake

Carmine Cacciavillani

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Danny Byrnes Chief Revenue Officer

CEO

Nationwide Title Clearing

Blue Sage Solutions

AS CHIEF REVENUE OFFICER, Danny Byrnes has ultimate accountability in aligning all revenue-generating departments and building strategic partnerships to ensure ongoing success for Nationwide Title Clearing, leveraging his dynamic sales and marketing experience and industry knowledge. Due to his dedication, knowledge and experience, NTC has established a team of top industry experts that has led to a meteoric rise in sales over the past 11 years and continues to maintain a consistent growth rate. Byrnes was hired in early 2011 and quickly advanced to vice president of sales. In his second year, sales nearly doubled, and in his tenure, Byrnes has expanded sales by 570%. While continuing the success of the sales department, he took on the responsibility for NTC’s public relations and marketing in 2018 and then was promoted to chief revenue officer in 2020. Since then, he has established and implemented an effective go-to-market strategy that has further accelerated the company’s rapid growth contributing to the success of the sales, marketing and PR departments. By expanding upon, bundling and rebranding many of NTC’s existing services and bringing them to market, he has successfully diversified NTC’s offerings — protecting it from shifts in the market. Exhibited through the consistently high rankings on the Inc. 5000 list and Tampa Bay’s lists of fastest-growing companies, Byrnes’ efforts as a leader are driving explosive growth at NTC. Just in the past two years, Bryne and his team have brought home countless awards, including HousingWire’s Tech100 award for NTC’s PerfectDocs platform and seven International “Stevie” awards for sales and customer service excellence.

CARMINE CACCIAVILLANI is the brainchild behind Blue Sage Solutions, a fast-growing loan origination platform in the mortgage industry and the only platform built and launched in the cloud that supports any channel of business. Thanks to Cacciavillani, the number of loans originated through Blue Sage soared by 700% in 2020 as growing numbers of lenders, banks and credit unions have adopted digital mortgage processes — many of them doubling their underwriting efficiencies in the process. Five years after its launch, Blue Sage has been so successful that Goldman Sachs Growth Equity has invested in the company to ensure Cacciavillani’s creation continues to evolve into the new gold standard for loan production in the mortgage industry. When launching the Blue Sage Digital Lending Platform five years ago, Cacciavillani turned heads. Not just because the market for loan origination systems was dominated by a handful of entrenched players, but also because there was nothing else like it. Considering that the mortgage industry has struggled for years to successfully adopt and implement digital mortgage processes, Cacciavillani’s decision to launch Blue Sage was a daring move that has certainly paid off. Today, Cacciavillani’s dream of empowering lenders to originate digital mortgages from the ground up has become reality. Over the past year, Blue Sage has experienced a 66% growth in clients with over 40,000 individual users. Cacciavillani continues to build out the Blue Sage platform and enhance its speed, flexibility, and value by developing integrations with companies such as FormFree, Corelogic, ClosingCorp, Optimal Blue, ComplianceEase and many other third-party service providers.

What one habit has made a crucial difference in your success?

What has been the secret to your success?

“Keep things light and do not quit. Sales is not a fun game when times are tough.”

“The reason for our success is our employees. We have a core group of folks who have been working together for over 30 years and who have in-depth knowledge of the mortgage business and can use their technical acumen to continuously bring new innovations to the forefront.”

OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2020

Bill Decker

President

President, Chief Operating Officer and Co-Founder

Cornerstone First Mortgage

MAXEX

OVER THE PAST SEVERAL YEARS, Sean Cahan has built Cornerstone First Mortgage from a single local bank into one of the fast-growing, full-service mortgage lenders in the country. With 22 branches and licensed to do business in 42 states, Cornerstone surpassed $1 billion in annual production last year. Meanwhile, Cahan, who in addition to managing Cornerstone’s operations also has his own portfolio of clients, has been the company’s top producer for six years running. Last year alone, Cahan originated more than $245 million in loans — nearly one quarter of his company’s total production. In fact, Cahan has been among the top 100 loan originators in the U.S. in loan volume for the past four years. Under Cahan’s leadership, Cornerstone is poised to grow even larger. In May of this year, the company acquired San Diego-based lender West Coast Funding, operating as WCF Twenty Four Seven. Understanding that culture can be the defining factor between whether acquisitions are successful or not, Cahan made sure WCF shared Cornerstone’s core mission of putting borrowers first and gaining their loyalty for life by providing an unbeatable consumer experience. With the acquisition, Cahan’s company is expected to double its annual loan production to $2 billion a year. Cahan is a self-declared “Mortgage Geek,” creating some of the most engaging YouTube videos in the mortgage industry, all while teaching consumers about the mortgage process and helping other loan officers kick their sales into high gear. Despite some zaniness behind the Mortgage Geek videos, Cahan’s no-nonsense advice informs others seeking a career in the mortgage industry and loan officers who want to increase sales.

BILL DECKER has more than 30 years of experience building successful organizations at the intersection of banking, mortgage, capital markets and technology. As co-founder and president of MAXEX, he spearheaded the creation, development and growth of the first exchange to enable buying and selling of residential loans between originators and many marquee investors through a single clearinghouse. Decker has been instrumental in developing MAXEX’s vision, the design of the company’s platform and the effort to unite lending originators and institutional investors on a single exchange. His decades of experience as an entrepreneur and executive in mortgage and banking have been crucial as MAXEX continues to unite the market for non-agency structured finance in unprecedented fashion, increasing standardization, transparency and liquidity for all participants. Because of the operational vision and execution instituted by Decker, MAXEX remained a reliable source for that private market liquidity during the pandemic and thrived as a result, tripling the company’s 2019 lock volume in 2020. As the jumbo market returned and pipelines surged back beyond capacity, Decker’s guidance helped MAXEX navigate the industry-wide reliance on third party vendors while maximizing capacity and liquidity options. Decker’s relationships and experience, along with MAXEX’s rapidly increasing scale, uniquely position him to educate market participants, legislators and regulators on policy matters that are essential to improving liquidity in the secondary mortgage market. Throughout his career, Bill has played an active role creating standardization within the mortgage industry by leveling the playing field between large and small financial institutions.

What has been your secret to success?

What’s the best advice you’ve ever received?

“I’ve always done my homework and learned the ins and outs of the mortgage process as well as all the different products and guidelines, especially the most difficult ones. By learning the different products and getting away from just selling a rate, a successful loan originator is able to sell knowledge.”

“The best advice I ever received is to treat others as you wish to be treated. It seems so simple in concept, but it is hard to embrace. Embedded in this concept is truly understanding that each one of us is a unique individual and what motivates one individual may have little to a negative impact on others.”

OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2020

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Sean Cahan

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James Deitch

Uday Devalla

CEO

Chief Technology Officer

Teraverde

Sagent

AFTER SPENDING 25 YEARS AS A LENDER, James Deitch founded Teraverde to assist lenders with technology and strategy. Over the past 10 years, he has combined his lending expertise, technical savviness and desire to help lenders into an award-winning company. Deitch’s mortgage domain knowledge combined with his natural inquisitiveness has led him to write three best-selling books on strategic, digital and disruptive transformation. His interviews with over 300 executives helped him develop insightfulness in thinking through client issues. In the past 12 months, Deitch navigated Teraverde through the challenges of COVID-19 and changing business conditions. Teraverde re-engineered Coheus, the award-winning business intelligence platform, speeding installation to just 48 hours and simultaneously reducing the cost of Coheus to lenders. Deitch developed a joint product with Loan Vision’s general ledger system to combine LOS and general ledger data in an easy-to-use BI application. His drive and energy helped the Teraverde team remain focused on building great technology for the long term while maintaining the company’s self-funding bootstrap model. In the early stages of the pandemic, Deitch assisted many lenders in managing through limited liquidity and a contraction of products offered. Three months later, the Federal Reserve forced down interest rates, challenging lender capacity in the resulting refinance boom. Deitch switched gears and assisted clients in expanding capacity through business process changes and better application of technology.

UDAY DEVALLA is the chief technology officer of mortgage servicing software company Sagent. Devalla has been a mortgage innovation insider through every major advance in the modern era, from building the origination industry’s first automated underwriting system at Countrywide — which paved the way for the success of today’s top AUS Fannie Mae DU — to modernizing one of the largest nonbank tech platforms during the 2013-2019 digital mortgage era that powered Blackstone-owned Stearns as well as top fintech SoFi’s mortgage lending. Today, Devalla is leading the last mile of mortgage modernization by rewiring the servicing industry with the same consumer-first, bankon-your-phone experience that people get in every other aspect of their lives. Devalla joined Sagent as CTO in September 2020 and leads more than 400 team members on executing the firm’s ambitious “consumer-first servicing modernization” vision. This time period was, and remains, in the heat of unprecedented pandemic-driven homeowner hardships and real-time policymaking to provide relief. In this era, servicers have all the opportunity — and all the compliance and reputational risk — of caring for consumers. Without disrupting daily real-time servicing operations for Sagent’s servicing clients, Devalla led a comprehensive migration to entirely cloud-based platforms in 2020 and early 2021. This resulted in highly configurable, modular performing, nonperforming, and consumer platforms that enable servicers to ace every customer care detail and remain in real-time compliance with real-time regs and GSE/investor changes.

What has been the secret to your success?

What’s the secret to your success?

“I believe team members are capable of extraordinary contributions. I encourage each team member to think broadly about innovation, and how to creatively address an opportunity or issue. I’m willing to invest in each team member’s knowledge and interests.”

“My secret to success is pushing myself to view the world through a housing consumer’s eyes. They don’t know or care about the wildly complex details we deal with in the mortgage industry, they just know they want to buy, finance, improve, and sell homes easily. It’s our job to simplify it for them.”

OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2020

John Fraas

President

CEO

Title365

Class Valuation

KRISTEN ESTRELLA, president of Title365, which recently merged with cloud-based banking software company Blend, is revolutionizing the antiquated title process within the financial services industry. In her role, Estrella leads 1,300 people across the U.S. and India with the mission to address common pain points associated with title and settlement processes, enabling over 290 financial institutions to increase employee productivity and deliver exceptional customer experiences. Under her leadership, Blend and Title365’s technology offers an end-to-end experience for lenders and borrowers, minimizing costs and inefficiencies by deeply integrating title and settlement into the loan process. As the first woman to be promoted to president of Title365, Estrella is one of the top-ranking women on the company’s leadership team. Prior to Title365 being acquired by Blend, she led the company while it was wholly owned by Mr. Cooper, one of the largest non-bank servicers in the U.S., highlighting the scale and size of Title365’s ecosystem under her. Estrella played a critical role in Blend’s acquisition of Title365 — a significant moment/transaction in the company’s history — approximately doubling Blend’s number of employees by the time the deal was completed. When Blend started to build their own in-house title company in 2020, they realized that the most effective way to scale quickly and best serve their customers would be to invest in a title company that shared their mission of providing the best in class solution to the industry. Estrella was responsible for conducting due diligence for the companies approaching Title365 and was instrumental in deciding that Blend was the highest performing partner for their mission.

AS CEO OF CLASS VALUATION John Fraas had to make massive adjustments to navigate the pandemic over the past 12-18 months. With a team of about 200 people, one of the company’s greatest assets prior to the pandemic was its energetic, hive-like call center where colleagues could partake in daily games and entertainment throughout the workday, developing a family-like culture. As the pandemic hit, this work environment transitioned to fully remote, and to add to the challenges, the appraisal market hit historic numbers, stretching everyone beyond capacity. Fraas managed to maintain a positive attitude and was insistent on continuing the weekly company-wide meetings remotely to give him an opportunity to share updates with the team and congratulate individual contributors for jobs well done. His blend of positivity and commitment to transparency surrounding the goals of the organization helps keep the team aligned for a common goal and excited to work together to achieve it. There is nothing Fraas asks of his team that he wouldn’t be willing to do himself. With historically high appraisal volume, the company’s call center message boards are often filled and backed up from the many requests for status updates or other questions. To help the team and get responses to their business partners as quickly as possible, Fraas is always quick to jump in and begin responding to messages to help the team keep up. Over the past 6 months, Fraas has also been integral in the acquisition of two additional AMCs (Southeastern and Synergy), as well as the partnership with Class Valuation’s new owners, Gridiron.

What’s the best advice you ever received?

What has been your secret to success?

“Early in my career, I was given advice by one of my first managers that I continue to live by today. They told me, no matter what your job or position is, it’s important to always have respect for others and to never put your reputation at risk.”

“To listen more than I speak and to be comfortable not being the smartest person in the room. At Class we have such a great team of people that know our business and our clients. We function as a high-performing team because we have the utmost respect for each other and value each other’s opinion.”

OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2020

51 ❱ HOUSINGWIRE

Kristen Estrella

52 ❱ HOUSINGWIRE

Anthony Frederick

Trevor Gauthier

SVP, Sales

CEO

United Wholesale Mortgage

ACES Quality Management

ANTHONY FREDERICK started at United Wholesale Mortgage 23 years ago, making his way from the mailroom to the senior vice president of sales. Throughout his 23 years, his passion for driving the company forward, supporting the wholesale channel and supporting mortgage brokers continues to grow and has helped UWM claim its stake as the No. 1 wholesale lender in the nation for six years in a row. Frederick is the definition of how hard work can truly pay off. Now, as the SVP of sales, Frederick leads a team of nearly 800 sales team members working to support mortgage brokers as they grow their business and help borrowers across the nation. His passion is the motivation that leads the sales team and drives success. Within all of his leadership roles, one thing has held true — Frederick cares about his team and strives to help make them better personally and professionally. His empathetic approach and over two decades of experience have given him the innate ability to put himself in other people’s shoes and coach them on a much deeper level. His connection to the people that he leads fuels the teams’ drive to build similar relationships with UWM clients. Throughout 2020, UWM’s sales team was steadfast and instrumental in the company achieving 2020 production of $182.5 billion, which is 69 percent higher than its prior record production. This groundbreaking achievement was done at a time when the industry and UWM were learning how to work in a new, virtual environment. Frederick led the team and pivoted from tradition in order to adapt quickly and seamlessly.

AS A LEADER, Trevor Gauthier is equal parts industry shaker and humanitarian leader. Not only did Gauthier provide ACES employees the additional support and flexibility needed in 2020, but he has also increased ACES’ reach by 50%, maintained a 92% customer retention rate and expanded revenue by 55% since 2019, all while simultaneously building a new product. While the pandemic provided Gauthier with an opportunity to leverage ACES’ data and technology to support the industry’s compliance needs, it also enabled him to be of service to his employees. The care and concern Gauthier demonstrated for his employees is reflected in the results of ACES’ client and employee satisfaction surveys from the end of 2020. On the client side, ACES’ Net Promoter Score jumped 174% from 2019, and ACES client base has increased 23%. Internally, ACES scored in the top percentiles across all four key drivers of high performance — mission, adaptability, involvement and consistency — as defined by the Denison Organizational Culture Survey. Gauthier has also increased staff by 50%. In addition to providing employees with the flexibility and support they need, Gauthier revised the parameters surrounding the company’s philanthropic program, ACES Cares. The program offers a dollar-for-dollar match of employee donations to a U.S.-registered 501(c)(3) charitable organization of the employee’s choice. Recognizing the tremendous need for charitable contributions and community support addressing issues related to COVID-19 and racial inequality, Gauthier expanded ACES Cares to include donation matching of up to $250 per employee and encourage employees to volunteer and engage in community outreach.

What has been your secret to success?

What one habit has made a crucial difference in your success?

“When I started at UWM, I quickly realized I was going to have to outwork everybody just to be average and if I was going to be one of the best, I was going to have to absolutely dominate from an effort standpoint.”

“I’ve made a habit of asking myself ‘If not me now, then who?’ If your eyes catch a dirty cup on the counter, put in the dishwasher. These items add up, taking the extra few moments to address them head on generates more results than you’d think.”

OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2020

Ben Graboske

CEO

President, Data & Analytics

eXp Realty

Black Knight

SINCE JOINING THE COMPANY IN MARCH 2010, Jason Gesing has been part of the foundation of eXp Realty and has served in a number of capacities, including managing broker of multiple states, general counsel, president and his current position as CEO. He has helped the company go from fewer than 25 real estate agents in four U.S. states to almost 60,000 agents in 17 countries. As CEO Gesing leads corporate decisions and manages the overall operations and resources of the company. He also serves on the Board of Directors of eXp World Holdings (NASDAQ: EXPI) and serves as chair of the Governance Committee. Gesing’s leadership is characterized by enthusiasm, humbleness and care for people. He has helped build an agent-centric culture at eXp Realty that is defined by community, sustainability, integrity, service, collaboration, innovation, transparency, agility and fun. Gesing’s efforts to foster a positive culture have helped earn eXp Realty the distinction of Glassdoor’s “Best Places to Work ‘’ for four consecutive years. Under Gesing’s leadership, which prioritizes a cloud-based, agent-centric brokerage model, eXp reported record earnings for Q1 2021, with revenue increasing 115% as compared to a year ago at the same time and agent count increasing 77% year-over-year. In 2020 and 2021, he helped eXp open brokerage operations in South Africa, India, Mexico, Portugal, France, Puerto Rico, Brazil, Italy, Hong Kong, Colombia, Spain, Israel and Panama. Gesing is continuously searching for ways to help agents be successful, adding and enhancing eXp’s affiliated services to help agents with end-to-end business.

AS PRESIDENT OF BLACK KNIGHT DATA & ANALYTICS, Ben Graboske leads his team to provide bold, new solutions that are positively impacting the mortgage and real estate industries with comprehensive data and innovative tools. These efforts help companies find new leads, learn powerful insights, reduce portfolio risk and prepare for the financial impact of a world-changing pandemic. Under Graboske’s management, his division is far exceeding revenue goals and his leadership style fosters a culture of collaboration, inclusion and innovation. To provide the best possible solutions to Black Knight’s wide array of clients, Graboske has led his division to launch a large suite of new and leading-edge products and enhancements. Recognizing the severity of COVID-19’s economic ramifications on the U.S. housing market, Graboske led the Black Knight Data & Analytics team to begin compiling daily, loan-level information on the number of U.S. mortgage holders seeking pandemic-related forbearances. This complimentary information, leveraging Black Knight’s extensive data, research and analytics capabilities, was presented in the new McDash Flash Forbearance Tracker Report. This daily report was made available to the mortgage industry, government agencies and the GSEs to provide a clear understanding of the magnitude of the mortgage forbearance situation and helped lenders and servicers benchmark their company’s activities against the industry and make informed decisions regarding next steps. Graboske has also demonstrated his professional excellence and leadership by assembling a talented and diverse leadership team. He has personally sponsored and mentored emerging and diverse talent throughout his career.

What one habit has made a crucial difference in your success?

What has been the secret to your success?

“Waking up early in the morning and, whenever possible, doing some form of exercise that elevates the heartbeat. For me, it can make the difference between a good day and a great day.”

