He wants it to be as easy getting a mortgage as it is buying shoes on Amazon
Sometimes, inspiration can strike in the most unlikely of places.
“I grew up on a dairy farm in the Midwest,” Adam Stein (pictured) of Blue Sky Financial LLC began during his recent interview with Mortgage Professional America. From such humble environs, an illustrious career in the mortgage industry heavy on technology would be launched.
“I pretty much stumbled into it,” Stein said of entering the mortgage industry. “I worked in a number of fields out of college,” he recalled of his salad years after graduating from the University of Utah. His first substantive gig was working at a traditional bank when someone suggested he might want to explore being a broker. “‘Hey, you’d be really good at this mortgage thing,’” he remembered being told.
The advice led him to Columbia mortgage and investment, a small brokerage firm in Washington. “This guy ‘I’ve got these old files from my dad’s old mortgage company,’” Stein remembered. “I sat there thinking ‘I’ve got a college degree, I’ve got a brief but successful track record, and this jackass wants me to telemarket for him’,” he said with a laugh. “But I didn’t really have anything to lose, right? So, I worked my bank job ‘til 5 o’clock and then drove over to the little office they had, picked up these files and called people ‘til 8 o’clock at night. I think inside of four to six weeks, I had a pipeline with probably $20,000 in in commissions.”
One thinks of the “Karate Kid” skeptical of the “wax on, wax off” method during his nascent martial arts training that ultimately pays off. Indeed, Stein described a similar bewilderment at the beginning when he first learned the trade. “I knew absolutely nothing about mortgage and their training was pretty minimal,” he said. “I learned mortgage in the trenches from the account executives and loan officers around me. I started processing my own files, so learned the operations side and became a junior partner in that company.”
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By now comfortably ensconced in the industry, a prescient focus turned to digital origination – at a time when that wasn’t really much of a thing. “Around 1997, I started talking about digital origination,” he recalled. “I couldn’t get them to spend any money on R&D Back in the day, the mantra was ‘you need the biggest yellow page ad and the biggest newspaper ad’. I was like, ‘hey guys, that stuff’s all going to go away’.”
Unable to convince his colleagues of future developments, a disagreement over how to run the company emerged. Stein made a bold move: “I wound up buying my branch out. I wrote them a check and said ‘you can take this money and I can take this branch, or I can walk away and the branch will follow me. Would you like this check?’”
They took the check.
By 1998, Stein started American Brokerage and Finance with licensing in a dozen states, where he was able to luxuriate in his vision for digital originations.
“We set up the very first CRM to LOS pricing integrations and connected to the website so we could do digital originations,” he said. Thinking that “we’re really good at this tech we wired together,” he secured Series A financing in to launch LoanTek, with the funding closing in 2010. “It was one of the best consumer-facing pricing engines in the market,” he said of the product that was driving such heavyweights as Lending Tree, Zillow and Bankrate LLC. The latter eventually was bought out by Red Ventures, becoming a subsidiary of that company by November 2017.
Flash forward three years later, and Blue Sky Financial was created amid a global pandemic. “Employee one was April of 2020, right at the beginning of COVID,” Stein said. “I actually built and sold another little tech company between there,” he offered, with a chuckle. “Somebody got me back in the dark horse of mortgage origination again. I got out of tech.”
But tech wasn’t off the radar. In the first year, Boise, Idaho-based Blue Sky had 50 full-time employees who did digital originations in 12 states to the tune of $880 million worth. In the first year alone, Stein remembered - and in the middle of the COVID-19 scourge, he added for further emphasis. The company also operates a sales and operations center in West Palm Beach, Fla. And has another office in Sun Valley, Idaho.
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Technology continues to be at the forefront of his vision. “Blue Sky Financial just closed its Series A this past month, and I’ve got one of my old CTOs back with me – he’s been with me through four different companies now. We’re actually going to put a tech stack that I think will be the premier consumer experience in the space. Our goal is to get a person from our landing page through credit, DU [desktop underwriting] approval and disclosure in some five minutes.”
For Stein, the currency placed on technology is largely rooted in a survey he came across during his early banking days. “One of my mentors pulled me aside and said there was a survey done on consumers about their least-liked places to go. Going to bank and visiting with a loan officer was only behind the dentist and the DMV [Department of Motor Vehicles]. That was a survey done 27 years ago or more, but I don’t think a lot has changed. People don’t necessarily enjoy being poked and prodded for their financial information and sitting down in front of someone baring their financial soul. If you can make that a friendlier, quicker, self-empowered decision on the part of the consumer, then I think you’re alleviating a lot of pain and a lot of time.”
Stated simply: “To the greatest extent possible, I want a customer to acquire a mortgage online with the same ease they buy a pair of shoes on Amazon.”
