CEO started company from parents' guest bedroom
If ever there was a wunderkind of the mortgage industry, Joel Mathew (pictured) would fit the bill.
Barely 30 years old, Mathew is CEO and president of Houston-based Champions Mortgage – a firm he founded in 2018. While the wunderkind title is lofty enough given the competitive nature of the business, Mortgage Professional America reached out to Mathew for another honor – making the cut among the Global 100, a list of top industry professionals vetted by MPA and its sister publications. He’s one of only 24 US mortgage professionals so honored.
MPA reached out to find out what makes the industrious young man tick. He began by reflecting on his days following his graduation at the University of Texas at Austin after studying finance.
Learning the ropes at an early age
“I was working at Chase as a credit analyst,” Mathew told MPA during a telephone interview. “I didn’t really like my job, and I stumbled upon mortgage. The biggest thing is I went to college at UT-Austin for four years, and they never said anything about mortgage. It’s an unknown thing, especially for college kids. That’s why I never got into it.”
The field was so unknown to him at the time that he assumed the only way people secured mortgages was through banks. A friend of his disabused him of the notion by describing the broker channel.
“The perception was you go to a bank to get a mortgage,” he said. “One of my buddies was the one who was ‘no there’s a whole other thing, the broker side.’ So I took a chance and quit my job to study for my exam. I passed the exam and then I’m like – now what do I do? I have this mortgage license but I had to learn the basics. What you learn in the books and what you learn in real life is night and day.”
It was time to find a job in the industry to learn the ropes. “That’s when I looked for an opportunity and applied to a couple of places, most of them remote. I wanted to find something that was more in-person to learn, especially being new to the field. So, I went to a local brokerage.”
But the environment wasn’t ideal as a learning space. “It was completely mismanaged and disorganized,” he recalled. “I didn’t have any support and was working for free. I worked there for a few months. I was 25 at the time, so I didn’t really have clients of my own and was only getting paid per client that I was closing.”
And yet the experience wasn’t a total loss, he said. “The good thing that happened is I was able to learn the process – learn what a mortgage is, how to structure a loan, how to work DTI [debt-to-income ratio], and talk to underwriters. They told me ‘read the guidelines. If you understand the guidelines, you will know what to tell clients and the underwriters.’ So, I made that a priority and did that for six, seven months.”
He then went to Guild Mortgage, a retail office, where he began to build a client base. This is also when the benefits of the broker channel became more apparent. “I had a couple of clients by then,” he said. “I knew the rates at the broker side of things and was trying to price out the same rate with the retail side but those rates were not the same as I was getting on the broker side. They were, like, ‘even if you make zero dollars, you cannot get the rates you were getting there.’ I thought, why is anyone going to a retail bank? Why wouldn’t everyone go to a brokerage?”
Burning the midnight oil
That was the epiphany he needed to start his own company, initially from a guest bedroom in his parents’ house. “I used to go to people’s houses to take loan applications because I didn’t have an office,” he said. “Credibility is everything. People wanted to meet you in person, so I used to tell people that my office was downtown: ‘Let me come to you and take the loan application’.”
By 2018, he was able to lease office space in a Houston suburb, meeting clients during the day and processing loans at night while working from 8 a.m. to midnight closing three to five loans a month. Gradually he was able to hire a couple of processors and some loan originators.
“When we first started, I was literally the one doing every loan – 100% of the volume was mine. Up to 2021, 75% of total volume was all mine. I couldn’t scale the business that way, so I made a priority to get loan officers to come see the value. So we created a marketing team to provide any kind of marketing for the realtors and loan officers.”
From the original one-man office when he first began, Champions Mortgage now has a staff of more than 70, including 35 full-time employees and some 40 loan officers. Now married to his college sweetheart, Mathew finds himself delegating more rather than working those 16-hour workdays of the past.
His approach to growth helped the business smoothly navigate choppy waters spurred by the volatility of the market that occurred some two years into his launch. “Last year, based on total volume, we had the highest total closings in Texas,” he said, noting the shop’s impressive volume of $245 million.
The Global 100 honoree said even bigger things are in the offing for 2024, both literally and figuratively. For starters, Champions Mortgage will have relocated to bigger space in downtown Houston by mid-year. Moreover, the company will be a corporate sponsor for the hometown professional baseball club Houston Texans.
“2024 is a year for a lot of great things for us as a company, so I’m very excited to see what the year has in store for us,” he said.
Given his preternatural drive, it’s sure to be a banner year.
Want to make your inbox flourish with mortgage-focused news content? Get exclusive interviews, breaking news, industry events in your inbox, and always be the first to know by subscribing to our FREE daily newsletter.