“I focus on finding top performers to lead — and be a part of — my teams. I empower them to do their jobs and provide the support they need to be successful. ”

OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2020

53 ❱ HOUSINGWIRE

Jason Gesing

54 ❱ HOUSINGWIRE

John Hedlund

Michael Hutchins

Chief Operating Officer, Managing Director

President

AmeriHome Mortgage Company

Freddie Mac

AS ONE OF THE FOUNDING MEMBERS OF AMERIHOME’S EXECUTIVE TEAM, John Hedlund’s vision and drive have led AmeriHome’s Correspondent Lending division to be the 2nd largest Correspondent Lender and 14th largest mortgage company, according to Inside Mortgage Finance, in seven short years. Hedlund’s focus on operational excellence, customer relationships, industry advocacy and career development of AmeriHome employees set him apart from other leaders in the industry. Facing unprecedented circumstances in the past 12 months, Hedlund led AmeriHome through the transition to a 100% remote workforce, with nearly 100% productivity within 48 hours. With the effects of the pandemic creating a never-before-seen wave of refinance activity, AmeriHome was able to exceed its acquisition budget by nearly 50%. Hedlund has kept his leadership team focused on maintaining the culture and work ethic that he spent the first six years of AmeriHome’s life building and developing. Hedlund continues to build, develop and drive successful initiatives and projects on the home front for AmeriHome. Understanding that scalability can only be achieved by automating redundant processes and driving cost out of the manufacturing process, AmeriHome continues to be an elite market participant through its commitment to the use of current technology to drive workflow and maximizing human capital where their highest and best use can be merged. Through changes implemented in the past 12 months, Delegated Correspondent turn times have improved by nearly 30%, while production volume is up 30% year-over-year.

AS A 30-YEAR VETERAN OF FINANCIAL SERVICES, Mike Hutchins was the right person to lead Freddie Mac through a challenging time in the housing market. Over the last 12 months, Hutchins has built Freddie Mac’s financial strength while ensuring the company served as a critical source of liquidity and stability to the housing market in a very difficult economic climate. Hutchins was a driving force in the strategy that led to the revival of the credit-risk transfer market after a period of difficulty early in the pandemic. He has led the company as it provided unprecedented support to a surging single-family purchase and refinance market, and he has overseen an extraordinary effort to support renters, borrowers and lenders adversely affected by COVID-19. Hutchins led internal decisions and oversaw the company’s external efforts to reach out and provide assistance to struggling borrowers, renters and lenders. Under his leadership, Freddie Mac has helped more than 900,000 at-risk homeowners and renters remain in their homes while supporting a vibrant U.S. housing finance system that remained a source of strength for the national economy. During the early days of the pandemic, the credit-risk transfer markets endured a period of uncertainty, with key players abandoning the market. Thanks in part to Hutchins’ oversight of Freddie Mac’s CRT strategy, the company remained in the CRT market, after only a three-month lull. This strategy re-energized the market and drew record participants to its offerings, having its biggest year ever in 2020. Today, Freddie Mac has transferred credit risk on more than $2 trillion in single-family mortgages since the inception of the CRT program.

What one habit has made a crucial difference in your success?

What has been the secret to your success?

“Be proactive in everything…plan ahead, adjust with new information and changing conditions, but have a plan and look down the road for what might happen - good and bad.”

“I strive to be a ‘micro-understander,’ but not a ‘micromanager.’ Understanding the details of a business as complicated as purchasing mortgages, securitizing and hedging them is important to making the best short-term and long-term decisions.”

OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2020

Pat Kinsel

CEO

Co-Founder and CEO

Snapdocs

Notarize

UNDER AARON KING’S LEADERSHIP AS CEO, Snapdocs’ growth has exploded as the number of lenders who use Snapdocs’ Digital Closing Platform has increased by more than 700% within the last 10 months and the company has doubled headcount to support that growth. King’s commitment to making Snapdocs’ customers successful is a key reason why the organization has grown so quickly and why many more lenders are seeing the benefits that digital closings have promised. While it’s taking some lenders months or years to fully adopt digital closings and see ROI, Snapdocs enables lenders to digitize 99% of their loan volume in as little as one month, close 10% or more loans in a month without adding headcount and fund the same day as the closing. Snapdocs’ explosive growth is a result of King’s commitment to delivering real value to customers quickly and making Snapdocs’ customers wildly successful. This commitment runs throughout the entire company and is reflected in the results that Snapdocs’ customers have seen. King led Snapdocs’ strategic partnership with Ellie Mae, which was announced in March 2020. This partnership between the industry’s leading digital closing provider and LOS provider brings lenders one step closer to a fully digital end-to-end mortgage process. With this partnership, lenders can easily integrate Ellie Mae’s Encompass with Snapdocs to access a single platform for managing all types of closings, including wet, hybrid, and full eClosings. The integration bridges the gap between origination and closing by digitizing and automating the workflows between these two key steps in the mortgage process.

PAT KINSEL is the pioneer of remote online notarization, which became an essential service that kept businesses and the housing market moving forward during the COVID-19 pandemic. Kinsel and his work have transformed how industries complete their most important transactions. Kinsel knew back in 2015 what the entire world now knows in 2021 — that there needed to be a simple, easy digital way to notarize documents online from the comfort and safety of someone’s home in just a few short, simple steps. Kinsel has led Notarize through an incredible growth trajectory of 600%+ growth during the pandemic, and he’s been at the forefront of increasing security surrounding real estate closings through his work across a multitude of industries. Under Kinsel’s leadership, Notarize has completed the country’s first legal online notarization, online real estate closing, online mortgage, online will and online auto sale. Kinsel led Notarize to become the first platform approved by Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and countless title underwriters and national banks. Kinsel and Notarize have chaired the standards-setting groups for the Mortgage Bankers Association, American Land Title Association and others. In the last 12 months, Kinsel has led Notarize through 150%+ growth. The team has expanded from 100+ people to nearly 400 teammates in less than a year. Kinsel’s team is pushing the company and the industry forward and bringing the power of RON to additional categories, including financial services and auto. In addition to running Notarize, Kinsel is an entrepreneur partner at Polaris Partners where he specializes in building and investing in innovative SaaS platforms.

What’s the best advice you’ve ever received?

What has been your secret to success?

“Create clarity of thought on the number one focus of any initiative within the company. It’s easy to list multiple things to focus on, but the hard work is in boiling that down. When everything is important, nothing is important.”

“I believe Notarize has been successful because, despite what at times seemed like a sure failure, we’ve been willing to hold a vision and a bet far longer than most rational people would. Most startups fail simply because people give up before their bet plays out and hard, meaningful goals take time.”

OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2020

55 ❱ HOUSINGWIRE

Aaron King

56 ❱ HOUSINGWIRE

Alex Kutsishin

Samantha Manfer

Co-Founder and CEO

EVP, Chief Business Development and Brand Officer

Sales Boomerang

Planet Home Lending

AS THE FOUNDER AND CEO Alex Kutsishin is practically synonymous with Sales Boomerang and its success. In less than five years, he has been able to change the way lenders think about customer retention and introduce a fast-adopted technology in a normally slow-to-adopt industry. Kutsishin is a serial entrepreneur with an all-or-nothing approach to business. Kutsishin’s vision with Sales Boomerang was to change the way lenders think about customer retention. His first obstacle was overcoming industry resistance to all things new. Instead of positioning Sales Boomerang as “revolutionary” or a “disruptor,” he called his solution an “evolution” of existing practices. Kutsishin’s creative, “where there’s a will, there’s a way” approach to problem-solving extends to his team, who say there isn’t a request they can make of their CEO that he won’t move mountains to accomplish. Under Kutsishin’s leadership, Sales Boomerang has earned two HousingWire Tech100 awards, and at less than five years old, Sales Boomerang will debut in the top 5% of the Inc. 5000 with revenue growth of more than 3,800% in its first three years of operation. Sales Boomerang’s award-winning honors consistently point not only to the company growth but to the difference Sales Boomerang has made in the mortgage industry. To date, Sales Boomerang has discovered over $30 billion in new volume in total originations and helped lenders record up to 85% borrower retention rates, well over the industry average of 18%. Individually, Kutsishin was named a 2020 HousingWire Tech Trendsetter, highlighting his passion and his mission for improving the lives of customers and creating a culture of service, encouraging his team to always give more value than you get.

INSIGHTS GLEANED FROM WORKING IN ORIGINATIONS, servicing, subservicing, warehouse lending and asset management made Samantha Manfer instrumental in building an innovative asset monetization engine that is changing the way investors manage mortgage assets. The new monetization engine gives asset investors the real-time ability to alter asset strategies in response to shifts in mortgage, securities or real estate markets. It employs technology, people and tactics from all the areas in which Manfer has worked during her two decades in the mortgage industry. Historically, sub-servicers and asset managers have singularly focused on either performing or non-performing portfolio management. Few have been able to pull together and offer the full spectrum of servicing and retention originations. Manfer’s monetization engine was first created to ensure and protect Planet Home Lending’s own mortgage servicing rights investments. The engine seamlessly and nimbly moves assets based on loan-level performance, shifting between nonperforming, reperforming and performing. When an investor desires liquidation or refinance, the engine shifts the loan to Planet Home Lending’s retention originations team. In the past year, private clients found the monetization strategies so effective that they sent over larger portfolios and asked Planet to apply similar strategies to niche and unconventional assets. As a result, the company’s third-party sub-servicing portfolio expanded significantly during the first half of 2021, reaching 46,242 active assets valued at nearly $12 billion. Those results nearly doubled the 23,281 assets valued at $6.3 billion Planet Management Group managed from inception in 2014 to year-end 2020.

What one habit has made a crucial difference in your success?

What’s the secret to your success?

“Taking action. I don’t wait to take action. When I see an opportunity, I don’t drag my feet. When I learn something new, I use that knowledge the very same day.”

“The secret to my success is working at a company with visionary leadership dedicated to innovation to ensure a long-term future. That includes channel leaders who believe we achieve more when we work together. The monetization engine is the most recent example of the synergy we create.”

OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2020

Terri Merlino

Chief Data Officer

SVP, Chief Credit Officer

CoreLogic

Freddie Mac Single-Family

DEVI MATETI, CoreLogic’s chief data officer, is responsible for the data and analytics which power the core of CoreLogic. With his team of more than 300 data scientists, engineers and operations associates as well as key strategic vendors, he is transforming how we collect, curate and deliver data and insights to the industry. His team is pioneering the adoption of new technological innovations, such as artificial intelligence and machine learning, to develop new cutting-edge analytics that give the industry the most complete view of property. Mateti has been a pioneer, pushing not only CoreLogic but the industry forward in adopting new technologies to enhance the quality and coverage of property data. He led the team to launch CoreLogic’s next generation cloud-based smart data platform. Under Mateti’s leadership, CoreLogic launched CLIP, an industry-leading property ID. With CLIP, CoreLogic takes the information from over 20,000 disparate sources of property data and connects them to create a comprehensive, single source of truth for a property. This innovative new industry standard, together with the company’s advanced geospatial data sets, creates a 360-degree view of the property that fuels the housing ecosystem. Mateti’s team processes more than 250,000 transactions per day, updating over 1 billion property records annually. Eighty percent of MLS listings come through CoreLogic’s networks, and the company has 99.9% coverage of U.S. properties. In total, it’s more than 5.5 billion property records spanning 50 years, all managed by Mateti. The team has also developed more than 2,000 robotic process automation bots to drive everything from thousands of automated quality checks to cutting down processing time by 30%.

AS SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT AND CHIEF CREDIT OFFICER at Freddie Mac Single-Family, Terri Merlino is motivated by innovation and moving the housing industry forward each and every day. Merlino has had an extraordinary year and career, using her approximately 30 years of industry experience and proven leadership track record to make a difference. During the past 12 months of unprecedented COVID19 challenges, she substantially and positively impacted Freddie Mac’s mortgage credit risk management and quality control efforts as well as its clients’ experiences. Over the past year, Merlino has leveraged her broad-based knowledge of mortgage operations, sales, processing, underwriting, quality control and secondary marketing activities to substantially and positively impact Freddie Mac’s mortgage credit risk management efforts, as well as its clients’ experiences. Merlino was instrumental in leading the drive for industry adoption of Freddie Mac’s best-in-class risk assessment tools Loan Quality Advisor and Loan Product Advisor, to ensure loans delivered were acceptable to Freddie Mac’s risk appetite. This resulted in widespread adoption by year-end. Merlino moved the dial forward for Freddie’s ongoing efforts to enhance its Single-Family Seller/Servicer Guide — an enormous and critically essential client resource — to foster transparency and bring clarity to the organization’s guidelines, which included hundreds of requirements and updates throughout the year. These efforts made it easier for clients to do business with Freddie Mac. Merlino demonstrates her leadership skills not just at Freddie Mac, but throughout the industry. She has served on several industry committees, including Fannie Mae’s Risk Management Forum and Freddie Mac’s Credit Advisory Board.

What’s the best advice you’ve ever received?

“‘An 80% solution today is better than a 100% solution tomorrow.’ This advice has helped drive my career with a bias towards action and results. This mantra has given me and my teams the freedom to take chances and experiment.”

“One piece of advice that’s helped me is take responsibility for your own career. Stop waiting for someone to tap you on the shoulder and say, ‘You should apply for this job.’”

OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2020

57 ❱ HOUSINGWIRE

Devi Mateti

58 ❱ HOUSINGWIRE

Samantha Meyer

Austin Niemiec

Chief Risk Officer

EVP

First Community Mortgage

Rocket Pro TPO

SAMANTHA MEYER has dedicated 16 years to First Community Mortgage’s employees, customers and community, leading to her selection as the first female on the board of directors for First Community Mortgage in 2019. Meyer is an expert in her field and has a vast knowledge of every facet of mortgage lending. She is a reliable source of answers to complicated questions and stays up-to-date on the latest mortgage industry trends and changes, including ever-changing regulatory requirements. Likewise, she fosters the same always-learning, always-growing approach among her team members, and actively supports them, going far beyond simply modeling these great habits. Her election to the First Community Mortgage board of directors was well-deserved, as Meyer has managed nearly every operational department in the company. As a very active member of the community, she also serves as vice president of FCM Cares (an employee-driven, community-focused Foundation) and since the inception of the non-profit in 2016, participates monthly in The Mortgage Collaborative women’s networking group. Meyer manages a team of 20 people who would agree she is the glue of her department. Over the last year, production nearly doubled for First Community Mortgage, yet business was “as usual” because Meyer provided extra training sessions as necessary, was always available to assist with any unusual circumstance and stayed informed on industry and regulatory changes. In March of 2021, First Community Mortgage acquired a Mortgage Boutique, and Meyer headed up the acquisition herself from a compliance and licensing standpoint to ensure everyone was covered for Risk.

AUSTIN NIEMIEC has spent the last year tirelessly doing two things: leading by example and being a steadfast advocate for mortgage brokers’ freedom to choose. Leading Rocket Pro TPO through a period of growth during the onset of the pandemic, Niemiec’s decisions and leadership led to incredible success for Rocket Pro TPO and its broker partners. Niemiec’s leadership is a core reason why Rocket Pro TPO continued to grow throughout the pandemic and both he and the broad group of leaders at Rocket Companies had the foresight to stock up on the necessary technology to ensure its team members could be as effective in their at-home offices as they were in the office. This became a critical step in ensuring that Niemiec’s AEs supported Rocket Pro TPO’s brokers with great speed and certainty in March and April. Since then, he has continued to operate with foresight, especially focused on ensuring his team can scale with ease while we continue to onboard new partners and experience record-setting days and months. This led to spring 2021 being one of the best purchase seasons in the company’s history. Niemiec has continued to push for Rocket Companies to leverage its resources to provide brokers with industry-leading technology. In March of 2021, Niemiec announced that Rocket Pro TPO earmarked $100 million specifically for broker technology in 2021. One of the most recent examples was the launch of its Pricing Calculator, which allows users to price out loan options and easily compare different products in an easy-to-consume, side-by-side way all without needing to go through an entire application.

What’s the best advice you’ve ever received?

What’s the secret to your success?

“I know this sounds simple and obvious, but we live in a world where success at any cost is not only expected…but anything less is often deemed failure. ‘The truth shall set you free’ enables true excellence.”

“The key to my success is being unabashedly team-focused. I make sure to always enter conversations and meetings with one focus: making sure the team succeeds.”

OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2020

John Paasonen

CEO

Co-Founder and CEO

RE/MAX Gold Nation

Maxwell

JAMES O’BRYON’S vision has guided RE/MAX Gold Nation for more than 23 years. Since joining the company, his ideas for change and growth have proven to be priceless and shown to be truly prophetic. O’Bryon has led the company through many hurdles over the years, including the Great Recession of 2008 where he emerged with an organization that was smarter, healthier and better poised for growth and support. Similarly, when the pandemic presented unique challenges, O’Bryon leaned into growth and the company grew from one state with 98 offices to five states with 119 offices and 2,688 agents. O’Bryon’s insight and vision during this challenging time helped create a reassuring and supportive place not only for agents, but also for staff and leadership creating further trust in their company. Under O’Bryon’s leadership, RE/MAX Gold Nation developed a partnership with Children’s Miracle Network hospitals. From 2015 to 2020, the company has donated over $1.2 million to children and families in need. The company’s ability to give back has increased with its success over the years, growing from supporting three hospitals to seven, benefiting thousands of families. Gold Nation’s belief in servant leadership comes directly from O’Bryon’s guidance and has created an environment of caring and experienced leaders who strive to put the agent first. O’Bryon’s relentless approach to growth, adaptation and change has created an environment of leaders who are always looking at how they can evolve and improve. Without him, the company would not have seen the same astronomical growth or an environment that puts its agents and communities first.

JOHN PAASONEN co-founded Maxwell in 2015 to arm small to midsize lenders with the efficiencies and economies of scale they need to compete against the industry’s largest players. Since then, Paasonen has grown the company to serve more than 250 community lenders. Under his leadership, the Maxwell platform has facilitated more than $100 billion in loan volume, helping its customers enhance the borrower experience by closing loans 45% faster than the national average. Paasonen knows the right talent and leadership drive metrics and transformative solutions. In the last 12 months, Paasonen has scaled the Maxwell team and business rapidly despite the challenges of work-fromhome settings and changing market conditions. Under Paasonen’s guidance, the Maxwell employee base grew by more than 500% in 2020. Because of Paasonen’s deep connections to the lender community, he was able to use his insight to deliver value to Maxwell’s customers even in 2020’s unprecedented landscape. Despite ambitious product release reschedules and company growth, Paasonen has remained committed to company culture. Due to his influence, the Maxwell team centers day-to-day interactions on its core values. Each weekly check-in ends with an opportunity for employees to give gratitude to others who have helped them in large or small ways. Similarly, Paasonen ensures the company focuses on its mission of increasing access to homeownership. As a part of this focus, Paasonen created a partnership with New Story, a non-profit organization that provides homes to people living with inadequate shelter.

What is the secret to your success?

What has been your secret to success?

“We are relentless. Our success is driven by an incredible group of caring and relentless leaders, employees, and agents who recognize the value of putting the REAL in real estate. Providing value and protection for our clients transcends all else.”

“I asked a venture capitalist what the most predictable factor was when evaluating a new business to invest in. He said, ‘A founder that has grit.’ When you’re starting a business, the biggest difference in success is having the gumption to overcome the inevitable challenges that stand in your way.”

OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2020

59 ❱ HOUSINGWIRE

James O’Bryon

60 ❱ HOUSINGWIRE

Bruno Pasceri

Fiona Petrie

President

EVP, Managing Director

Incenter

RE/MAX INTEGRA U.S.

