One former Superbowl champion-turned-mortgage professional has grown his business exponentially – following a trend seen by other industry players.
Casey Crawford, former tight end and Superbowl champion for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers has received a lot of media attention as he has grown his mortgage company into a multi-billion dollar enterprise.
Crawford recently shared the secret to what kicked off his ascension in the mortgage broker industry with Bloomberg news.
“I actually Googled ‘how to start a mortgage bank,’” Crawford told the publication. “We got to build from the ground up what 21st-century customer experience can and should look like. We went from seven employees to, this month, 2,000.”
Crawford is the co-founder and CEO of Movement Mortgage and, while at the helm of the privately held bank, has helped it generate over $214 million in annual revenue last year.
Movement Mortgage is just one of the non-bank lenders that has picked up the slack left behind by the big banks following the financial crisis a few years ago – for its part, funding over $8 billion in mortgages so far this year.
According to Inside Mortgage Finance data, obtained by Bloomberg, four of the top 10 mortgage originators in Q1 2015 weren’t banks – and they accounted for 37.5 percent of loans placed in 2014, a 26.7 percent increase over prior year.
"That was attributable to a combination of nonbanks being more aggressive, both in terms of rates and underwriting, and large banks pulling back slightly in the conforming markets," Editor Guy Cecala told CNBC.
And the attention Crawford is receiving certainly isn’t hurting the exposure of these smaller lending institutions.
He has been featured in the Charlotte Business Journal, CNBC, and Bloomberg, among others.
