His past career in food services informs his mortgage career
For Marshall Gottlieb (pictured), the winning edge is rooted in a focus on customer service, with attention placed on what’s best for the client.
It’s a philosophy the CEO of Arizona-based Agave Home Loans inculcates to each of his loan officers. “You need every single loan officer and team member at the company to be very open-minded to feedback and coaching and who they’re talking to and really staying open-minded to how we can help people,” he told Mortgage Professional America during a telephone interview.
He cited an example as to how that philosophy might manifest itself: “Sometimes a person might call in and want $50,000 to do a remodel of their home, but maybe they don’t qualify to do a $50,000 remodel of their home. But they do qualify to pay off $40,000 in debt and that saves them a ton of money. So a loan officer needs to be open-minded to look at what helps a client and be able to offer them what is available. The client ultimately makes the decision for themselves once they fully understand the terms of the loan, but in a lot of cases they are very willing to save $800 a month or $600 a month even when they didn’t intend to.”
Placing a premium on customer service
That level of customer service – when the concept is all but anachronistic in today’s hurried pace – invariably leads to referrals and positive online reviews, Gottlieb suggested. The dynamic helped him secure one of 10 awards from Rocket TPO as one of their broker partners with the greatest production in terms of loan volume.
Rolling up one’s sleeves to help a customer is especially needed amid the current tougher housing industry slowed by high interest rates and inflation. “Especially coming off a really good market in 2021 and 2022, you get so accustomed to the person who calls in and says they’d like to lower their interest rate and ‘I’d like to lower my payment’,” Gottlieb said. “We’d say ‘we can do that for you’, but now that’s not an option. The last couple of years, the market has been more challenging. We’re doing a lot more 2-1 buydowns and 1-zero buydowns and options. And maybe we’ll tell them, ‘I know you’re intending to sell your other house and use that money for your down payment. But have you thought about renting your house instead?’”
But again, promoting that level of customer service is a team effort: “We have 40 producing loan officers in any given time,” Gottlieb said. “If all 40 of them are thinking that way, you’re going to have a lot more people you can help and you’re going to provide a lot more value to them. And then you’re also going to differentiate yourself a little bit more from the competition because the competition is offering them, in most cases, cookie cutter,” the Agave Home Loans CEO said.
It’s like going to a nice restaurant
Think of it as going to a restaurant and being tended by a thoughtful server – a metaphor that is hardly an abstraction for him. In a previous interview, Gottlieb detailed how he came up in the food services industry – a pizza parlor to be exact – where he rose the ranks from dishwasher to manager between the ages of 15 to 22. The lessons of service he learned then are now being applied to the mortgage industry.
“If I go into a nice restaurant, I want a personalized experience where the server asks me questions about what I like and what flavors I like and what I’ve tried and not tried and then tells me ‘one thing you might like on this menu is this; some people do it this way and then pair it with this drink’. And then I feel like I’m getting something that fits me better and I’m relying on the expertise of the server as opposed to when you ask a server what’s good and they say ‘oh, everything; our most popular is the pepperoni pizza.’ No, I want customization, and I want to know that you understand my situation and are going to give me the advice that I need.”
Thankful for Rocket’s award, Gottlieb nonetheless isn’t resting on his laurels and took a modest stance. “We’re appreciative of the awards, and we’re proud of our team for the hard work they’ve put in delivering a great client experience,” he said. “At the same time, we still feel we have so much more to accomplish and we’re not even touching the surface of what we really want to do.”
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