BRUNO PASCERI is harnessing his unique brand of leadership to build a company of innovators dedicated to removing the obstacles, inefficiencies and pain points that impede mortgage industry performance. His belief that by putting people first, profits will follow is the backbone of an incredibly collaborative, creative and collegial family of companies that not only innovates to help mortgage lenders lead their markets but execute. Over the past 12 months, this has brought about improvements in title search, settlement, underwriting and closings, inspections and appraisals and lending. Pasceri operates off the belief that employee quality of life is key to having happy, high-performing teams and doing the right things for the right reason in the right way also drives the Incenter culture. He and the leadership team at the nine Incenter companies have relied on this mantra during a particularly challenging period and have worked hard to take care of Incenter’s more than 1,600 employees. Through, Incenter Cares, the new employee assistance program he inspired, every team member received gift cards, vouchers, and much more several times during the pandemic. This provided a huge morale boost, especially for those individuals struggling with illnesses and other hardships. Pasceri received close to 200 heartfelt thank you letters from individuals who were in difficult family situations. Pasceri’s strategy for building a durable company of compassionate and intelligent people bent on making a difference in the lives of employees and customers alike is to lead by example. Every other month, he brings Incenter’s division heads together to share wins and losses, brainstorm new ideas and just enjoy the high energy and camaraderie of like-minded people.

FIONA PETRIE is the executive vice president and managing director of RE/MAX INTEGRA U.S., the U.S. branch of the world’s largest real estate sub-franchisor. In her role, Petrie oversees all operations — including regional growth and expansion initiatives — of RE/MAX INTEGRA in the Midwest and New England regions, comprised of 500 franchises and 7,000 agents. At the start of the pandemic, Petrie and her team took swift action to ensure the RE/MAX INTEGRA network and their clients felt supported. She worked with her team to develop an online resource center for brokerages, agents and consumers, which outlined pertinent information for practicing real estate safely and effectively while also spearheading a social media campaign, “At HOME Together,” showcasing how RE/MAX INTEGRA agents supported each other and their clients during the shift to a work-from-home lifestyle. Petrie assisted with implementing productivity tools at a discounted rate, including RE/MAX 360 tours powered by EyeSpy360 and provided free enhanced trainings for affiliates to optimize their businesses for the current environment. She and her team educated broker/owners and agents on facilitating virtual transactions and meetings through resources including “Tech Tuesdays,” “Better Together With” and the “Building Your Business Virtually” video series. Following her efforts in 2020, Petrie has placed a strong focus on continuing to steward growth and inspire positive changes in the real estate industry in 2021. Petrie is a cause-driven leader. Whether organizing a company-wide food drive to combat insecurity, supporting brokerage fundraising efforts for local pet shelters or ensuring a continuous fundraising push for Children’s Miracle Network, her strengths lie in following her heart to help those in need.

What’s the best advice you’ve ever received?

“I had a mentor who told me that if I could touch just one person, I would lead a fantastic life. I see my Incenter role as an opportunity to help other people do what they love, with people they care about and always put family first.“

“Walter Schneider, president and co-founder of RE/MAX INTEGRA has always said, ‘there is never a good time.’ People are always waiting for their ‘perfect’ time to do something, but there is never a perfect time to do anything.”

OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2020

Eric Ray

EVP, Consumer Direct

Sr. EVP, Chief Digital Officer and Co-Head of Real Estate

AmeriHome Mortgage

Radian

KAREN POSTIGLIONI, executive vice president of Consumer Direct at AmeriHome Mortgage, has been in the mortgage industry for 23 years and brought her industry knowledge and problem-solving acumen to the company five years ago. Postiglioni has played an integral role in AmeriHome’s success by helping the division drive automation, workflow improvements, excellence in governance and successful project rollouts. She did all of this while successfully managing the Consumer Direct channel as well as the Operations, Process and Change, and the Strategic Workflow Optimization teams. Postiglioni has brought a renewed focus to the organization instilling increased visibility, accountability and standards and has been a critical component in helping Consumer Direct reach a net income growth of 332% in 2020 compared to last year. Her key contributions have been a driving force in helping us to become the fastest growing and most profitable division within AmeriHome, which is the third-largest correspondent lender in the nation. With the emergence of the COVID pandemic in 2020, the CD division was challenged with pivoting from being an in-office organization to one that had to provide a work-from-home model. Postiglioni led this change by planning and overseeing workflows and strategizing with SWOT for a successful remote transition. During this time, with Postiglioni’s leadership, each department received all of the necessary tools to succeed by taking into account their unique functions and goals, ensuring they were taken care of and provided additional resources and support as needed. Thanks to Postiglioni’s help, the transition was seamless and successful, resulting in year-over-year production growth of 125% in the Consumer Direct division.

THROUGH A GLOBAL PANDEMIC that accelerated the demand for digital solutions, Eric Ray and his teams led Radian in leveraging unique technology, data and analytics. With the help of his team, he reimagined traditional business processes, products and services, including remote working infrastructure and tools, real estate market intelligence, automated property valuations, digital title and closing services. Under Ray’s leadership, Radian has invested deeply in artificial intelligence, machine learning, predictive modeling, blockchain and other emerging technologies that will be a driving force of change in the mortgage and real estate industry. In the past year, Ray’s teams have been a driving force in the execution of Radian’s digital strategy to new heights with the launch of homegenius, an emerging, integrated suite of highly innovative real estate products and services focused on driving the digital transformation of real estate transactions from search to close. Thanks to Ray, Radian has expanded its footprint in the housing finance and real estate ecosystem to become an industrial strength fintech that is powered by technology and informed by data. Since joining the organization in 2018, Ray has been a champion of digital disruption and transforming the traditional real estate transaction. His teams have been responsible for bringing award-winning and innovative new services to market, including the Radian Home Price Index. Ray’s achievements leading highly talented teams focused on reinventing better ways to execute mortgage and real estate transactions highlights Radian’s culture of innovation and digital transformation that spans more than 40 years.

What’s the best advice you’ve ever received?

What has been your secret to success?

“The best advice I’ve ever received is to answer the question. It sounds like a no-brainer but people forget to answer the original question all the time. Always think of what the original question is, and answer that question as directly and succinctly as possible.”

“It all comes down to being a continuous learner. One must have the willingness to get out of their comfort zone and take risks, be inquisitive, ask questions, listen intently and collaborate effectively. It can be an all-consuming experience so it is important to have a strong sense of work-life balance.”

OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2020

61 ❱ HOUSINGWIRE

Karen Postiglioni

62 ❱ HOUSINGWIRE

Steve Reich

Steven Schachter

Chief Operating Officer

EVP, Market Leader - Mortgage

Finance of America Mortgage

Sourcepoint

WITH HIS PERSISTENT FOCUS on enhancing operational efficiencies, fostering technological innovation and creating a strong company culture, Steve Reich has been instrumental in the expansion and growth of Finance of America Mortgage. Since becoming chief operating officer of FAM in 2018, Reich has been responsible for the daily management of the company and played a key role overseeing and integrating several successful asset acquisitions, including FAM’s most recent acquisition of certain Parkside Lending assets. FAM’s ongoing success, particularly over the past year, is a result of Reich’s strong leadership and commitment to putting his employees first and ensuring they have all of the tools that they need to excel and to deliver exceptional service to clients. Over the past year, Reich has spearheaded a range of new initiatives designed to support FAM’s continued growth and further bolster the overall effectiveness of the company’s operations. Notable initiatives include developing and implementing a new capture-retention sales program and reorganizing the underwriting processes to create new efficiencies. With every initiative Reich undertakes at FAM, he asks, “How can we make our sales force more efficient or more successful?” As a result, he has come to strongly believe in combining the sales force with technology. This approach adds value and complements the human element of the business, as opposed to treating technology as an entirely new solution or a replacement for the sales force.

SINCE JOINING SOURCEPOINT over 12 years ago, Steve Schachter has held wide-ranging leadership roles across operations, finance and business development. He took over as head of Mortgage Business in September 2020. Schachter is the guiding force steering the company’s “Digital First, Digital Now” strategy aimed at providing leading-edge business process management solutions that help lenders and servicers outperform. In the last two years, he has continued to strengthen Sourcepoint’s product and service portfolio across originations, post-closing and servicing, with an emphasis on leveraging digital, automation and analytics. Under his vision and leadership, the company more than doubled its revenues, added thousands of employees and expanded its global footprint — adding several new locations to support the distributed work environment in the new normal. Schachter adopted a two-pronged approach to drive these high-impact results. On the client front, he mobilized the Sourcepoint team to introduce new products and services. During the last 12 months, the team launched an automated platform-based Post-Closing Solution to accelerate post-closing outcomes and an Automation Advisory Practice to help lenders and servicers identify the right automation opportunities in their businesses and maximize ROI. He also oversaw the launch of First Learning Intelligence to help mortgage companies transform their cognitive quotient and build intelligent and future-ready organizations.

What’s your secret to success?

What one habit has made a crucial difference in your success?

“The No. 1 quality of a successful person is being a hard worker. The secret to success is a strong work ethic, treating others with respect, honesty and transparency.”

“Always being present has played a big role, especially over the last year with the global health crisis upending the way we do business. Whether I’m strategizing with my team or engaging with clients, I make every effort to be present in the moment.”

OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2020

Phil Shoemaker

CEO

President of Originations

SimpleNexus

Homepoint

AN INDUSTRY VETERAN of more than 35 years, Cathleen Schreiner Gates is known for her unmatched skill in driving strategy and producing results. She’s built and led winning go-to-market teams at the mortgage industry’s most prestigious firms and forged her own path by founding Trifecta Consulting. Now at the helm of SimpleNexus as CEO, Schreiner Gates is transforming the home-buying process for lenders, agents and borrowers.Schreiner Gates’ career has been shaped by her expertise in outside and inside sales channels, business development, market assessment, professional services, demand creation, customer service, operations and support. Schreiner Gates initially joined SimpleNexus, which connects its 39,000 active LO users with more than 4.5 million borrowers and 141,000 real estate partners, in April 2020 and quickly became more involved, reflecting her passion for helping people and companies grow to their full potential. In September 2020, Schreiner Gates was named president and in June of this year, took her place as CEO. Prior to joining SimpleNexus, Schreiner Gates served as Ellie Mae executive vice president of sales and marketing. During her seven-year tenure, Ellie Mae appeared six consecutive years on the Deloitte Technology Fast 500 and negotiated a $3.7-billion purchase by private-equity firm Thoma Bravo. During her tenure, Ellie Mae credited Schreiner Gates with leading its tremendous growth. In 2017, Schreiner Gates led the company to earn reported revenue of $417 million, up from $360.3 million in 2016. That same year, Schreiner Gates’ sales and services department was responsible for booking 40,800 Encompass seats.

PHIL SHOEMAKER has emerged as a top leader in the mortgage industry — not just in catapulting Homepoint to be one of the nation’s largest and fastest-growing lenders, but also as a leading industry advocate for the expansion of independent mortgage originators within the wholesale and correspondent channels. Shoemaker has more than a 20-year track record of innovation and building loan origination and production systems. Shoemaker joined Homepoint in 2018 and rapidly accelerated the company’s transition from a startup into a public entity that is one the nation’s largest and fastest-growing mortgage lenders — guiding Homepoint to a company record of $62 billion in closed loan volume in 2020. Under Shoemaker’s leadership, Homepoint has consistently provided its partners with some of the industry’s most competitive pricing, fastest turn times and reliable communication and processes. Shoemaker has been a key driver behind Homepoint’s adoption of low-code technology and the formation of Amplify, the company’s regional alignment of Operations personnel — two moves that have been instrumental in positioning Homepoint for continued growth in unison with its broker and correspondent partners moving forward. Shoemaker is the primary strategist behind Homepoint’s originations growth in wholesale and correspondent lending. In the past year, he has driven a 260% year-over-year growth in loan volume at Homepoint, as well as a 72% year-over-year increase in broker partnerships. That upward trajectory has made Homepoint the third-largest wholesale lender, 12th-largest correspondent lender, seventh-largest non-bank purchase lender and ninth-largest overall lender in the country.

What’s the best advice you’ve ever received?

“When I was promoted to my first management role, I was advised to find ways to leverage the talents and passions of the individuals on my team versus having everyone adhere to a single definition of what success looks like.”

“You benefit by viewing business through a team lens. When your goal is a higher purpose than winning or making money as an individual, and more about what you can achieve collectively as a team, your job is much more fulfilling and fun.”

OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2020

63 ❱ HOUSINGWIRE

Cathleen Schreiner Gates

64 ❱ HOUSINGWIRE

Kristen Sieffert

Baron Silverstein

President

President and Chief Operating Officer

Finance of America Reverse

Newrez

SINCE BECOMING PRESIDENT of Finance of America Reverse in 2015, Kristen Sieffert transformed the company into one of the largest reverse mortgage lenders in the country and led its shift to become a more complete provider of holistic retirement solutions that prioritize relationships with borrowers, lenders and partners. Under Sieffert’s leadership, FAR has reshaped the industry by offering new products as well as sound research, education, financial tools and a human-centered approach to help retirees navigate their retirement journeys. Sieffert has leaned into her core strengths of compassionate, visionary leadership and people-first initiatives over the past year to position FAR as both an industry problem-solver and vital retirement advocate, with impressive results to show for it. Sieffert evangelized early on that home equity, and reverse mortgages in particular, should be part of the discussion when it comes to a well-balanced retirement roadmap — not an option of last resort. Given the current retirement crisis in America — which has subjected huge swathes of America’s seniors to the prospect of crippling mortgage debt and climbing medical costs in their later years — she knew that a truly groundbreaking solution could be a valuable option for many homeowners in or near retirement who are saddled with mortgage debt. To meet this need, Sieffert spearheaded the launch of FAR’s new retirement mortgage called EquityAvail earlier this year, a first-of-its-kind offering that allows qualifying homeowners to refinance their conventional mortgage while also reducing their monthly payments. Through her tireless dedication and direction, Sieffert’s landscape-altering vision became a reality in the spring of 2021 and is poised to improve the lives of millions of Americans moving forward.

THROUGHOUT HIS 30-YEAR INDUSTRY CAREER, Baron Silverstein has managed and led mortgage and capital markets platforms through a variety of transitions and market backdrops. Today, Silverstein defines success not merely by the way he leads, but by his ability to empower others to lead. As Newrez continues to grow, Silverstein continues to set the right tone and culture in which industry leaders are able to develop and navigate the peaks and challenges of the ever-evolving mortgage space. Silverstein’s full view of the mortgage lifecycle and customer journey — from both a lending and servicing perspective — has allowed him to make extremely important and often difficult decisions in the short term for Newrez while also maintaining a strategic foresight and a steadfast focus on the Company’s long-term goals. After joining Newrez as president in May 2020, Silverstein was tasked with growing Newrez during a global pandemic and an explosive period of mortgage lending, Silverstein’s approach to leadership was both attentive and progressive. Under Silverstein’s leadership, Newrez witnessed massive growth in its origination lending platform in 2020, emerging as a top 10 lender with 176% production growth during the year. He also helped lead the company through a successful rebrand. In April 2021, Newrez’s parent company, New Residential Investment Corp., announced it would acquire Caliber Home Loans with the intention of combining the Newrez and Caliber platforms into one premier financial services company. Silverstein has played a pivotal leadership role in the acquisition process, which is expected to close in the third quarter of 2021.

What has been your secret to success?

What’s the best advice you’ve ever received?

“Throughout my 17 years in the retirement solutions industry, I’ve found that successful leadership depends on two main ingredients—prioritizing people and staying curious.”

”If everything seems under control, you’re not going fast enough.”

OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2020

Patrick Stone

CEO and Co-founder | Global Head of Open Banking

Executive Chairman and Founder

Finicity | Mastercard

Williston Financial Group

WITH MORE THAN 25 YEARS of executive management and entrepreneurial experience, Finicity CEO and Co-founder Steve Smith has developed Finicity into a leading provider of data and insights and a trusted open banking platform that has led to innovations in the Mortgage space with large lenders like Rocket Mortgage, Guaranteed Rate and Sierra Pacific. Smith’s leadership and vision has positioned Finicity as a leader within mortgage and also the broader financial services industry. Under Smith’s leadership over the past year, Finicity launched new products, continued to lead the market in direct access agreements and became part of Mastercard. All of these activities strengthen Finicity’s position as a leader in open banking and a trusted provider of data and insights to the mortgage industry, credit decisioning and broader financial services industry. In February of this year, Finicity launched Mortgage Verification Service, a FCRA-compliant service that uses Finicity’s open banking platform to leverage high-value data from financial institutions and provide real-time insights and verifications that prove creditworthiness in a matter of minutes. MVS delivers complete and accurate information to the lender and streamlines the consumer flow into a single experience that’s completed in minutes. Deeply involved in Finicity product strategy, partnership development and customer acquisition, Smith is the driving force behind the company’s success. Smith’s drive helped propel the company to join the Mastercard family in November 2020. Not only is he responsible for growing Finicity’s services under the Mastercard umbrella, but he was also promoted to head of global open banking.

EARLIER THIS YEAR, Patrick Stone celebrated the ten-year anniversary of Williston Financial Group amid the historic social and economic challenges of a global pandemic, confirming its long-term stability — a testament to the principles upon which Stone founded the company in 2010. His mission has a central goal: to create a single technology platform that could bring together all real estate transaction participants, then leverage it to provide maximum collaboration and efficiency. The emphasis on technology has allowed WFG to grow both steadily and securely into a family of companies providing products and services across much of the real estate and mortgage spectrum. Over the last 12 months, Stone has continued to establish a client-first culture at WFG that’s best illustrated by the company’s June 2021 overall Net Promoter score of 78. WFG is the only title underwriter and provider that tracks and publishes this data. While 2020 had been the company’s best year to date for both order volume and revenue, WFG is currently on track to beat last year’s records in 2021. Stone has worked to take isolated elements of the real estate industry and create collaboration in order to increase efficiency and improve the mortgage experience for homebuyers. Stone and his team have worked to advance solutions to help reduce the operational costs of the more than 1,500 independent title companies writing their policies. This suite of outsourcing services called WFG Blocks is a set of turnkey back-office processes that title companies can plug into their operations in whatever combination they wish.

What’s the secret to your success?

What has been your secret to success?

“My secret to success has been to stay true to the original mission when we started Finicity. Through the changes in technology and pivots in our business, we have always kept the same guiding mission.”

“I would attribute the success I have had to three things: First, following my curiosity and regularly exploring and learning new things of interest. Second, not wasting time on ‘couldas, wouldas and shouldas.’ Finally, I have always felt the need to accomplish at least one thing per day.”

OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2020

65 ❱ HOUSINGWIRE

Steve Smith

66 ❱ HOUSINGWIRE

Ike Suri

Terry Theologides

Chairman and CEO

EVP, General Counsel, and Corporate Secretary

FundingShield

Fannie Mae

IKE SURI is a pioneer in automated fintech fraud prevention solutions for the mortgage market. He has led FundingShield’s efforts in protecting lenders and consumers against wire fraud, title fraud and other cyber threats. Under his leadership, FundingShield’s products and solutions have created a new category of services for the mortgage and real estate industry, delivering real-time, transaction-level title/closing agent compliance and fraud risk management services. These solutions also drive cost savings, with clients realizing over 200% ROIs per annum on operational efficiencies alone while also delivering asset quality and loan file improvements. With Suri at the helm, more than $1.4 trillion in closings have been protected through Q2 2021, where FundingShield has been able to provide additional loan level recourse and coverage to its clients not available elsewhere because of FundingShield’s unique data, risk management and workflows. Suri oversaw the expansion of FundingShield insurance portfolio to increase the warranty and coverage in various loan programs to up to $10 million per transaction for clients of the firm. This was achieved during a time where the insurance markets closed out to various firms and/or premiums increased while coverage was more restrictive due to the pandemic. Revenues also grew by more than 800% in 2020. This is a direct result of FundingShield’s design, which not only leverages automation, AI and real-time data but also harnesses proprietary data and technology to find efficiencies in various markets.

AS FANNIE MAE’S EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT, general counsel, and corporate secretary, Terry Theologides is responsible for the Legal Department and Government and Industry Relations while serving as a key member of the firm’s Management Committee and senior advisor to the CEO and Board of Directors. Theologides has led the Legal team, and helped lead the company, through a period of tremendous external and regulatory pressures, including new leadership at Fannie Mae’s regulator and conservator, a pronounced shift in priorities from conservatorship exit preparation to a focus on mission, and the COVID-19 pandemic, including the many actions Fannie Mae took to ensure the stability of the mortgage market and provide support for struggling homeowners and renters. Without diminishing the accuracy or completeness of their legal advice, Theologides and the Legal team have led the company to embrace a pragmatic and risk-balanced approach — enabling the business to pursue its objectives on a well-informed and compliance basis. Theologides provides value to the entire company, making key hires and promotions and transforming roles within the organization to expand responsibility with stretch assignments and exposure across business units. He has also invested in upgrading the Legal Operations function in pursuit of greater digitization, automation and optimization of key recurring legal tasks. However, according to Theologides, his greatest achievements are the people he’s helped mentor and develop into stronger attorneys and leaders, including over a dozen general counsels. Theologides is committed to the continuous improvement of his organization and more importantly, the people in it.

What one habit has made a crucial difference in your success?

What has been your secret to success?

“Relentless execution.”

“Always striving to hire and develop people who are smarter and more talented than I am.”

OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2020

Dale Vermillion

President

Founder and CEO

ICE Mortgage Technology

Mortgage Champions

JOE TYRRELL took over as top executive for ICE Mortgage Technology upon completion of the acquisition and led the integration of three industry leaders merging together as one organization, as a part of ICE, a global data and technology company.  As a result of his focus on integrating seamlessly into one group, the shift occurred with little to no interruption to customers and partners. As the leader of ICE’s Mortgage Technology business segment, Tyrrell  focuses on maintaining a positive culture for the over 2,500 teammates, specifically from merging Ellie Mae, Simplifile and MERS together, that each were in business separately for decades, and connecting the team not only to each other but also as a group within the Intercontinental Exchange umbrella. Tyrrell’s tireless effort to both connect people to the business segment’s mission, as well as integrate the group into the ICE global company shows up in the successful way the team continues to launch and deliver industry-changing innovation. Not only is Tyrrell an excellent leader with a clear strategic vision, but also he is beloved across the company.  Tyrrell’s visionary leadership enables the company to produce game-changing and industry-leading technology, which includes automation advancements. By leveraging AI and machine learning, the company is poised to deliver improvements in the borrower experience while reducing the time and cost to help lenders grow their margin. Tyrrell previously served as chief operating officer at Ellie Mae, where he oversaw technology, product strategy, product management and business and corporate development efforts. He was at the forefront of leadership for 90% of Ellie Mae’s workforce directly.

OVER HIS FOUR-DECADE CAREER in the mortgage industry, Dale Vermillion has influenced every aspect of the origination process. As an award-winning trainer, Vermillion has transformed the cultures, priorities and processes of hundreds of sales and operations teams across the nation. As a consultant, he has guided large and small lenders, third-party vendors and fintech disruptors to offer greater value to their customers and partners. And as a consumer advocate, he has offered timeless advice to millions of consumers through regular appearances on nationally syndicated radio and his book, Navigating the Mortgage Maze. The pandemic proved what many in the industry already knew to be true: even the most disruptive lenders need trustworthy sounding boards who can help them meet customer and partner expectations in an evolving market, and Vermillion is exactly that. Over the past 12 months, Vermillion’s influence on the success of individuals and companies within the industry has reached new heights. Vermillion pushed his team to find new and creative ways to engage every member of the industry, from CEOs to individual loan officers and operations team members to consumers. That push resulted in two sponsored thought leadership series, the development of the first-ever self-hosted podcast series, a complete overhaul of the virtual talent development platform, Mortgage Champions Online, the launch of a digital credentialing platform for LendingTree University, and several top-tier podcast appearances. Mortgage Champions also saw a triple-fold expansion of its client base, all while delivering a suite of new enterprise and non-enterprise customer solutions.

What one habit has made a crucial difference in your success?

What has been the secret to your success?

“Throughout my career, especially as I have had the opportunity to take on more responsibility, I have really focused on ensuring that I am listening more than talking, especially in meetings where decisions need to be made.”

“First, having great mentors and a teachable spirit. From a young age I learned the importance of learning from those who have already succeeded instead of trying to figure it out on your own.”

OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2020

67 ❱ HOUSINGWIRE

Joe Tyrrell

68 ❱ HOUSINGWIRE

Jeffrey Walker

Joe Welu

CEO

Founder and CEO

CredEvolv

Total Expert

JEFFREY WALKER has led high-performing teams at some of the most influential organizations in the mortgage industry, including Wells Fargo Home Mortgage, CitiMortgage, SunTrust Mortgage and Fannie Mae. During his time at Fannie Mae, he served as single-family chief strategy officer, departing in October 2020. Walker’s passion for combining commercial success with social responsibility led him to found CredEvolv, an education fintech focused on helping lenders deepen their relationships with deserving but underserved consumers. Walker serves as both CEO and advisory board member to the credit remediation company. Walker has coached and mentored hundreds of current and future mortgage industry leaders over the years. He is a recognized public speaker and has received numerous awards for innovation in customer experience and from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for his lean management and problem-solving expertise. Believing that socially responsible commercial success should not be an oxymoron, Walker has recently dedicated his commitment to solving the systemic challenges of underserved consumers through his work within CredEvolv. Over the span of his career, Walker worked to engage Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to help solve the industry’s pervasive challenges related to black homeownership gaps. As an innovator, Walker works tirelessly to help lenders execute on their commitments to social responsibility and created the industry’s only digital platform that connects lenders, consumers, and HUD-certified nonprofits.

OVER HIS MORE THAN 20-YEAR TENURE, Joe Welu has infused customer experience mastery into the entire mortgage industry. His vision has always focused on borrower engagement strategies that center in on the customer experience. As a result, he’s helped thousands of financial marketers and hundreds of mortgage institutions across the nation deploy personalized marketing and sales strategies at scale. Welu has taken Total Expert from a startup venture to a high-growth company that serves the nation’s top lenders and loan officers. In 2020, Total Expert grew revenues 1,558% over the last three years — and was recognized as the 3rd fastest-growing Minneapolis-based company and one of the top 40 fastest-growing software companies on the Inc. 500 (No. 288) list in 2020. The company also more than doubled its customer count and grew its Total Experience Platform user base by 49%. More than 30,000 users are on the Total Expert platform today. In the past 12 months, the company’s revenues have continued to skyrocket, growth that directly reflects Welu’s leadership and vision for the company. Today, more than 150 customers, including 15 of America’s top 25 lenders, leverage Total Expert’s marketing and sales software to enable lending and financial services firms to create customers for life by blending human relationships with digital simplicity. Total Expert locked in partnerships with over 20 industry associations across the mortgage, banking and credit union segments and surpassed 250 employees in July 2021, a 13% increase in employee headcount in 2020 spanning across 24 states.

What has been your secret to success?

What’s the secret to your success?

“I understand that I don’t have all the answers. Problem solving is critical to continuous improvement and requires you to check your ego and engage the people who are closest to the problem to solve the problem.”

“Embrace the feeling of being uncomfortable. I believe that to truly change, you have to step outside of your comfort zone. As a result, in my personal experience and through our business at Total Expert, fighting the urge to resist change and unforeseen challenges has always resulted in growth.”

OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2020

Brian Zitin

President and CEO

CEO

Realogy Franchise Group

Reggora

A STRONG BELIEVER IN ACCOUNTABILITY and authenticity, Sue Yannaccone possesses a keen understanding of the residential real estate industry and has extensive experience leading organizations through transformational change. As president and CEO of Realogy Franchise Group and the first woman to hold the title, Yannaccone is responsible for managing leading real estate franchise brands, including Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate, CENTURY 21, Corcoran, ERA and Sotheby’s International Realty, as well as the management of both Corcoran and Sotheby’s International Realty company-owned businesses. Combined, Yannaccone oversees more than 16,000 worldwide offices and more than 220,000 brokers and independent sales associates doing business in 115 countries and territories worldwide. Yannaccone is also the founder of What Moves Her, a program that aims to inspire and support all women to find their path to leadership and business success in real estate. Through leadership programs, a dedicated event series and more, What Moves Her intends to encourage women to support one another, their businesses and their communities. In its first year, a launch event and ongoing Coldwell Banker virtual conversation series titled “Portraits of What Moves Her,” helped guide more than 5,000 women and provided them with tools and strategies to help them continue achieving success in their personal and professional lives. With more than 20 years of hands-on industry experience and a servant-leadership mindset, Yannaccone brings a unique combination of more than 15 years of franchise experience in both commercial and residential sectors, followed by several years of senior franchise and owned brokerage leadership positions at Realogy.

BRIAN ZITIN is revolutionizing the appraisal process with a two-sided platform for mortgage lenders and appraisal vendors. Not only is he modernizing the experience for everyone involved, but Reggora’s technology is also designed to reduce turn times and help the industry get closer to a one-day mortgage reality. Zitin is leading the Reggora team and product development with three core focuses: shortening the overall amount of time it takes to complete an appraisal, reducing lenders’ operational costs and the amount of time spent managing the appraisal process and creating a more transparent experience for banks and borrowers. Over the last 12 months, Zitin has worked to incorporate the core values of Reggora as he and the team diligently work toward the goal of shrinking appraisal turn times. This has meant embracing a nimble corporate structure. Zitin taps into his team’s peak agility by cutting away at bureaucracy and red tape and making sure everyone feels empowered. It has also meant fostering an environment where everyone contributes and the best idea wins. Zitin has cultivated a workforce that delivers their best effort, every day. This mantra is at the core of the company’s culture. Zitin also serves as a mentor for rising entrepreneurs graduating from his alma mater, Boston University, and other local entrepreneurs in Boston. For Zitin, this means offering green entrepreneurs practical business advice like reviewing their pitch decks or just giving them general product advice. He also contributes to Boston University’s summer startup accelerator program as a speaker. The program matches aspiring entrepreneurs with experienced entrepreneurs.

What one habit has made a crucial difference in your success?

What has been your secret to success?

“As I have grown in the world of leadership, I have learned to trust in those who showed up where I couldn’t. I have learned that a team can take us much further than any one person ever could on their own.”

“My success boils down to a combination of risk-taking and hard work. Coming out of college, my co-founder and I turned down jobs to pursue our vision of transforming residential valuation. I knew very little about the industry, but I was confident that with focus and drive I could learn enough to be dangerous.”

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Sue Yannaccone

The executives moving markets forward Market trends, advice and guidance from HousingWire’s Vanguards By Brena Nath

If you added up the impact that HousingWire’s Vanguard winners have had on the industry, you’d likely have a comprehensive list of the initiatives that have moved markets forward. These are the leaders who have dreamt, shaped and molded a better way to execute the home-buying journey. From injecting technology into the mortgage process to redefining the real estate agent and home shopper relationship, these leaders have laid the foundations for millions of homeowners. HousingWire sat down with three of these leaders: James O’Bryon, RE/MAX Gold Nation CEO, Cathleen Schreiner Gates, SimpleNexus CEO, and Phil Shoemaker, Homepoint president of originations, to learn more about the housing trends they’re closely watching, what they think will define 2022 and what they hope people remember them for when they retire. JAMES O’BRYON, RE/MAX GOLD NATION CEO

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Brena Nath: First off, congrats on being named a 2021 Vanguard. Who would you want to thank for helping you get where you are today? James O’Bryon: In that question, I would change one word, and that would be the “You” because really, there’s very little about me that allows me to win this award. It’s my partners. It’s the executives who lead this organization. It’s most obviously the 2,700 agents who are a part of the organization who perform at an extraordinary level consistently. In everything we do, I can find a person who has done the heavy lifting, which I end up getting credit for, but I didn’t do it. So, the most obvious answer to the question would be, my partners, our leadership team, our incredible support group, the agents, it’s a community of 3,000 people. Because I’ve been in the industry as long as I have, I know what they do, and I know how challenging it is. I’ve done most of their jobs at one time or another. And I recognize that every single thing that each of them does, in its own way, is as challenging as what I do. And so, I get the collective credit for what it is that they’re all doing. BN: What’s one accomplishment in your career that you’re really proud of? JO: This ties back to your first question. The thing that I’m most proud of is I have developed and kept relationships with people for decades. The relationships that I’ve been able to build and sustain are absolutely, above all else, what I’m most proud of. And then secondary to that is the fact that those people have entrusted each other and entrusted me to build a vision, which has been consistent since its inception. So, the vision was to build the largest, most powerful,

RE/MAX branded real estate organization in the world. And that vision was established in 1995, and it survived for 26 years. It survived, not by being the weight on my back, but also by being the weight on this collective back. Absolutely. The thing I’m most proud of would be those people that we talked about in question number one, combined with the fact that they were so indulgent with me when we first started talking about this concept when it seemed like it was crazy. BN: How are you helping move markets forward? JO: Historically, a brokerage in our industry was a single woman or a single man on an island attempting to drive a company. And historically, the amount of synergy it took to take different mind trusts and different perspectives and mesh them into something really extraordinary, it didn’t exist. I mean, it was this little company and a bunch of little fiefdoms out there trying to do their own thing. In terms of moving the industry forward, what we’ve managed to do is create a brain trust, which covers five states, and I’m anticipating will cover many more as the time goes by, with brilliant people who have different perspectives and come together to create this juggernaut presence. When we have meetings, we’ll come out of them smarter, stronger and more capable of driving this juggernaut than if we were trying to do it individually on our own. I have the luxury of that with leaders across five states. The collective IQ becomes incredibly powerful because it’s not just me trying to figure out how to do stuff, or just me and our executive team trying to figure out how to do stuff. It’s their executive group and somebody else’s executive group. So, somebody will say, “Have we tried this?” And part of the leadership group will say, “I didn’t even know that existed what you’re talking about.” And

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are like the rocks, we’ve got to figure out a way for the river to go around. Then the other thing is much more pragmatic than those. It’s the overall issue of housing affordability. I recognize each state is different and each region is different when it comes to housing affordability, but across most of our existing footprint, housing affordability has become a pretty compelling issue where many of those who otherwise would be able to buy homes just aren’t able to. And as a result, they become generational renters, and then pass it on to the next generation. So, working toward creating a system for the creation of affordable housing, that is something that I am definitely watching, and I think a lot of people in our industry are watching right now and to some extent.

BN: What are two trends in the mortgage and real estate industry that you’re closely watching? JO: One is just the overall global change that we’re seeing in a variety of different areas. So, the most obvious is the pandemic. There’s also, regardless of what one attributes them to, all of the natural disaster changes that we’re seeing. California right now has a 3-to-4-month fire season that it didn’t have 5 or 10 years ago. So, the things that are global, that are largely beyond our control, and yet, we must accommodate. And usually, change that’s beyond our control is the most challenging and paralyzing because we figure that we can’t do anything about it. And in these instances, there’s very little we can do about a pandemic, and there’s very little we can do about the natural changes in the environment. There’s also is very little we can do about regulatory change, but we have to adjust and accommodate each of those things. So, watching those things and how they impact our market and what needs to be done in the future, that’s probably for me number one, right now. Much of what else we do, we can control to some extent or another, but those previous things, we really can’t, so we need to figure out a way to accommodate. It’s kind of like a river. Sometimes the river can flow and break down rocks, but sometimes it’s got to go around rocks. So, those things

“The thing that I’m most proud of is I have developed and kept relationships with people for decades. The relationships that I’ve been able to build and sustain are absolutely, above all else, what I’m most proud of.” - James O’Bryon

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then in some cases, we’ll try it, and it’ll be great. In other cases, we’ll try it, and it won’t be so great. But it moves the conversation forward because together, we’re so much smarter than we are individually.

BN: The past two years have been filled with a lot of uncertainty; what factors do you think will define 2022? JO: I think the year ahead is going to be a time of great healing. I think 2022 is going to be our opportunity to get some things right. And I think it’s going to be our opportunity for people to relearn social skills, social graces and the ability to get along with one another to coexist in the same space. I do believe that people are going to, as soon as they possibly can, and feel safe about doing it, go back to being in each other’s presence. And we’ve seen that sporadically in other venues, like the restaurant business. It’s a feast or famine thing right now, where if the restaurants are open, they’re packed. A lot of the things we’ve seen in the last year and a half, in terms of our industry and our environment, have been driven by a set of circumstances, which is extremely ar-

tificial. So, in 2022, I believe people will want to go back to social environments and they’ll want to be in group settings. They’ll tune more into what their true focus is and why they’re in the business. So, without even speaking to all of those things that we cannot control, I think in the areas that we will be able to control if the pandemic relaxes enough that in 2022 people can return to some state of normalcy, it’s going to be a spectacular year. I am very much looking forward to it.

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BN: After you’re finished with your career, what do you hope people remember you for? JO: I reduced it down to one thing, “He did the right thing.” Because in meetings for years, and the group that I directly work with, they all know these words. When we’re talking about a dilemma, or a crisis, or litigation challenge, or a client issue, or a vendor relationship, what we’ve consistently said over the years is, “Okay, what’s the right thing to do?” And then even if it costs us money, we do it. And that has worked so consistently, and it’s become so sustainable that I suspect that, you know, if we put something on my gravestone, I would want it to be, “He did the right thing.” BN: To wrap, what’s one piece of advice you would give people in this industry? JO: No matter what your role in the industry is, whether you’re a real estate agent, real estate manager, a real estate executive, or in the horizontal part of our business, which is the brokerage business, or the vertical parts of our business, I think it’s very important to define what your role is going to be. It’s important to define that for yourself, and then, share that with others. Then, do everything you can to commit yourself to that role and to act accordingly. And I’ve seen that work consistently over the years, and it is certainly what’s worked for us. And what I see not working consistently over the years is where people define, then redefine, then redefine their roles and jump around to the extent that all they’re really ever doing is attempting to gain proficiency or expert status in a different environment or something new. What I see in our mission and the definition of our mission is primarily to serve our agents in serving their clients. And that’s how I would describe it. And as such, we have extraordinary agents who receive extraordinary reviews from their clients because their clients know why they’re in the business. So, their clients don’t think, “I wonder if my agent is in the business for selfish or individualistic or ulterior motives,” they understand, “My agent has chosen to associate with RE/MAX Gold Nation to serve me.” So, there’s no lack of clarity as to what the objective of the agent is or what the objective of the organization is. So, my advice to anybody who plans on making a career of this, choose it, define it, share it, stick with it.

