She vividly recalls when the prospect of buying a home seemed insurmountable
Early on, Ashley Bedford (pictured) learned the value of hard work. Yet even now, she’s awed at her ability to have bought a home, let alone become a licensed mortgage originator helping others achieve homeownership.
Her journey to the mortgage industry is as implausible as it is inspirational. During an interview with Mortgage Professional America, she recounted obstacles in achieving homeownership as moments informing her career to this day. The empathy yielded from those experiences guide her role as a loan originator, including her focus on the purchase market when many of her counterparts chased after quick commissions during the recent refinancing wave that has since calmed.
At 18, she moved to Orlando, Fla., from Ohio to be with her now-husband. “I got here with $150, bought a bicycle and rode my bike to Target and Bubbalou’s,” she said of her two jobs, the formal name of the latter being Bubbalou’s Bodacious BBQ. “I would ride my bike to one job in the morning and the other in the evening.”
The Great Recession emerges
She would later land at Washington Mutual bank. “At $10.25 an hour, I thought I had made it,” she said with a chuckle. By 2006, she would give birth to the first of two daughters, prompting a job transfer to a small community bank, she recalled. Things were going pretty well, she said. And then, the Great Recession hit to sweep it all away.
The couple lost their fledgling construction business and she got laid off from work. Her husband found employment as a manager for pest control services firm Terminix, for which the family transferred to Sarasota, Fla. As their family grew, the couple began to think about buying a home – a seemingly insurmountable move at the time. “Even though I worked in banking, I didn’t really know very much about my credit score and things like that because I didn’t grow up being taught that,” she recalled. “The mortgage company said we could buy a $189,000 house, but we needed a $30,000 [down payment]. I was 26 years old. I didn’t have $30,000.”
A friend referred her to a broker to secure more favorable terms. The family then returned to Pensacola, Fla. “I was in college full time, I had two kids, and felt like we could never get ahead,” she said. She asked someone at the mortgage firm if she could help out with processing loans to earn extra money. Instead, her contact suggested a job as a loan originator, a job she took in Orlando – the family’s final stop.
“My husband had to stay [in Pensacola] for a little bit. I moved back to Orlando where’s he’s from and moved in with my mother-in-law so she could help me with the kids while I was working. I just dove in and worked 18 hours a day the first year. Florida was saturated with brokers because it’s so easy to get licensed. I had to figure out how to set myself apart.” With the power of epiphany, she found her niche. “I started getting known in Orlando as the loan saviour,” she said.
Lessons from the past continue to resonate
Today she plies her trade at Appli Home Loans, which she joined last month after eight years with another local brokerage. “I remember what it felt like to be told I needed $30,000 and thinking I’d never be able to provide a home for my family,” she said. “To be able to empathize with people in that situation and helping them get into a house with their families is so important to me.”
That stance kept her attention on the purchase market instead of instant gratification of refis. “I really stayed focused on purchases during the refi wave, even if it meant putting in a lot of hours,” she said. “Purchases are your bread and butter. The people who want a refi will wait for you because you’ve built that relationship. I took that time to really nurture those relationships.”
The purchase focus hasn’t compromised volume. In 2021, she posted volume of $100 million across 329 units, followed by $82 million-plus over some 260 units last year.
Bedford credits the Association of Independent Mortgage Experts (AIME), of which she’s a member, with helping her along the way – chiefly through its “brokers are better” campaign that serves as the trade association’s clarion call. “AIME and ‘brokers are better’ really set us apart,” she said. “They made brokers genuinely better. I know that’s so cliché, but honestly, they started healing the reputation that started in 2006, and let people know what a broker truly does and how they’re really for the consumers,” she added, referencing rampant finger-pointing that occurred in assigning blame for the Great Recession.
In celebrating that sentiment, Bedford last summer joined other brokers associated with United Wholesale Mortgage in ringing the closing bell at the New York Stock Exchange – a moment she considers a career highlight. “It was really, really cool,” she said. “It was definitely an experience I’ll never forget.”
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.
