They share how they got their businesses rolling…
In challenging times, one turns to the stars of one’s chosen profession for inspiration. At a recent gathering of mortgage brokers and loan originators, there was no shortage of such role models from which to draw inspiration.
The setting was the recent FUSE conference organized by the Association of Independent Mortgage Experts (AIME) in Las Vegas. The sixth version of the annual conference came against a backdrop of challenge given a market slowed down by high mortgage rates and lack of housing affordability. There are few better ways to inspire than with a panel discussion titled “We Are Mortgage Champions: Top Volume Originators.”
Panelists discussing their methods were Michael Cain (pictured top left), loan officer at C2 Financial Corp.; Major Singleton (pictured top center), mortgage broker, Edge Home Finance; Braiden Shaw (pictured top right), broker-owner at Fulcrum Home Loans; Nancy Bayat (pictured below left), vice president, Amerify; and Jason Kindler, president at First Coast Mortgage Funding. The panel discussion was moderated by Tom Ahles (pictured below right), president of growth at AIME.
The secrets of their success
Each panelist shared insights into their experience in the industry and the factors that have led to their success.
In September, Singleton marked his third year in the industry after retiring from a military career. He spent the first half of his career in retail before making the jump to the wholesale channel, he said. He described having to attend a presentation made by a loan originator to discuss home loans offered by the US Department of Veterans Affairs.
“I got notified about 15 minutes before the guy arrived to talk about mortgages,” he said. “So, I had to sit there for about an hour to hear about the VA home loan to make sure he didn’t say anything crazy or try to sell something crazy to my people.”
Instead, Singleton became enthralled by the presentation, he said. He approached the visitor after his presentation about staying in touch after retirement. Prior to that, he was offered a job at the Pentagon. “I knew it was my time to depart,” Singleton said. “I’m not a Pentagon kind of guy.”
He reached out to the mortgage expert who had spoken to his troops and was encouraged enough to join the industry. “It’s been a fun ride,” he said. “My brand is VA loans,” he said. “That got me into the industry.” He runs an educational platform as primer on VA loans for veterans and real estate agents alike. “It’s been what has really helped to propel me,” he added.
His first year out, he posted $121 million in volume. Not bad for a rookie.
Shaw wasn’t sure what he wanted to do in college, where he enjoyed participating in sports. Given his major in finance, he zeroed in on Wall Street. But then he became a dad in his senior year, which pretty much upended everything, he said.
“It kind of flipped my world upside down,” he said of becoming a dad. As a young parent, he knew one thing for sure: “I didn’t want to do an 80-hour workweek on Wall Street,” he said. “I stumbled into the broker world, and I didn’t know what it was or what I was getting into. I was at a local shop in Utah and was there six months before moving back to Idaho. Once I moved away, I knew I wanted to start a new thing.”
Together with a partner, he launched his shop in February 2020 – in the midst of global pandemic that ushered in volatility in the mortgage industry. “The next month, everything went insane,” he recalled. “And we had to roll with the punches and figure it out.”
Fortunately, there wasn’t much of a broker presence in Idaho – at a time when the capital city of Boise was experiencing brisk growth. He attributes the broker dearth as the reason for his company’s growth as the rest of the industry was tightening. “Boise was growing like crazy, so we took advantage of it.”
Experience yields dividends
Bayat is no newcomer to the industry, marking her 23rd year as a broker. Acknowledging she could do more on social media to promote herself, she described how she is able to thrive in a tough market.
“I’ve been in the business a very long time, and I’ve always been in wholesale,” she said in the way of an introduction. That longevity has paid dividends: “People know who I am. I’m honest, I work with a lot of integrity. And I think that over time, clients remember that.”
She described how she keeps the fires burning at her shop: “How I stay afloat in markets like this is with referral business,” she said. “I stay on top of my book of business. I have close to about 12,000 clients I service.” Her outreach to those customers depends on the market, she noted. “In 2020, 2021, I was once every six to eight months but now it’s every three months. I call every birthday. I’ve done over a dozen loans for many cleints. They always come back because they know who I am.”
For his part, Kindler has experienced success through something of a niche. “I’ve been in the business since 2001,” he began. “I started in the broker side of the business and then, in 2010, the broker shop I was running in Atlanta was acquired by a bank – like many companies that went through that at the time.”
That niche emerged in the first decade of his career. “I was in retail up until that point when I was actually recruited to run a builder mortgage company. My twist in this is that a lot of brokers, I hear, as soon as they hear builder and you got a client prequalified and they’re going to a builder the sentiment is ‘aww man.’ As far as the builder business goes, I’ve closed over 100 builder loans every year for the last X number of years.”
Asked by Ahles when his career started to catch fire, Cain didn’t hesitate to answer: “That’s pretty easy,” he said “It’s when we switched from being a broker in 2019. “I went from having handcuffs on to really being able to align myself with a company like C2 that allows us to run our own business. We’re focused more because we’re able to take the money we have been earning with our commissions and investing that back into our business with events,” he said of entertaining Realtor partners. “Through social media, we have found who we want to be with. We seek them out and go belly to belly – drink with them, invite them to places we’re going. We have to become best friends with them – baseball games, softball games, doing things with their kids. Basically becoming a family.”
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