CATHLEEN SCHREINER GATES, SIMPLENEXUS CEO BN: First off, congrats on being named a 2021 Vanguard. Who would you want to thank for helping you get where you are today? Cathleen Schreiner Gates: I have to go with two people. The first one is Jonathan Corr, who was the executive that hired me at Ellie Mae and brought me into the mortgage business. He had a technology background similar to mine, and he saw in my background what he felt was needed at Ellie Mae. That just kind of got me into the space, and you know the old adage, “Once you’re in the space, you never leave the space.” So, giving me the opportunity to lead and empowering me to do the things I knew we needed to do to grow as a company, that’s really what I think was the springboard for me to be where I am today. And then the second one would be Ben Miller and Matt Hansen, the co-founders of SimpleNexus, along with John Aslanian, who I had worked with at Ellie Mae for years. John said, “She can help us. Let’s talk to her. She can help us grow.” And I met them and was sold immediately. So having the opportunity I’m in today is clearly due to the co-founders of SimpleNexus. BN: What’s one accomplishment in your career that you’re really proud of? CS: Right now, I’d really have to list the work that I did at Ellie Mae to drive the incredible growth when I was there. When I joined, they had just IPO-ed earlier that year. They had closed the year in the low $50 million range, and

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BN: How are you helping move markets forward? CS: You know, I’m tech biased. I’ve always believed that technology for technology’s sake is useless. But if you use technology as an enabler to disrupt and move an industry forward, that’s super powerful. So, I always look at how technology can actually change the game in a market, allow the stronger players in that market to be even stronger if they adopt and apply technology solutions in the right ways. So, I always look at that first. There are three sides to the triangle. So, I look at the technology enablement, and then, I look at the talent mix. And if you’ve got the right talent and the right technology, the third one would be the right sort of processes, looking at the way you’re going to operate. Those are a pretty killer trifecta. So, I look at everything through those three lenses. BN: What are two trends in the mortgage and real estate industry that you’re closely watching? CS: I would say there’s a convergence going on of two markets that have historically been separate verticals but sort of collide in positive ways and that’s the real estate market and the mortgage market. I think those markets are converging because to the borrower, they want a seamless journey from their point of thought. Like, maybe I’m going to buy a house and then start looking through the real-estate alternatives and then need to flow straight into their mortgage process. Historically, these have been two separate plays that are now coming together and integrating and weaving together into a seamless borrower experience. And guess what the enabler for that is? Technology. I think the other thing is just the speed with which the manufacture of a mortgage is happening. There will be a point in time where the mortgage will happen before you can organize for the movers to come move your stuff. So, I’m looking at all the different emerging technologies and these small companies that are playing with a piece of the process and automating it just a little bit more, bringing intelligence to it a little bit more, taking eyeballs off of things that automation can help with. I think that’s the other significant trend — investments in technology to speed up and take cost out of the process. The convergence of a lot of these. Those are the trends we’re looking a lot at. BN: The past two years have been filled with a lot of uncertainty; what factors do you think will define 2022?

“I’ve always believed that technology for technology’s sake is useless. But if you use technology as an enabler to disrupt and move an industry forward, that’s super powerful.” - Cathleen Schreiner Gates CS: I think everyone’s talking about this to be honest and the reason is it’s real. The lenders out there have to compete for the borrower more than they’ve ever had to do. We have this massive bubble of borrowers coming into the market, and a lot of these homeowners coming into the market are what I call digital natives. They grew up in a digital world and so some of the conventional ways that lenders might’ve attracted borrowers are going to fall a little bit to the wayside. And the refis are going away, so it’s sort of how do you attract that borrower? How do you differentiate yourself from the digital natives to the millennials, and frankly, all the different demographics out there who are actually adopting more and more of a digital approach to their lives? So how do you compete for the borrower? I think that is massively important to the lenders. And then coming out of the kind of year that the lenders have had, they had to really staff up to accommodate the volumes. So how fast do they staff down? How fast do they get efficient again and sort of reading the tea leaves and figuring out, “You know, the profitability on a loan is going down. Our costs are going up. Are we overstaffed?” Some lenders will be far better equipped to deal with it than others because they’ve been through these cycles before. And they have a sense of how to burst resources and then contract and then burst again and contract. A lot of the smartest lenders look for ways they won’t have to burst again the next time if they can automate, streamline and get smarter about the process. BN: After you’re finished with your career, what do you hope people remember you for? CS: I had the opportunity to sort of retire two years ago and then I kind of got pulled back into SimpleNexus, so I’ve seen a little bit of what this is about. I was blown

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over six or so years, we got it to half a billion in revenue, completely organizing ourselves for growth. So, I’m pretty proud of that because it allowed me to use everything I’d ever done or learned in my entire career. I got to apply it and see the results. Along with that, the most satisfying things are always helping leaders grow and mature into becoming leaders they want to be and giving them the empowerment to make the changes that they’re so skilled to make.

away by the sentiment coming from people who felt that I helped them build their career and be at a place where they could contribute and feel good about their career growth. Because we’re spending a lot of time doing this thing called our career. So absolutely, the most satisfying thing for me throughout my whole career has been helping people develop into strong leaders, watching them blossom, watching them have an impact and them feeling good about it. BN: To wrap, what’s one piece of advice you would give people in this industry? CS: To me, in this industry and having been in other industries, I think the industry is still at the discovery stages of what technology can do to move the industry forward. So other vertical industries kind of grabbed on to tech a little bit earlier and maybe are a little bit further up the maturity curve. I think the mortgage industry, being as massive as it is, has an unlimited opportunity to really embrace technology and do fun things for it. We’re just at the beginning. So, the thing I would say to every leader is to sharpen your mind and learn about what technology enabling capabilities are out there that can help you with your business. Don’t put it in a box and let somebody else be the expert. Develop some knowledge of it.

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BN: Is there anything else you would like to add? CS: Be curious. Look what’s out there. And the other thing I would say is to look through the lens of sustainability. In other words, I’ve been advocating looking at tech, but a lot of these ideas come and go very quickly. They’re like a fast burn. So, the layer I would add in there would be to look hard at the sustainability of anyone you partner with for any approach you take because you’re going to maybe make a decision and then that’s going to disrupt the way people operate inside your organization. And so, you pay a little bit of a price to disrupt. That’s change manage-

“Honestly, I think the biggest thing is that I’ve never sacrificed who I want to be. I feel like success can change people, and I’ve seen that.” - Phil Shoemaker

ment. So, make sure this thing’s going to be sustainable for you, and it’s going to be a decision you’re going to be comfortable living with for a few years, not a few months. PHIL SHOEMAK ER, HOMEPOINT PR ESIDENT OF ORIGINATIONS BN: First off, congrats on being named a 2021 Vanguard. Who would you want to thank for helping you get where you are today? Phil Shoemaker: I’d have to say my wife. I definitely would not have been able to do a fraction of what I’ve done without her support. I’ve been really lucky along the way. Outside of my wife, there’s a long list of people who really took an interest and invested in me and they all know who they are, and I very much appreciate all of them. BN: What’s one accomplishment in your career that you’re really proud of? PS: Honestly, I think the biggest thing is that I’ve never sacrificed who I want to be. I feel like success can change people, and I’ve seen that. I’ve been around a lot of people who have found success. And I think that what I’m most proud of is, despite my success, is that I feel like I’ve stayed consistent with my values and who I want to be. It’s really all about me. I really find a lot of joy in helping other people and being a part of a team that wins together, as opposed to my own personal accomplishments. BN: How are you helping move markets forward? PS: The No. 1 thing would be that I think this industry as a whole has become a little too focused on the wrong thing, specifically technology and automation. Just to give you context and background, I’m a technologist, and so I started out my career as an electrical engineer. That’s what I got my degree in. And then, I got into technology and built two loan origination systems. So, I actually came into the industry with a very heavy focus on technology. I think technology and process are extremely important because efficiency really does matter in this industry. But this is still very much an industry that’s about relationships. It’s a people-centric industry. I believe what we’re doing at Homepoint is unique, and we’re coming at it with a people-first mentality. Our goal is to kind of double down on that. If you think about what we’re doing, putting people in homes, it’s a very noble thing, and it’s oftentimes one of the biggest transactions that a person ever does. It’s stressful, right? And so, creating a company that recognizes it’s not just about profit and making money, it’s about something bigger than that, which is we are putting people in homes. Oftentimes, I think that gets lost in the industry. I think that you can win and do both. You can make money and you can also take a people-centric approach, and you can be efficient from a technology standpoint. One doesn’t have to trump the other.

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BN: The past two years have been filled with a lot of uncertainty; what factors do you think will define 2022? PS: First, it is pretty certain that rates are going to up. If you look at every single data point around where rates are going, it’s up. And if you look at what that means in terms of forward forecasted volumes, there’s a heavy shift towards a purchase market, which is why I think physical distribution will matter and why you will see wholesale start to grow. With that same concept, when you see that shift with refis going away, you’re also going to see a pretty healthy amount of consolidation. And that’s something that, honestly, I do struggle with because I think consolidation is good since you do have to have it to some degree. If

you can create a company that has more scale, you’re able to bring down costs, that ultimately benefits the end consumer. But there’s a degree issue there. Too much consolidation is bad. You don’t want three companies because then you lose all the optionality and that’s bad. That is one thing that I’m hyper-aware of. The industry will consolidate, but I do think that collectively as an industry, we should be concerned about how much it consolidates. BN: After you’re finished with your career, what do you hope people remember you for? PS: This might sound a little cliché, but I just want to be remembered as a good person. Look, I am very competitive, and I like to win. But for me, winning is not about getting a certain number on the ranking tables. It’s about achieving a goal and the process you go through along the way, and the people you impact and having a positive impact in the world. That would be number one — that I was a good person. It really is about the process and who you impact as you go through it. That’s what’s important. Not the destination. BN: To wrap, what’s one piece of advice you would give people in this industry? PS: It’s not about you. If I’m focused on making other people successful, I win. It’s not about you. I think the people that are most successful are the ones that actually find their success in helping other people as opposed to helping themselves. And oddly enough, I think you end up getting further that way.

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BN: What are two trends in the mortgage and real estate industry that you’re closely watching? PS: The number one trend is that I do believe that there’s going to be a persistent migration between from retail to wholesale. And let me back up and give you the perspective there. Physical distribution in this industry is still very important. Having originators in the market that have access to referral sources, like real-estate agents, who are familiar with borrowers, communities, and the different nuances of the market is really important. And there are two ways you can get that. You can build a company with distributed retail where you’re employing those LOs, or you can engage in wholesale lending where you are a lender but you’re leveraging this network of originators around the country. And I’ve had deep experience in both. I’m not saying an originator in retail or wholesale is better. But I do believe that the overall platform that wholesale offers an originator is superior, and the reason is that in wholesale, there’s more alignment with the originator and the lender. The originator is able to focus on what they do best, which is originating loans, and the lender is able to focus on service and building scale and efficiency, opposed to trying to manage the originator, which is very costly and time-consuming in retail. It got muted a little bit in 2020 because when rates go down, everyone’s pipelines get full, and people stop moving. As rates go up, which they undoubtedly will, refis will go away and capacity’s going to start to become more constrained. You’re going to see more and more originators take that leap and move to wholesale because they’ll give their borrowers better rates, and I think they’re also going to be able to give their borrowers a better experience. The second thing I’d point out is that there is a severe issue in mortgage with diversity. You could also broaden that to other industries, but since this is the industry we’re in, I’ll focus on mortgage. There needs to be more minorities in leadership positions and owning businesses. It’s the same thing with women. The industry has been dominated by one class for far too long. That’s why last year we did a $1 million grant to help minority- and women-owned brokers start.

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ortgage Cadence has recently launched its new platform, offering the industry’s most complete, modern LOS that delivers cloud-based, automated loan origination capabilities designed to enable an exceptional user experience throughout the entire mortgage lending life cycle, across all channels and products. The new end-to-end Mortgage Cadence Platform (MCP) is both complete and configurable, offering an open-architecture designed to meet the needs of a wide range of lenders’ businesses. With a leading POS through closing collaboration tools, the comprehensive platform has a modern, intuitive design and delivers exceptional user experiences. Due to the platform’s open architecture, users have access to a robust set of APIs, as well as admin, workflow and UI design tools that allow them to extend and customize their technology strategy to meet the unique needs of their business. The platform’s point-of-sale and loan origination system are both written in HTML5 for responsive design across devices to meet the user regardless of where they are. “Our approach is unique among mortgage technology companies, in that we are focused on building and investing in delivering the best LOS and thoughtful integrations, not dictating the broader ecosystem and ancillary services they need to use. Our open platform makes it easy for our clients to define their strategy,” said Pete Espinosa, CEO, Mortgage Cadence. Mortgage Cadence provides LOS platform solutions to independent mortgage banks, credit unions and commercial banks in the U.S. MCP is both complete and configurable, providing a solution for a wide range of lenders across all products and channels. The platform offers one database, mitigating risk and exposure and assisting with compliance by providing a single system

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of record. “We focus on helping our clients become high-performance lenders through the ideal combination of innovative leading technology, boutique-level support and experience, and an optimal mortgage process that meets the needs of our lenders and their borrowers,” Espinosa said. Within the platfor m is Mor tgage Cadence’s Automated Configuration Efficiency (ACE) engine, which allows lenders to define workflow automation. In addition, lenders can leverage automation within the POS to send vendor requests or opt to order services later in the origination process within the LOS. This solution supports all products and channels and is fully hosted in the Microsoft Azure public cloud, so bandwidth and server size can be adjusted to scale with an organization’s growth aspirations. There is a great deal of flexibility within MCP. Security is built into the platform to accommodate appropriate loan visibility by user base, and clients can add new channels or users when new employees or branches are added. As feedback is gathered from the borrower or employee experience, data entry fields and modules can be removed or added into custom workflow collections. “We understand mortgage technology and mortgage lending, including the best practices that produce high-quality, compliant mortgage loans of all types. Our breadth and depth of experience on both sides of the equation give Mortgage Cadence a significant leg up,” Espinosa said. MCP was designed with role-based experience top of mind and allows for multi-user concurrency in a loan file for maximum efficiency. The platform is delivered as a comprehensive out-of-the-box solution as well as a highly configurable platform that can accommodate a diverse client base.

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he origination process can be costly and time-consuming. Lenders need advanced capabilities, such as automation, decisioning and workflow capabilities to improve performance and streamline the origination process. Black Knight’s Empower loan origination system (LOS) offers an end-to-end, digital ecosystem that supports retail, consumer-direct, home equity, correspondent, wholesale and assumption lending channels all from one platform. This all-in-one system includes advanced capabilities like configurable workflows, intelligent automation, exception-based processing, compliance validation testing, configurable web APIs and much more to help lenders benefit from a faster, more efficient origination process. Intelligent Workflow Automation – Empower offers data-driven, workflow automation across the origination life cycle, from point-of-sale through fulfillment and post-closing. Lights-out Processing – Preconfigured by the lender, Empower can perform numerous tasks without the need for human intervention, creating significant processing efficiencies to help reduce the overall cost per loan. E xc e pt i o n-b a s e d Wo r k f lows – Empower automatically evaluates loan data and alerts staff when a loan review is needed, which helps to significantly decrease manual reviews and accelerate turn times. Artificial Intelligence (AI) – Empower leverages artificial intelligence to further automate “stare-and-compare” tasks more quickly and efficiently than traditional manual methods, helping lenders accelerate processes, decrease errors and reduce costs. Compliance Support – Black Knight continually enhances Empower to help lenders address their compliance requirements. In addition, Empower includes lender-configurable loan-level state and federal compliance testing embedded directly in the LOS workflow.

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BLACK KNIGHT www.blackknightinc.com/

THE EXECUTIVES:

ANTHONY JABBOUR, CHAIRMAN AND CEO Anthony Jabbour leads the company’s overall vision and direction to provide Black Knight’s premier solutions and services for many of the nation’s largest lenders and servicers.

JOE NACKASHI, PRESIDENT, BLACK KNIGHT Joe Nackashi provides overall strategic direction for Black Knight’s operating groups to maintain a laser focus on clients and deliver the solutions that help them achieve greater success.

RICH GAGLIANO, PRESIDENT, ORIGINATION TECHNOLOGIES Rich Gagliano is responsible for the overall strategy and product direction of Black Knight Origination Technologies.

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Black Knight’s Empower LOS supports retail, wholesale, consumer-direct and more all from one platform

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CORELOGIC www.corelogic.com

THE EXECUTIVE:

MICHAEL MITCHELL, EXECUTIVE, DISTRIBUTION PARTNERSHIPS, CORELOGIC

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As Distribution Partnerships leader for CoreLogic, Mike Mitchell and his team are responsible for all 3rd party channel partner relationships across the CoreLogic enterprise.

CoreLogic partners with ICE Mortgage Technology to make the digital mortgage experience more accessible

he origination process is primed for simplification. Too many lenders are still forced to spend countless hours manually entering data into their loan files. This is not only time-consuming, it also increases the likelihood of error, which further delays the origination process. To streamline communication between all parties, CoreLogic has partnered with ICE Mortgage Technology — part of Intercontinental Exchange — a leading global provider of data, technology, and market infrastructure. This renewed partnership is a significant milestone in expanding the availability of the digital mortgage experience and delivery of a true digital mortgage workflow for lenders and borrowers. The combination of CoreLogic data with ICE Mortgage Technology’s state-of-theart platform means that mortgage professionals will be able to work smarter, with end-to-end underwriting tools to get more done, with fewer errors. By expanding its broad portfolio of CoreLogic solution integrations on the ICE Mor tgage Technology Platform, Encompass users will soon have the ability to automate ordering of critical settlement services, including appraisals, credit reports, fraud reports, flood certifications and the many other services CoreLogic delivers through Encompass, creating an efficient and consistent, end-to-end digital mortgage solution. CoreLogic platforms are already implementing new automation and expanding data delivery. Valuation, title and closing workflows are a critical focus for driving loan process efficiency and compliance through CoreLogic platforms in the Encompass workflow. Earlier this summer, CoreLogic kicked off projects to modernize all of its critical integrated solutions on the ICE Mortgage Technology Platform via Encompass Partner Connect to update critical data-driven processes and make these solutions available to thousands of mutual clients on the platform. With Encompass Par tner Connect,

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a cloud-native third party-services integration platform from ICE Mortgage Technology, users will have the ability to automate the ordering of CoreLogic services natively through the workflow automation within Encompass. For instance, lenders can benefit from new features such as automated service ordering and optimized user experience. They’ll have the ability to leverage oneclick service ordering and Automated Service Ordering (ASO) when applicable, as well as the capability to control and designate where to route specific documents of the service provider orders. Additionally, data and documents are automatically imported into the loan file. “Our focus on automating the entire workflow to provide a better experience for the consumer and our clients is a shared priority with CoreLogic,” said Parvesh Sahi, Senior Vice President of Business and Client Development, ICE Mortgage Technology. “By automating the ordering of the wide array of solutions that CoreLogic has on our platform we will make it easier for our customers to originate or acquire more loans, at lower costs, and in a fraction of the time.” CoreLogic’s solutions are available directly from within Encompass by ICE Mortgage Technology for any Encompass user. The new integration methodology also allows CoreLogic product updates to be automatically pushed to Encompass without a user having to manually request updates. “When CoreLogic’s solutions and data are combined with the automated operational benefits of the Encompass Partner Connect APIs, users will get a robust endto-end solution that will reduce errors, save time, and save money – leading to a better overall customer experience,” said Michael Mitchell, Executive, Business Development for CoreLogic. Encompass users will receive ongoing announcements over the next 18-months introducing CoreLogic’s new solutions and enhanced user experiences leveraging Encompass Partner Connect.

