Company joins a growing list succumbing to shrinking market
Just a little over one year since its launch, AmeriSave Wholesale Mortgage Solutions – the wholesale channel of Atlanta-based AmeriSave Mortgage Corp. – has closed its doors effective immediately, company officials announced.
An industry source alerted Mortgage Professional America to the closure last Friday, but no official statement could be secured. In seeking comment, MPA last week left a voicemail for Michael Brenning, president and founder of AWMS, that went unanswered. MPA also reached out to a company spokesperson via LinkedIn but received no response.
The AmeriSave Wholesale Mortgage Solutions website has since been stripped of product information, serving as a centerpiece solely meant to contain the channel’s status: “AmeriSave Wholesale Mortgage Solutions (AWMS) is closing its door {sic} effective immediately,” the notice reads.
Still, AWMS will still honor existing pipelines, the notice adds. The company outlined post-closure parameters:
- No new registrations after 9/1/22.
- Loans in the pipeline must be locked by Friday, 9/2/22, by midnight.
- All loans must close and fund by October 31.
- A team will remain in place to work through the pipeline with you from an operations standpoint.
- You will be contacted shortly by your Account Manager to review your existing pipeline and to establish lines of ongoing communication.
The company joins a growing list of firms unable to survive amid a shrinking market in the lending space. The number of employees to be laid off as a result of the closure is as yet unknown.
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As news of the closure trickled out, employees took to LinkedIn to announce their imminent departures and telegraphing their availability. “Hi everyone,” one senior underwriter typed on the business connections site. “I am looking for a new role and would appreciate your support. I have had an amazing opportunity to be a part of AmeriSave Wholesale Mortgage Solutions for the last year and a half and with great sadness and surprise, we [were] notified that the doors would be closing effective 9/1/22. I am being kept on until 10/31/22 to help close out a pipeline, but the journey for the next amazing place is in #opentowork mode.”
A national account executive shared his thoughts, palpably conveying the shock registered on hearing the news: “It was a very abrupt and heartbreaking day last Thursday,” he wrote. “I feel very fortunate for the opportunity to get into this industry right out of college and can say that I hope to continue my professional career in the mortgage world.”
Added an account executive: “AmeriSave Wholesale closed up shop last week and many people including myself were laid off in the process. To my AWMS family, I will forever cherish all successes, failures, laughs, tears we shared as a startup in one of the most grueling industries out there.”
Brenning didn’t post an official statement on LinkedIn, but dutifully responded to employees’ posts while offering praise for their past work. Brenning predicted a bright future for AWMS in August 2021 – a mere two months after its June 14 launch – as he expressed during an interview with title underwriter Doma.
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“Yeah, so, you know, a lot of wholesale lending choices out there for the broker community, why launch another one?” he asked rhetorically during the interview with Doma. “There’s already several hundred choices and, you know, many, many, many great choices for the broker community. So I set out with a couple of gentlemen that run AmeriSave, the parent company, the mother ship to the AmeriSave Mortgage Corporation, set out with them in May of last year and 2020 middle of the pandemic to build something that they saw as a vision.”
In the interview, Brenning touted the parent company’s AUSSIE technology he described as a decisioning engine – “a processing engine, origination engine, kind of like an underwriter, processor, originator, compliance person all in one.” He was given “a blank check and a white canvas to do this the right way,” Brenning said. “And that’s what we set out to do, is give brokers a clean, new, fresh choice that is powered by what I would call revolutionary technology.”
He lauded the startup’s ability to launch without reliance on “legacy” technology: “There are a few big competitors out there still operating on DOS. They put shiny images over the top of it, but it’s still DOS. And, you know, there’s some legacy origination systems that most brokers are beholden to in those wholesale lenders have to work within. We’re not beholden to it. Everything that we run off of over here at AWMS is wholly owned and created internally.”