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n today’s chaotic market, mortgage companies need to streamline the mortgage process so they can originate more loans. Encompass by ICE Mortgage Technology offers a truly differentiated digital platform that provides straightthrough processing for a comprehensive end-to-end workflow. From lowering costs to reducing time to close, this loan origination software enables lenders to make smarter business decisions. Encompass delivers everything that mortgage companies need to acquire and close more loans, grow their business at scale, streamline operations and remain fully compliant, all in one place. With innovative and preconfigured task-based workflows, the omni-channel experience allows for teams to get up and running without having to custom-build an environment from the ground up. “While Encompass is considered the gold standard of the lending industry, leveraging not just data and technology, but also real-world industry expertise to provide tech that actually solves problems for lenders, we are rapidly evolving what a lending platform means,” said Joe Tyrrell, President, ICE Mortgage Technology. “As we look to expose more APIs, provide direct access to the components of the platform, and create a suite of technology and data that lenders can leverage, we want to enable any experience they can envision.” Encompass maximizes operational efficiencies through automation across its users’ entire business, while also ensuring compliance with ever-changing regulations. The platform also delivers actionable data insights that help lenders benchmark against their peers and make informed decisions about where to focus to optimize their ROI. “Encompass is the industry’s leading platform for lenders and investors, with the functionality to support every channel they

use through a single system of record,” said Stephanie Durflinger, Vice President, Product Management. “As our customers’ businesses grow and more channels are added, Encompass continues to support them by minimizing complexity, steps, systems, costs or headcount needs.” Encompass provides a unique combination of powerful automation, ease of use and flexibility to help mortgage companies streamline their operations from end-to-end and take their business to the next level, without needing to leave the platform. For example, Encompass eClose is leading the industry’s transition to paperless closings with a more efficient process that eliminates the pain and added cost associated with managing multiple vendors. “We’ve also integrated an eVault solution to provide customers with secure storage of digital mortgages and notes,” Durflinger said. “Additionally, Encompass offers a fully web-based solution for correspondent investors that enables them to digitize traditionally analog processes within the secondary market and acquire loans with less work.” By leveraging data and automation, Encompass helps users reduce costs, increase revenue and deliver better customer experiences. By automating previously manual, time-consuming tasks, users can also drive efficiencies at every point in the loan lifecycle. ICE Mortgage Technology combines the native automation of Encompass with the e-collaboration and eRecording capabilities of Simplifile, along with the national electronic registry for nearly 90% of the U.S. mortgage market in MERS. Encompass enables automation of manual, time-consuming tasks to speed up the loan process and meet borrower’s demands for speed and convenience, ultimately helping to improve the borrower experience.

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ICE www.icemortgagetechnology.com/

THE EXECUTIVES:

JOE TYRRELL, PRESIDENT OF ICE MORTGAGE TECHNOLOGY Joe Tyrrell is head of ICE Mortgage Technology, the leading cloud-based loan origination platform provider for the mortgage industry and part of Intercontinental Exchange Inc., a leading global provider of data, technology and market infrastructure.

STEPHANIE DURFLINGER, VP, PRODUCT MANAGEMENT Stephanie Durflinger is Vice President, Product Management for next generation solutions at ICE Mortgage Technology.

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How ICE Mortgage Technology is automating everything automatable for lenders and investors

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ORIGENCE origence.com/

THE EXECUTIVE:

MICHAEL FARRIS, VICE PRESIDENT OF STRATEGIC SOLUTIONS AT ORIGENCE

he loan origination process can be time-consuming and inefficient due to manual processes. Origence has addressed these common pain points by launching the Origence Mortgage Platform, a tightly integrated point of sale and loan origination system. The Origence Mortgage Platform removes inefficiencies from the loan origination process through automation and configuration. It’s an event and digital information-based system as opposed to the legacy form-based systems that the industry has relied on in the past. “Our combination of automation and the ability to make work processes happen in parallel drives down cycle times for lenders,” said Michael Farris, Vice President of Strategic Solutions . “Further, our platform has a POS and LOS that are tightly integrated for bi-directional data and documents, removing the hurdles of disparate systems.” What’s unique about the Origence Mortgage Platform is its automation and the ability to tailor workflows for different product and borrower scenarios. Using automation, Origence has been able to remove much of the manual process typically associated with other platforms in the mortgage marketplace. The Origence Mortgage Platform offers a modern technology stack solution that uses drag and drop orchestration builders to allow lenders to easily customize their system without needing technical programming skills. With the combination of LOS and POS, multiple users can work in parallel on the same loan to expedite the overall process, delivering a better experience for the borrower. For example, one team could work on collateral value, while simultaneously

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A seasoned industry veteran, Michael Farris leads the Strategic Solutions group at Origence. His focus on integrity and process-driven sales solutions have resulted in negotiated contracts with top 100 lenders in diverse technology and service industries.

The Origence Mortgage Platform increases borrower visibility and engagement throughout the loan process

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another team could work on creditworthiness. The Origence configuration embodies best practices by highlighting the opportunities for automation and streamlining workflows. The robust configuration capability allows lenders to have workflows tailored to their business that they can control 100% themselves without the need for programming. “We have implemented high-level process design plans, resulting in project plans curated to the lender’s specific needs,” Farris said. “Our high engagement partnership approach with lenders spans the duration of the implementation, from planning through full production.” With Origence, ongoing borrower communication is generated throughout the process, reducing the amount of time staff have to spend on the phone providing status updates on loans. This allows the borrower to upload their documents and check-in on outstanding documents. As a result, the borrower’s visibility and engagement in the process are maximized, increasing pull-through and improving the overall borrower experience. “Origence’s rich borrower experience allows lenders to self-provision as much data as they want, resulting not only in a quicker application, but just as importantly, a quicker time to closing,” added Farris. “We remove static conditioning with automated conditioning and dynamic tasking on the loan.” Origence was developed post-TRID with compliance built-in, not strapped on the outside like many other solutions being offered. Lenders who partner with Origence recognize the intrinsic value of the management and strategic direction of a mortgage platform that is drawing on decades of industry expertise.

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he loan production process can be incredibly complex, as well as time-consuming. To improve production, SimpleNexus launched Nexus Origination — a solution that provides lenders with a robust mobile-first tool they can use anywhere to keep their pipeline progressing. Nexus Origination features a native mobile experience for both originators and borrowers to easily navigate the mortgage process while improving the efficiency of task completion and communication between parties. The platform’s mobile-first approach enables lenders to close more loans through on-the-go origination tools while also delivering the modern convenience that today’s consumers have come to expect. “This mobile usability is a defining feature of SimpleNexus’ homeownership platform and empowers loan teams to collaborate effectively in a hyper-volume, decentralized working environment,” Cathleen Schreiner Gates, SimpleNexus CEO, said. With this solution, real estate agents gain loan status visibility, and borrowers enjoy a simple application process from their preferred device with single-login simplicity. Originators can even order credit, run pricing, send pre-approvals, sign disclosures, and execute closings all on the go with full integration with their loan origination system (LOS). Nexus Origination features bi-directional data sync and automatic data push to a lender’s LOS for added time savings and information integrity. The integration enables lenders to preserve their current origination workflows with the added efficiency gains of mobile execution. “With its single login simplicity for borrowers, Nexus Origination streamlines the customer journey to homeownership with a modern point-of-sale experience,” said Ben Miller, co-founder of SimpleNexus. After downloading the mobile app, borrowers can upload documents, eSign

disclosures and closing documents, and check their status in real-time. This single-platform experience allows borrowers to conveniently navigate all aspects of the loan process with ease from their preferred device using a single login. Nexus Origination also features collaborative tools for enhanced referral partnerships. Lenders can build lasting connections with other real estate professionals for a more collaborative and effective referral strategy. The solution keeps partners connected through the mobile app and automatically sends them loan milestone updates as their clients progress through the approval process. “SimpleNexus provides a clear and detailed onboarding process for new clients, including documentation of key roles and contacts that will assist throughout the full implementation,” said Andria Lightfoot, chief customer officer of SimpleNexus. The onboa rding process involves straightforward, guided support through the customization, configuration, beta testing, and go-live phases. An assigned project manager assists clients through their implementation. Additionally, virtual training and onsite training provide additional resources for a smooth implementation experience. Technology is evolving, and borrowers expect more. SimpleNexus is a homeownership platform that unites originators, borrowers and real estate agents for a seamless and collaborative journey from the point of thought all the way through to closing. It provides an ecosystem that helps lenders attract borrowers expecting a modern loan transaction. “As a lender ’s business expands, SimpleNexus can keep up with their ever-changing needs by bringing together borrowers, partners, and loan originators in a single branded platform,” added Gates. “Nexus Origination delivers a personal, trusted home-buying experience for customers through a mobile-friendly solution.”

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SIMPLENEXUS www.simplenexus.com/

THE EXECUTIVES:

CATHLEEN SCHREINER GATES, CEO Cathleen Schreiner Gates has been driving accelerated growth at an early stage and global software-as-a-service (SaaS) organizations for 35 years.

BEN MILLER, CO-FOUNDER As a co-founder at SimpleNexus, Ben Miller oversees ongoing business operations, including strategic partnerships, implementation management, and customer success functions.

ANDRIA LIGHTFOOT, CHIEF CUSTOMER OFFICER Andria Lightfoot is a renowned mortgage technologist with experience leading mortgage operations, providing strategy for enterprise software solutions and implementing innovative change management solutions.

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Nexus Origination from SimpleNexus features a native mobile experience for both originators and borrowers

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STAVVY stavvy.com

THE EXECUTIVE:

SHANE HARTZLER, CHIEF STRATEGY OFFICER, STAVVY

ost digital solutions in the lending industr y are designed to solve one problem and built for one audience in mind. This fragmentation makes it difficult for everyone involved in the lending process to communicate with each other effectively. Stavvy has the power to bring these disparate components together. Stavvy enables digital transformation by helping organizations navigate complex financial and legal transactions easily and safely, which allows organizations to put customer experience at the forefront. Stavvy was purpose-built for real estate transactions, with a focus on the holistic user experience. Instead of replacing workflows or expecting a change in user behavior to adapt to the platform, Stavvy integrates into the way users are already working and automates the entire process. Stavvy’s solution securely digitizes every aspect of the process – not just replacing pen and paper with electronic documents and signatures, but rethinking the entire workflow. The end result is a best-in-class consumer experience and the creation of a truly digital asset that meets the needs of both up and downstream stakeholders. This full closing platform supports any sort of closing: a full RON, RIN, in-person or hybrid. Today, the platform integrates with Encompass by ICE Mortgage Technology, and integrations with other LOS systems are in development. It can intake documents from multiple sources as well as handle signings and annotations. And since Stavvy is designed for the title agent workflow, closing agents can easily inte-

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Shane Hartzler, the Chief Strategy Officer for Stavvy, helps guide Stavvy’s vision, working with lenders, title professionals and industry stakeholders to evaluate market needs and identify innovation opportunities to support companies making a digital transformation.

Stavvy’s solution securely digitizes and automates every aspect of the real estate transaction process

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grate the platform into the way they already work. “Our platform does a better job of facilitating compliance than competing products, and allows for easy communication with the lender and other parties throughout the transaction,” Chief Strategy Officer Shane Hartzler said. “There are also key integrations with LOS providers, document companies and title production software that remove additional steps.” Some of the biggest roadblocks that obstruct most loan originations are trailing documents and spelling or paperwork errors. By using cross-check fillable fields and verifying that all requisite information is included, Stavvy drastically reduces the time spent on pre-and post-close quality control and time wasted updating incorrect documents. For lenders, Stavvy features full vendor title compliance. Even before a title order is placed, lenders can assess a title agent and make sure they have the required insurance, certification and more. Although Stavvy isn’t an LOS, it is built to integrate with all major LOS platforms. “The loan origination process today is fragmented, with disparate systems and a mix of paper and digital pieces that can be cumbersome to manage,” added Hartzler. “Our customers typically want to integrate those disparate pieces and realize material efficiencies as a result.” Stavvy is built to serve financial institutions of all sizes, and scale as they grow. Because lenders and title companies are working on the same platform, there’s no learning curve for additional solutions or time spent syncing across different tools.

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FinXperience from Tavant brings all parties in the loan process together onto one collaborative platform “With our VELOX platform, we helped our lender clients not only grow but also improve borrower/loan officer collaboration and close more loans faster. Our clients grew 117% YoY for the period (first half of 2021), improved their conversion by 64%, and reduced cycle times by 52% across purchases and refinances while improving loan officer productivity by 29%,” said Abhinav Asthana, Head of Tavant’s Fintech Products Business & Growth. “How did we achieve it? Our data-driven ecosystem that plugs into over 130 data and third-party service partners hyper-personalizes your borrowers’ experience, augments your business processes with hybrid workflows - leveraging humans and machines, and enables your loan officers to serve your borrowers better,” added Asthana. FinXperience integrates through a bi-directional framework with its surrounding systems, including CRM platforms, pricing engines, document management systems, and LOS. This integration allows all participants in the process to interact with and access loan data in a true, real-time manner. “Tavant’s user journey and persona mapping for every party within the mortgage transaction leads to an optimal workspace for each user. The UX is friendly and intuitive, providing the most productive and efficient interaction coupled with bi-directional real-time data directly from the LOS based on security and data access rights,” said Mohammad Rashid, Head of Fintech Practice. He further commented, “Our alignment with digital transformation strategies across the home loan journey and our injection of AI/ML techniques along the way reduces the cost of originating mortgages through scaled automation opportunities at every junction.”

THE EXECUTIVES:

HASSAN RASHID, CHIEF REVENUE OFFICER Hassan Rashid steers Tavant’s strategy for continued profitable revenue growth, supported by a fully aligned business development engine.

MOHAMMAD RASHID, HEAD OF FINTECH PRACTICE Mohammad Rashid is responsible for driving innovation, strategy, offerings, and revenue of Tavant’s market-leading fintech business.

ABHINAV ASTHANA, HEAD OF FINTECH PRODUCTS BUSINESS AND GROWTH Abhinav Asthana is responsible for the overall innovation, go-to-market, and product management strategies for Tavant VΞLOX. 85 ❱ HOUSINGWIRE

he use of tech in the current mortgage application process is disjointed and siloed. Borrowers, loan officers, and the corresponding processors and underwriters are often working on entirely different systems. Meanwhile, borrower’s real estate agents, brokers, and financial advisers may not even have access to those systems, preventing them from supporting their clients through what is typically the largest financial transaction of their lifetime. With FinXperience, Tavant has brought all parties together on one collaboration platform and provided hyper-personalized digital journeys to borrowers, loan officers, brokers, financial advisers, and other participants in the lending ecosystem. The platform is loan origination system-agnostic and is designed to deliver value to both borrowers and lenders–”from the point of thought of buying a house to the point of owning a home.” “Most of our competitors have offerings that coerce the lender to follow a pre-determined and inflexible customer journey since their architectures provide for limited flexibility on the user experience front,” Chief Revenue Officer Hassan Rashid said. “The flexibility of FinXperience allows lenders to create an extremely differentiated experience from other lenders, as well as a hyper-personalized experience across their customer segments. There are no cookie cutters here.” A s a w h i t e - la b el s olu t i o n, t he FinXperience platform is highly customizable and configurable, with the ability to align with a lender’s specific branding and marketing differentiators and customer segmentation. The platform’s features, functionality, and volume-handling capabilities are scalable with the lender’s growth in the market.

TAVANT www.tavant.com

OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2021

C O M PA N Y S P O T L I G H T :

DOC M AG IC | SP ON S OR E D C ON T E N T

How DocMagic is helping accelerate digital closings DocMagic works with clients to make digital adoption as simple as possible

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he adoption of digital lending solutions has been increasing over the last few years, with the COVID -19 pa ndemic only accelerating the process. eClosings in par ticular have grown in popularity. For example, the use of Remote Online Notarization has expanded tremendously because 37 states now permit its use. That said, the eMortgage process is complex, involving a significant number of moving parts. DocMagic’s single-source solution has eliminated most of the issues that plague other providers – not just after implementation, but over the long term. The company’s powerful, end-to-end eMortgage technology is available via an intuitive interface that can be deployed quickly, and the company prides itself on its highly consultative approach designed to make the transition as easy as possible. Lenders with the ability to adopt technology that drives efficiency and client satisfaction have a competitive advantage in today ’s landscape. DocMagic delivers that technology in one seamless process provided by a single-solution suite designed to make the client experience as simple as possible. Once lenders understand all the options available inside the solution, they realize they can solve a whole host of problems. “Our hands-on approach to implementation, from developing the project roadmap to synchronized testing of each facet of the eClosing

process, helps us ensure success for our clients,” DocMagic President and CEO Dominic Iannitti said. “We’ve been at this a long time, so we understand our clients’ need for agile and technology-forward lending platforms to help them sustain and scale critical business processes.” HOW IT BEGAN DocMagic was founded in 1987 when Iannitti wrote its business plan during his senior year of college, basing the initial technology on automating the collection and organization of mortgage loan documents. By 1988, it was incorporated and had employees, functional technology and customers. The compa ny quick ly grew to offering custom form design and software. This formed the basis for the mortgage industry’s first auditing system, a full compliance and legal department and a variety of eServices. From the beginning, DocMagic has focused on delivering advanced, eff icient a nd complia nt mor tgage technology solutions. Back when the mortgage industry was almost entirely paper-based, the ability to use emerging technologies to “repackage data” allowed the company to begin automating manual data collection and interpretation processes. DocMagic has since grown into the largest loan document company in the U.S., expanding its solution set to include a suite of award-winning

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eMor tgage ser vices, compliance, mobile and digital mortgage technologies. Today, the company services key stakeholders throughout the mortgage supply chain, ensuring compliance and increasing efficiency while reducing loan production costs. “Our commitment to bringing digital processes to the mortgage industry has driven the evolution of our products and services for more than 30 years,” Iannitti said. “It is the primary reason DocMagic is at the forefront of digital document adoption.” Throughout its almost 35 years, DocMagic has continued to consistently evolve, enhance systems, launch new solutions and forge significant strategic partnerships that have made it a leader in document preparation, eClosings, eMortgages and other eServices that bring new efficiencies to the mortgage process. DIGITAL ADOPTION MADE EASY DocMagic supports its clients’ needs by making digital adoption as simple as possible. The company offers a full enterprise technology stack to support every aspect of the complete digital transformation process. The stack is designed to function as one integrated platform with a single sign-on, allowing for high levels of user efficiency. Its technologies are agnostic to any vertical and have allowed the company to develop some of the most powerful and widely used solutions and tools in the space. “We have made significant invest-

ment back into our core technology stack, allowing us to rapidly adjust to a fluid marketplace while simultaneously investing into where the industry is heading,” Iannitti said. DocMagic’s implementation and support teams take a unique approach to work with clients on their digital adoption. The company has established a team of subject matter exper ts. These experts serve an advisory services role, guiding clients through the best digital mortgage automation and compliance strategy for their specific businesses. The team’s tailored, solution-oriented crafting looks at both the short- and long -term of a user’s business. DocMagic’s implementation team has streamlined the client onboarding process – almost everything can be implemented remotely and without disrupting daily operations. This has proven particularly beneficial throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. DocMagic’s support teams take a hands-on, strategic approach to the onboarding process, product education and customer service. Implementation of its innovative technology is simple and quick, strategic guidance is always available, and support is second-to-none. DocMagic’s industr y exper ience allows the company to be a longterm partner, supporting its clients robustly. As such, DocMagic has

DOC M AG IC | SP ON S OR E D C ON T E N T

helped numerous lending entities successfully transition to a digital mortgage model, from docs to workflow automation and full eClosings. SOLUTIONS FOR EVERY STEP OF THE PROCESS DocMagic’s solutions touch almost every arena within the mortgage process, with end-users including loan officers, processors, compliance managers, settlement providers, attorneys and borrowers. DocMagic offers dynamic document generation using a single system of record, which automatically evaluates critical transaction information at all phases of the mortgage lifecycle to ensure accuracy and compliance. Powered by its proprietary Audit Engine, DocMagic’s Document Preparation solution optimizes every aspect of the document process, from initial disclosures all the way through closing. The company also enables a fully paperless eClosing workflow via its end-to-end eClosing platform, Total eClose. Total eClose seamlessly integrates every component of the closing process, including Remote Online Notarization (RON) capabilities, and offers direct connectivity to the MERS eRegistry. Total eClose can be implemented using a “walk before you run” phased approach, leveraging multiple hybrid models to provide lenders with the flexibili-

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ty to go fully paperless when they’re ready. AutoPrep is an advanced technology that leverages artificial intelligence and machine learning to transform standard documents into e-Enabled documents in less than 10 seconds. The solution scans and parses documents, locating all areas required for a signature and tags them for eClosing. Its other offerings include collaborative closing solution SmartCLOSE, GSE-certified eVault technology, and LoanMagic, an application for smart devices that dramatically reduces the time it takes to process mortgage loans. THE FUTURE OF DOCMAGIC DocMagic’s Total eClose platform and document generation solution have achieved significant market penetration, and the company is poised for more growth. In the coming years, it’s expected that eNote and eVault usage will gain additional momentum, and DocMagic anticipates widespread use of its eSign 3.0 system. Its AutoPrep solution will further e-Enable any third-party providers to allow complete eClosings, and the company expects to see an increasing number of lenders moving from hybrid eClosing models to offering 100% paperless eClosings – a goal with which DocMagic will happily assist.

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C O M PA N Y S P O T L I G H T :

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......................................89 ALTA......................................89 MBA ......................................90 NAHB ....................................90

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NAR.......................................91

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TRADE DESK

Marc Summers

President Association of Independent Mortgage Experts

AIME members, The broker community has continued to experience unprecedented growth in overall market share as more consumers come to the realization that the wholesale channel truly provides the best experience when it comes to buying a home. At AIME Fuse 2021, the largest gathering of independent mortgage professionals in the country, our association shared how low rates, innovative loan products, and exceptional customer service have put independent mortgage brokers at the forefront of an even greater footprint in the mortgage industry. Furthermore, the experience of celebrating the successes and growth of the broker community with fellow wholesale mortgage professionals from across the country has energized the wholesale channel to do even greater things as we enter the last fiscal quarter of 2021. AIME has successfully utilized our channel’s exceptional resources through technology and partnerships that help to position brokers as the best option for

homebuyers. This includes a laser focus on bringing awareness of the broker channel to consumers, strengthening client relationships, improving processing efficiency, streamlining workflows, and providing the flexibility that homebuyers demand in today’s digital marketplace. This could not be done without AIME’s exclusive resources and partnerships which allow brokers to hone their communication strategies to consumers and develop expertise on a number of emerging digital tools that bring value to their business. As we continue to pursue our vision of growing broker market share to over 25%, AIME is working diligently to support our channel’s positive momentum by continuing to be forward-thinking as we enter the new year. We know our members will continue to strive to provide the best service in the mortgage industry and AIME will be there every step of the way to assist them by providing brokers with the resources they need to succeed.

Association of Independent Mortgage Experts experts to examine the scope of the problem, as well as key legislative approaches to remedying discriminatory covenants in land records. The workgroup is actively collaborating with industry partners and academic experts on recommendations and best practices. The title industry is uniquely positioned to be a thoughtful partner in addressing discriminatory covenants and working to end housing discrimination. ALTA is strongly opposed to any form of housing discrimination and is committed to proactively working toward solutions that protect the property rights of all homebuyers. To find out more about how to become engaged in ALTA’s advocacy efforts, visit alta.org/tan.

American Land Title Association

Diane Tomb

CEO American Land Title Association

OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2021

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ALTA members, While federal law has properly made discriminatory covenants illegal and unenforceable over the years, their existence in property deeds and other official mortgage documents has caused significant pain and harm to countless Americans. In July, the American Land Title Association applauded Sen. Tina Smith, D-Minn., for introducing legislation to research discriminatory covenants in land records. Historic land records often exist in paper form, making the search for discriminatory covenants onerous. Furnishing funding to research and document discriminatory covenants addresses this challenge and provides a critical first step toward fully understanding the negative impacts of these abhorrent covenants. Addressing the existence of discriminatory covenants in land records is a major priority for ALTA. In the past year, ALTA convened a workgroup of industry

Robert Broeksmit President & CEO Mortgage Bankers Association

Mortgage Bankers Association

TRADE DESK

MBA members, Later this month, MBA will host its Annual Convention 2021 in San Diego. To kick it off, we will swear in our voluntary leadership who will guide MBA and the industry over the next year. First let me thank our 2021 chair, Susan Stewart, who has guided us these past 12 months. Her leadership, vision and commitment to promoting minority homeownership will expand opportunities for minority households for years to come. We are grateful for her service and look forward to our continued working relationship. The same passion and results-oriented approach can be expected from MBA’s incoming 2022 officers: Kristy Fercho (Chairman), Matt Rocco (Chair Elect), and Mark Jones (Vice Chairman). Fercho, executive vice president and head of Home Lending at Wells Fargo, will be the first Black MBA chair and just the fourth woman to take on the role.Fercho brings a unique and much-

needed perspective to the position, having worked at Fannie Mae as well as both banks and nonbank mortgage firms. I look forward to seeing her leadership on display, helping to solve the industry’s biggest issues, including her intense focus on closing the racial homeownership gap. Rocco, chair and CEO of Grandbridge Real Estate Capital, will offer tenacious energy and practical business experience that will be crucial as residential and commercial/multifamily real estate finance businesses and issues evolve. Jones, CEO and co-founder of Amerifirst Home Mortgage, has been an active leader within MBA and will be a particularly valuable voice for independent mortgage banks. The year ahead will continue to offer challenges, but I am confident these three visionary leaders will guide our association and the industry to the success our members expect and appreciate.

across the country, we are working to address issues NAHB members, According to an analysis of recent U.S. Census data that have contributed to the labor shortage and misconby economists at NAHB, more young people are enter- ceptions about the industry. Online resources at nahb.org/workforce include posting construction trades, which is helping lower the industry’s worker median age. This is good news for ers and promotional materials to celebrate Careers in an industry that has battled to not only fill an ongo- Construction Month every October and year-round; a ing labor shortage but to bring in a new generation toolkit with ideas to recognize the contributions of of skilled labor to its workforce. Statistics from the professionals working in the field 2019 American Community Survey show the share of and foster a positive image of construction workers under the age of 25 reached 10.8% construction careers; lesson plans compared to 9.7% in 2015. Consequently, the median for schools; scholarship opportuage of the construction workforce was 41 in 2019, the nities; and talking points to help same as a typical worker in the national labor force, increase public awareness about but a year younger than in the prior survey. While the the varied opportunities available news is good for an industry working to fill a huge gap in residential construction trades. from displaced workers who left construction during The data and research compiled by the Great Recession, the data also highlight some other NAHB economists show the strong challenges. The age composition of the construction earning potential of workers in labor force shows nearly half, or about 47%, are mostly our industry. It includes state-speGen-Xers aged 35 to 54 who make up a smaller gener- cific data on the average wages for ational group than their Baby Boomer predecessors. 19 construction trades More concerning are the Boomers aged 55 and older and projected workforce that make up more than 20% of the workforce, many demand for the top 100 Chairman of whom could retire soon. One of my top priorities is metro areas. National Association of Home Builders I hope you will join me to focus on workforce development and attract talent in touting the benefits of to our industry. Partnering with members at local and state home our industry to anyone interested in a meaningful and builder associations, and educators and policymakers rewarding career in the construction trades.

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Chuck Fowke

National Association of Home Builders OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2021

TRADE DESK

NAR members, About a month ago, the NAR had the pleasure of unveiling our redeveloped headquarters in Chicago. NAR has occupied this space since 1974 and has been proud to call the city our home. Chicago has welcomed NAR and allowed us to build, thrive and champion housing protections and laws that promote homeownership from this base. Because the community has been such a significant part of our success, it was an honor to reinvest in the city and the renovation underscored our ongoing commitment to our hometown. Our project injected $50 million into the economies of Chicago and the state of Illinois. In a time of financial hardship and uncertainty, I am pleased to reveal that the project created more than 350 union jobs and employed more than 150 national and local businesses from inception to completion. When we decided to move forward with the renovation, we were ecstatic to partner with Chicago-based real estate companies GNP Realty Partners and One Development. Together we reimagined the headquarters for the 21st

century. GNP Realty Partners and One Development executed the redevelopment in its entirety, resulting in the most comprehensive and sweeping change to the association’s Chicago headquarters in its history. The project contributed to the redesign and redevelopment of the Plaza of the Americas on Michigan Avenue, gratuitous to the city of Chicago. T h i s t a sk w a s a huge undertaking that ultimately surpassed already high expectations. We are indebted to the builders and workers who did such an impressive job in the middle of an unforgiving pandemic. That said, NAR is not done. We will continue to reimagine and identify new opportunities within commercial real estate. This includes a new world-class lobby design slated for opening in 2022. Stay tuned.

National Association of Realtors

Charlie Oppler President National Association of Realtors

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OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2021

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REAL ESTATE

OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2021

REAL ESTATE

The problem with banning pocket listings THE HISTORY BEHIND NAR’S MANDATE BY MATTHEW BLAKE

“We pay to support these organizations. They wouldn’t exist without us, so they should give us the benefit of the doubt.” - Jim Quinn

differences in both opinion and practice among real estate agents, with opponents contending it may be the trade group’s fatal overreach. These naysayers point to the Biden administration – already pursuing a “broad investigation” of NAR activities – intervening in a lawsuit challenging the ban. But if the pocket listings guidelines indicate NAR’s heavy hand, the policy also demonstrates that NAR power is channeled through a glass mosaic of countless MLSs, each with their own bylaws, level of resources, and coterie of nosy agents. “We pay to support these organizations,” Quinn said. “They wouldn’t exist without us, so they should give us the benefit of the doubt.”

For all the professed dismay and voluminous legal filings over pocket listings, there’s scant data on

OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2021

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im Quinn just won his appeal on his pocket listings punishment. “An agent of mine put a ‘for sale’ sign out in the yard,” said Quinn, the operating principal at Keller Williams Peace River Partners in Punta Gorda, Florida. “Another agent saw the sign and instead of the courtesy of calling us, he called the local MLS board and they slapped us with a $500 fine.” In the eyes of the Florida Gulf Coast Multiple Listing Service, the Punta Gorda Keller Williams franchisee had defied the National Association of Realtors’ clear cooperation policy, more commonly known as the pocket listings ban. Quinn was fined, he said, with no warning or due process. But after challenging the fine, the local MLS later dropped the penalty. The pocket listings ban has ignited stark

REAL ESTATE

“The rule doesn’t make any adjustments for movie stars, and the rule by definition gives discount brokers grief."

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- Michael Lissack

the number of off-market homes for sale before and after NAR’s decree. Ken H. Johnson, a real estate professor at Florida Atlantic University who coauthored a study over a decade ago that appeared in the Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics, estimated that less than 5% of all home sales close without being put on a public listing database. Johnson has no reason to suspect this percentage changed much. But he also acknowledges that the current ethical and legal debate over pocket listings is not something he anticipated. “I would think it would be a very low priority,” he said. “It’s like going 73 miles per hour in a 70 miles per hour zone.” NAR’s “MLS Technology and Emerging Issues Board” created the pocket listings ban, per NAR’s website. Enacted in April of last year, the policy requires agents list a home on their local MLS within one business day after marketing it. Marketing means many things, from yard signs to an Instagram post. NAR gives some examples of what marketing is but doesn’t say what it isn’t. NAR did not respond to several

inquiries over a period of weeks for this story. The trade group explains on its website that banning pocket listings “reinforce the consumer benefits of cooperation,” adding, “The MLS creates an efficient marketplace and reinforces the procompetitive, pro-consumer benefits that realtors have long sought to support.” Agents have a noble interpretation of what NAR is really saying and a cynical one. The uplifting version is that NAR, which has offered mea culpas regarding past racism in housing, implemented the policy to ensure listings are posted publicly, reducing opportunities a seller has toward discriminating against a buyer. “The ban on pocket listings needs to remain,” said Kevin Polite of Solid Source Realty in Atlanta. “It has a discriminatory past whereby white realtors who didn’t want to sell to Blacks and Jewish people would do pocket listings so that people of color or different religions would not have access to these homes.” Michael Lissack, an agent for Virtual Realty in Salem, Massachusetts, partly agreed. “I do sincerely think that NAR is focused on making sure nobody is steering and redlining, and keeping people from accessing property,” Lissack said. But Lissack also sees another reason, which is that MLSs collect dues from agents. And those MLSs, in turn, make their listings accessible to all dues paying members. Maybe some agents – like the Los Angeles reality TV stars Mauricio Umanksy, James Harris and David Parnes who are suing to repeal the pocket listings ban – are so plugged in they don’t need this public database to succeed. Others may feel MLS access is their only chance to compete. “NAR wants more and more people to pay them dues,” Lissack said. “So, they encourage the proliferation of unqualified

OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2021

“NAR wants more and more people to pay them dues. So, they encourage the proliferation of unqualified neophytes to take on the title of realtor. - Michael Lissack

REAL ESTATE

Like stars in the Milky Way, we can name some MLS companies, but we don’t know how many exist. Today, there are “more than 800 MLSs,” according to NAR’s MLS explainer. “There are more than 900 MLS systems in the United States,” states Zillow in their MLS explainer. “Each with its own rules, regulations, and database accessible to only its members.” There are “more than 600 MLSs nationwide that are affiliated with NAR through their ownership or operation by NAR’s Realtor Association,” stated Los Angeles federal judge John Holcomb in an order against PLS.com, the company founded by Umansky, Harris, and Parnes. Sophia Gilbukh, a real estate professor at Baruch College, is presently studying MLSs and placed the number at closer to 500 due to a wave of recent mergers. For example, Bright MLS, which is listed as a co-defendant in the PLS.com lawsuit, compiles listings throughout the mid-Atlantic and stems from the consolidation of nine different MLSs in 2017. “It is confusing who exactly is merging, who owns what, and what fees agents must pay,” Gilbukh said. That there is one NAR but untold MLSs

dates to age-old practices of sharing listings on printed sheets. “Before the Internet age, Realtors used to get together regularly in

they are so small, and all the agents tend to list on StreetEasy,” a company independent of NAR, Gilbukh said. Like Bright MLS, Midwest Real Estate

“Before the Internet age, Realtors used to get together regularly in town meetings, and share the listing information with each other, hence the local nature of MLSs." - Panle Jia Barwick

town meetings, and share the listing information with each other, hence the local nature of MLSs,” said Panle Jia Barwick, an economics professor at Cornell University who studies the U.S. real estate industry. Around two-thirds of MLSs are owned by a local NAR affiliate, Barwick said. This includes, for example, Rhode Island StateWide MLS, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Rhode Island Association of Realtors. Rhode Island State-Wide MLS adopted the pocket listings ban, said Phil Tedesco, CEO of the Rhode Island realtors’ group, because “This policy is mandatory under NAR rules.” H owever, the large s t M L S of neighboring Massachusetts – the Massachusetts Property Information Network, or MLS PIN – is “owned by 230 individual brokers or brokerage entities,” said Melissa Lindberg, MLS PIN’s chief strategy and marketing officer, and is, “Therefore not bound by NAR policies.” And yet, MLS PIN has its own, separate rule, Lindberg explained, requiring agents to post any home for sale within 24 hours of securing the listing. Other variations abound for MLSs, which are often the gatekeeper of the housing market information agents, and eventually the public, can see. New York City “has several MLSs, but

OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2021

Data is a co-defendant in the PLS.com lawsuit, and one of the biggest MLSs in the country, listing properties for all the Chicago metropolitan region plus parts of Wisconsin and Indiana. However, Midwest Real Estate Data is not subject to NAR rules because it's owned by a group of local brokers. Midwest Real Estate Data has 58 pages of rules and regulations for its dues paying members who post listings. There is an 877-word rule regulating agents’ use of photographs, and an additional 201 words on photography contractors. Unauthorized dissemination of system access passwords is a $2,500 fine. There’s also – like MLS PIN – Midwest Real Estate Data’s own iteration on a rule prohibiting pocket listings, which they implemented in 2016. Gilbukh has only begun her studies on MLSs. But so far, “I have certainly found a lot of inefficiencies.”

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neophytes to take on the title of realtor.” NAR delegated MLSs to enforce the ban through an “escalating process of warnings and fines,” per the trade group’s website. So far, there’s arguably been a scattershot implementation. “The rule doesn’t make any adjustments for movie stars, and the rule by definition gives discount brokers grief,” Lissack said. “If the issue was only fair housing compliance, then that makes sense. But these things don’t exist in a vacuum.”

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MORTGAGE

OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2021

MORTGAGE

How a noncompete ban would impact the mortgage industry ARE WORKERS WHO DO SIGN LIMITED IN WHERE THEY WORK? BY MARIA VOLKOVA

"Any company that pays big money upfront to induce an originator to come over, it is going to make it up with less competitive pricing down the road."

- Kevin Peranio

OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2021

Noncompetes rarely target loan originators, though there are instances in which an LO signs a noncompete with compensation tied to it, said Kevin Peranio, chief lending officer at PRMG. “Any company that pays big money upfront to induce an originator to come over, it is going to make it up with less competitive pricing down the road,” Peranio said. “Typically, lenders do employ this tactic to pay up for higher performers.” Audrey Boissonou, a loan officer with Guarantee Mortgage in California, said that before LOs sign a contract, they are usually careful to make sure that there are no limitations placed on their future careers. “It’s not just what the company offers you but what is the experience when you’re leaving... if they’re going to not pay you out your loans or you’re not supposed to take your data base, that’s not ok,” she said.

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n July 9, President Joe Biden ordered the Federal Trade Commission to fully ban or limit an employer’s use of noncompetes. If such a rule is implemented, industry veterans and labor attorneys say it could change how the mortgage industry recruits and retains talent over the next decade and beyond. Should the Biden administration make good on its threat, some loan officers, account executives and marketing personnel bound by such agreements would be able to switch jobs without fear of potential litigation from their employer. The general gist is that the impact of a rule banning noncompetes would be marginal, mainly felt by non-originators, who are more likely to be bound by a noncompete agreement, attorneys and lending executives said.

MORTGAGE

“It’s not just what the company offers you but what is the experience when you’re leaving." - Audrey Boissonou

Scott Crutcher, president of mortgagefocused executive recruitment firm Maverick Financial Group, noted the noncompetes that he has come across typically target executive-level managers. They generally prevent these employees from working in a similar role for a specified period of time. Crutcher said that some of the noncompetes he’s seen limit an employee's ability to work in the same sphere for up to two years. What seems to be more prevalent in the mortgage industry are non-solicitation clauses, according to Jim Clapp, president at Certainty Home Loans. Clapp remarked that these clauses “state that an LO or employee cannot solicit employees from the departing company for a set period like six months or one year.” Crutcher also added that in his line of business, which is recruiting, it is more common to see non-solicitation agreements that specifically target branch manager level employees and above. “The intent is if a branch manager moves, they can’t take their team of LOs with them. That’s what employers are guarding against,” he said. “Would it be helpful if that would change in the industry? Absolutely, more teams would be open to looking for different or better opportunities.”

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Sources interviewed by HousingWire disclosed that workers that do sign noncompetes are limited in where they work for numerous years, with some insiders noting that certain lenders do not allow former employees to operate within 50 miles of the branch that they were working at.

OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2021

“The intent is if a branch manager moves, they can’t take their team of LOs with them. That’s what employers are guarding against." - Scott Crutcher

Joe Tymoszczuk, national account manager at BCHH Title, who has previously worked with mortgage lenders, said he has only heard of a “few instances where [noncompetes] were enforced” and, from his experience, noncompetes are more common with small lenders that worry about other lenders recruiting their LOs. (He also noted that noncompetes are common in the title industry.) Tymoszczuk added that usually LOs

MORTGAGE

noncompete to be slapped on “mortgage brokers, bankers, loan officers, real estate agents, title companies, insurance companies.” Pollard expects for an FTC rule to be introduced in the next several months but fully anticipates push back from “corporate America.” Meanwhile, the white house estimates that somewhere between 36 million and 60 million private-sector workers are subject to noncompete agreements and that the use of these contracts not only prevents mobility of workers, but also mitigates a worker’s ability to lock down a higher paying job.

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feel that they can jump from one lender to another, though some lenders are wary of former LOs leaving to start their own mortgage shops, “so the lender will make their employees sign a noncompete to discourage anyone else from leaving.” To date, noncompetes have been dealt with on a state-by-state basis, with some states like California, Oklahoma and North Dakota banning them, while numerous others prohibit their use with low wage workers. However, Jonathan Pollard, a litigator at Pollard PLLC, who specializes in noncompetes, said in certain parts of the country, particularly in the South, noncompete abuse is rampant. Pollard pointed to Texas and Florida as the epicenters of noncompete abuse. “Originally noncompetes were meant to be exceptions and not the rule... they were meant for higher-level employees such as executives and CEOs, people who had the keys to the kingdom,” Pollard said. “Now you look around and noncompete agreements are at every level of every industry.” One such industry? Real estate. The attorney said it is not unusual for a

OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2021

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FINTECH

OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2021

FINTECH

Inside Figure and Homebridge’s massive bet on blockchain WILL OTHER LENDERS FOLLOW?

eter Norden , the CEO of Homebridge Financial Services, has been waiting a long time to do something truly unique in the mortgage business. Decades. “I’ve always struggled with finding a way to be different than my competition,” Norden, a 43-year veteran of the business, said. “Because the reality is, when you really look at it, all mortgage bankers sell pretty much the same products. And we pretty much sell those products to the same buyers, or put them in the same securities. We really don’t have a lot of differentiation.” When an investment banker called Norden last year to ask if he wanted to meet up with fintech pioneer Mike Cagney, Norden agreed. By that point, Cagney had already raised over $1.2 billion in debt and equity for his blockchain-

" I’ve always struggled with finding a way to be different than my competition." - Peter Norden

OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2021

focused fintech company, Figure Technologies, and generated real buzz around his vision for completely remaking the mortgage process. While most traditional lenders were scrambling to hire underwriters, loan officers, processors and keep up with record origination volume, Cagney was spending his days looking for acquisition targets. He wanted to test his theory that blockchain could revolutionize mortgage. And he needed to do it at scale. In August, Cagney flew to Florida and met Norden at his place in Boca Raton. Cagney, who co-founded digital student lending firm SoFi in 2011, asked Norden if he would be interested in selling the business to Figure, Norden said. “And I said, probably not, I mean that’s not really what my motivation is, but I would love to do some kind of merger where we can help each other. And that’s what we ended up doing.” After six months of negotiations, they struck a deal. Homebridge, the traditional mortgage lender with wholesale and retail operations based out of

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BY JAMES KLEIMANN

FINTECH

a New Jersey office park, would merge with Figure, the bleeding-edge fintech firm based in the heart of San Francisco, most recently valued at $3.2 billion. “We ended up sitting down and talking, and it just made a whole lot of sense that we could really do this and be in the forefront of the mortgage,” Norden said. “It’s great for Homebridge. And for Figure it’s a platform to be able to prove that blockchain technology works. And it actually gives them access to a much larger customer base, because of the volume of loans that we do.” Cagney said he had a lot of targets to choose from. “When it became known that we were looking at various mortgage companies, a lot of folks came to us, so we got a chance to look at a lot of different businesses,” he told HousingWire in an interview. “What was unique about Homebridge was a combination of the management and what they’ve been able to accomplish,

“It’s great for Homebridge. And for Figure it’s a platform to be able to prove that blockchain technology works."

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- Peter Norden

and the reputation of the organization, which I think is outstanding. “It’s a business with scale but wasn’t overly investing in technology. We want to be able to bring technology in a way to provide pretty significant disruption to those operating characteristics of the business… and downstream benefits. A couple things that are going to happen for Homebridge out of this are, one: we’re going to be able to lean in and bring a whole suite of products that the loan officers haven’t historically had access to. And ultimately the business has to scale to do some of the things that we’re trying to do on the technology side, the process of origination, capital markets. So there’s a lot of upside around that.”

In the beginning, life at Homebridge, which originated about $26 billion in mortgages in 2020, won’t look much dif ferent for the hundreds of LOs, processors and other staffers at the lender. For starters, the deal likely won’t receive regulatory approval for four to nine months. In the interim, Homebridge will be rolling out origination products that it hasn’t yet had on its rate sheet. HELOCs, which is a bread-and-butter item for Figure, will be the notable addition. They’re also planning to offer unsecured consumer loans for the wholesale and retail salesforce. “And we have to figure out the logistics of that, because for the most part, we’re a mortgage banker,” Norden said. “My lines of credit are really all geared towards mortgages, so when you start dealing with other things, we’ll probably end up just handing over the leads over to Figure for Figure to actually process and close.” Logistically, it’s going to take some

OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2021

time for the two companies to integrate systems. Norden estimated that it would take about a year to originate the new products in Homebridge’s name and close them. The ability to cross-sell different products to borrowers is a key part of the merger, the companies said. “From when we originate a mortgage, now we have the capability to possibly do a few more,” Norden said. “We can see that there’s student debt on the credit report, we can offer them a student loan refinance, if they need to do $25,000 worth of repairs on that house we can do an unsecured consumer loan for them. If they need to have a piggyback loan — a no PMI piggyback loan — we can do those because Figure’s doing all those, as well as doing some pretty creative jumbo product, which they’re delivering using Blockchain technology to certain institutions.” Conversely, while Figure is originating HELOCs, they can look at the consumer profile and have Homebridge offer the borrower a new mortgage. If this is starting to sound more like a depository bank than a traditional nonbank, you’re onto something. “So it basically becomes a full consumer lending unit that really can cover the gamut, with the intent to expand,” Norden said. “I think Mike has every intention of expanding it into every consumer finance avenue that is available over time. Frankly, Homebridge is going to really become a new type of fintech.” The merger won’t result in any layoffs. The executive team at Homebridge will also remain in place. Homebridge received a large amount of Figure’s stock in the deal, though details of the pending deal were not disclosed.

FINTECH

For an industry that obsessively talks about needing technology to bring down costs and improve consumer experiences, it’s perhaps surprising that there aren’t major mortgage players rolling out blockchain technology at scale. Today, the lifecycle of a mortgage loan is mostly a manual process, with each player putting a bit of information into unintegrated systems, and handing the quality control individually. That’s from application to approval, to title and appraisal, to closing, to the loan being sold on the secondary market, and then serviced. Blockchain technology allows Figure — or any lender that adopts the technology — to record, share and exchange the data about the loan without the need for a manual process. It’s immutable, meaning it can’t be changed, and the process is far more efficient and seamless than the paper-heavy process that exists today. To date, none of the biggest companies in mortgage have taken steps to replace their existing processes with blockchain, according to Debbie Hoffman, a professor at the University of Albany Law School, who teaches a course on blockchain and cryptocurrency. “Companies are not currently using blockchain technology,” said Hoffman, who also founded a blockchain advisory firm. “So in order for them to take advantage of it, they have to be open and willing to shift to use the technology and share it among the parties. So what I’ve always said is you need a few drivers to make that happen — drivers like bigger mortgage lenders... but it could be like Fannie or Freddie who say, ‘Hey we’re going to use blockchain and you have to adapt to our ecosystem and use the information that we’re going to use.’ It’s really difficult because you can’t use it in a vacuum, you

Blockchain to reduce mortgage industry costs by up to 100 basis points from origination through securitization,” Cagney said.

“There’s not a lot of leaders in our industry saying yes, we want to use blockchain, we’re going to risk it." - Debbie Hoffman

non-agency products. “So obviously a logical first application is for high-balanced jumbo loans that aren’t going to the agencies, leveraging blockchain to deliver those loans faster and more efficiently,” he told HousingWire. Currently, there is no timeline to originate agency product, Cagney said. One of Figure and Homebridge’s key challenges in making blockchain standard in mortgage banking is buy-in from other firms. “Everybody wants to see somebody else do it,” Hoffman said. “There’s not a lot of leaders in our industry saying yes, we want to use blockchain, we’re going to risk it. There are a few that are embracing technology and change and want a differentiating factor, but I think the industry is generally more hesitant. In the past year-and-a-half, they’re just trying to keep up with the volume so they haven’t really had time to focus on innovation. So then the question is, when we hit a slower time, is that the time for innovation? Or are they going to say, ‘We don’t have the money now to pay for innovation.’” In August, Figure struck a deal with loan servicing software developer Sagent, which will power Figure’s mortgage servicing process through blockchain. “ We’ll also begin bringing scale mortgage assets onto the Provenance

OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2021

Figure and Homebridge are betting that in a few years, blockchain will create efficiencies that allow them to grow far beyond the top-30ish mortgage lender level they’re currently operating at. Long term, the blockchain technology would allow Homebridge and Figure to handle mortgage transactions through cryptocurrencies instantly. Instead of dollars being wired into escrow accounts, you could use a token that has value, say 30 Bitcoins, for example, and have instant liquidity from player to player. Though the industry at-large has been slow to embrace the technology, Hoffman said Figure and Homebridge might shift the paradigm. “In the past year, mortgage lenders have gotten really comfortable with the concept of a digital mortgage and and remote notarization and that opens up the door to saying, ‘Okay, it doesn’t have to be on paper,'” she said. “We’re more comfortable with digital than we were a year-and-a-half ago. It’s really going to make it go a lot faster once the value is seen by the others watching Figure and Homebridge.”

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can’t be the only company that’s going to use it," she said. Cagney says Figure is already using blockchain technology “extensively” with

KUDOS

JPMorgan Chase commits $3 million to appraiser diversity

kud

Moves to support students and professionals in the appraisal industry By Sarahi De La Cuesta

JPMorgan Chase recently donated $3 million to the Appraiser Diversity Initiative, putting its financial support behind a growing movement to bring more diversity to the residential appraisal field. diverse talent to join the appraiser industry and we’re hopeful that these scholarships will help pave the way.” Dan Hofacker, head of Collateral Valuations at Chase Home Lending, added to that saying, “This announcement toward the Appraiser Diversity Initiative is another step forward in helping to close the racial wealth gap by offering support to students and professionals interested in joining the appraisal industry who may have previously felt unable to. We’re hopeful that our contribution will help to make positive changes in the industry.” According to Hofacker, along with the financial commitment, Chase will provide additional resources. “Chase is offering mentors to trainees in the ADI A COMMITMENT TO ADVANCE RACIAL EQUITY program — these are seasoned appraisers who the trainees will be able to consult for questions Chase has had ongoing discussions with the or advice,” Hofacker said. Appra isa l I nst it ute a nd “Additionally, as we return Fannie Mae on ways to supto in-person events, Chase is port the Appraiser Diversity “THIS ANNOUNCEMENT offering the use of our conferInitiative since the first quarTOWARD THE APPRAISence center space for the ADI ter, and this isn’t the bank’s program, as needed.” first financial commitment to ER DIVERSITY INITIAAccording to the Appraisal advance racial equity. TIVE IS ANOTHER STEP Institute’s breakdown of the “JPMorgan Chase is taking FORWARD IN HELPING state of the appraisal indusa comprehensive approach TO CLOSE THE RACIAL try, there were 78,000 apto narrow the racial wealth praisers in the U.S. at the gap in the U.S., particularly WEALTH GAP BY OFFERend of 2018 and just 40% of among Black and Latinx ING SUPPORT TO STUthose focused on residential communities. Last October, DENTS AND PROFESappraisals. we announced a $30 billion Seventy-nine percent of all commitment to advance raSIONALS INTERESTED IN appraisers identify as male cial equity of which $26 bilJOINING THE APPRAISAL and 71% are over 50 years lion is dedicated to expandINDUSTRY WHO MAY old, per the trade group. ing affordable housing and Eighty-five percent of appraissustainable homeownership HAVE PREVIOUSLY FELT ers stated they are white. in underserved communiUNABLE TO.” Four percent said they were ties,” Mark O’Donovan, CEO -DAN HOFACKER Hispanic, 1% reported as of Chase Home Lending, Asian, and 1% said they are said. “In addition to driving Black. sustainable homeownership, Hofacker said he is hopeful that initiatives and we’re working with our partners to root out bias in scholarships like this one will pave the way for dithe residential appraisal process. We need new,

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The initiative, which is part of a collaboration between the Appraisal Institute, National Urban League, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, is intended to attract diverse new entrants into the residential appraisal field, overcome barriers to entry (such as education, training, and experience requirements), and provide support to position aspiring appraisers for professional success. The commitment will be spread out over three years with Chase devoting $1 million per year to support trainee education packages. This investment will help approximately 700 students with costs that include textbooks, calculators and the purchase of any additional required courses.

OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2021

dos

KUDOS

WHY BECOME AN APPRAISER?

A $30 BILLION COMMITMENT When Chase announced its $30 billion commitment to advance racial equity last year, the funds were designated to: 1. Promote and expand affordable housing and homeownership for underserved communities 2. Grow Black- and Latinx-owned businesses 3. Improve financial health and access to banking in Black and Latinx communities 4. Accelerate investment in our employees and build a more diverse and inclusive workforce

And while a career as an appraiser isn’t typically a dream profession for young students, he said he would want college students who are thinking about getting into the appraisal industry to know that there is great demand for appraisers in the housing industry. “Where a waiver does not exist, almost every These commitments included specific goals like home purchase requires an appraisal as a part originating an additional 40,000 home purchase of the process, so a career in this industry can loans for Black and Latinx households and helping provide stability,” he said. an additional 20,000 Black and Latinx households “Additionally, while it can be different from place achieve lower mortgage payments through refito place across the country, a career in the apnancing loans. praisal industry has great earn“Systemic racism is a tragic ing potential,” he added. par t of America’s histor y,” With partnerships such as Jamie Dimon, Chairman and Chase’s, ADI can help share “IT’S LONG PAST CEO of JPMorgan Chase, said information about the opporat the time of the announcetunities to work flexible hours TIME THAT SOCIETY ment. “We can do more and do in the field and/or from a home ADDRESSES RAbetter to break down systems office, and the use of cuttingCIAL INEQUITIES IN that have propagated racism edge technology. and widespread economic in“O ne o f t he A p p r a i s a l A MORE TANGIBLE, equality, especially for Black Institute’s top priorities is to MEANINGFUL WAY.” and Latinx people. It’s long past encourage recent graduates to - JAMIE DIMON time that society addresses raconsider a career in the valucial inequities in a more tanation profession with a pargible, meaningful way.” ticular focus on diversifying As Chase continues to supour ranks,” Appraisal Institute port diversity initiatives, such President Rodman Schley said. as the Appraiser Diversity Initiative, the bank “The Appraisal Institute is truly grateful to Chase plans to release a progress update later this year, for making such a major commitment to helping which will share an overview of some of the key the next generation of appraisers.” changes that their donation has made for the ADI. Jake Williamson, Fannie Mae vice president As a result of initiatives like this one, Hofacker for Single-Family Collateral Risk Management, said, “Chase hopes that other lenders and interechoed this sentiment, said, “Chase’s generous ested parties with appraisal field experience get contribution to ADI is hugely impactful.” involved and give back and support the Appraisal “Their financial and staff support commitment Diversity Initiative, either by taking the time to be greatly increases the capacity to attract new ena supervisor/mentor to trainees, or by being an trants to the field and actively support their career event or financial sponsor.” aspirations,” he said.

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verse talent to join the appraiser industry. And part of driving sustainable homeownership, according to Hofacker, is working with their partners to help root out bias in the residential appraisal process.

parting shot

As a champion for diversity in the real estate industry, Kenya Burrell-VanWormer sat on the general session stage to lead a late morning panel at the National Association of Realtors’ Innovation, Opportunity & Investment (iOi) summit. The focus of the session was the power of diversity in proptech. Burrell-VanWormer, senior vice president of diversity solutions at T3 Sixty, was joined by Jovan Hackley, principal at Point S2, Katherine Winston, head of digital marketing at Plunk, Jeff Turner, entrepreneur in Residence at Second Century Ventures and cofounder at Tangilla, and Jesse Garcia, CEO at Zipi. While they only had a 30-minute session, the five panelists proceeded to lead a candid discussion that would leave an immeasurable impact on those in attendance. AJ Canaria, who not only took this photo but also serves as creative producer at MoxiWorks, described the session as raw, open and honest. “It felt like an intimate deep conversation among a small group of passionate individuals broadcasted all over the world. Heather Elias, the extremely talented MC for the event, and I chatted backstage after the panel concluded, and we both shared the same feelings about the panel discussion and how it moved us to have goosebumps and nearly tears,” he said. Canaria went on to say that his key takeaway from the session is to “ be open, be honest, be willing to have those hard conversations, and most importantly, you have to look for those opportunities to change and surround yourself with people of diversity.”

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Photo credit: AJ Canaria, Creative Producer at MoxiWorks

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❱ THE POWER OF DIVERSITY

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