One broker has had quite the career path
Angela Cason (pictured) started her career firing people for a living. Needless to say, she longed for something differing.
In an interview with Mortgage Professional America, she recalls her early days at JP Morgan, where she was tasked with firing people for the financial behemoth. “I was traveling back and forth from Wall Street to Delaware and basically firing people in New York,” she recalled. “I decided that wasn’t what I wanted to do,” she added with a knowing laugh.
Recruiter leads to dream job
She reached out to a friend in the recruiting field who lined her up with a job at Delaware Financial Mortgage in 2015, where she’s been happily ensconced ever since. “I was a processor, and in 2017 got licensed as a loan officer and started full time as a loan officer in 2018 – and I’ve been there ever since.”
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Cason spoke to MPA during the “Hall of AIME” event organized by the Association of Independent Mortgage Experts in Naples, Fla., from Jan. 26-28. Dubbed the “most exclusive broker event” of the year, the annual event celebrated the mortgage industry’s top producers.
Aside from the unpleasant task of having to fire people, the job at JP Morgan seemed somewhat of an abstraction: “The reason I really got away from JP Morgan and came back to Delaware is the numbers on the screen at JP Morgan – you really can’t fathom that amount of money,” Cason said. “Coming to Delaware Financial, I’m able to help people in my community, and that’s something I enjoy doing.”
The job of helping people achieve homeownership dovetails nicely with her community work, including working for the Junior League branch in Wilmington, she said. “This job kind of encompasses all that because I get to help everybody,” she said. “That’s a more tangible thing for me than just helping JP Morgan avoid losing millions of dollars to risk.”
What Great Recession?
And while much currency is placed by brokers on having survived the Great Recession, Cason finds her lack of such an experience as beneficial – yielding not only greater empathy for her clients, but sharing the experience of negotiating uncharted waters with them.
“For me, it’s actually easier because I wasn’t around in the previous cycle of this happening,” she said. “This is my first time, and I’m kind of on the same page as my clients who are feeling unsure and sharing that uncertainty where rates are going. I share that uncertainty with them. I can’t tell you for sure what’s going to happen either, but I think the future will get better,” she added, recreating a part of what she tells some of her clients. “It’s better than just being like ‘been there , done that, it’ll be fine’ kind of attitude.”
Her volume speaks for itself - $38 million in 2020.
Negotiating uncharted waters
Specializing in first-time homebuyers, she acknowledged the area requires a bit more hand-holding for anxious clients. “That’s how I like it, because I want them to have a good experience from start to finish.”
She acknowledged these are lean times in Delaware: “It’s tough right now,” she said. “There’s not a lot on the market to buy. Since Christmas, I have probably three dozen pre-approvals that I’ve done and not much going under contract because there’s just nothing to buy. There’s not a log of houses on the market right now. It’s very slow – which has its perks when you want to go away to Florida for the weekend,” she added, alluding to the luxurious Naples Grande Beach Resort that served as the venue for the Hall of AIME event.
Not one to slow down, Cason will be filling the slow period with a focus on social media: “This week, I’m teaching a social media seminar for realtors,” she said. “That’s kind of a sign of the time – 57 is a lot of realtors to sign up for an event.”
Social media is key to brand awareness
She spoke about the important role social media can play in raising one’s profile. “I’m on Facebook, Instagram and Tik Tok, which I think are the three main ones,” she said. “I believe that social media is only as good as obviously the person doing it. I’m not good at social media,” she acknowledged. “When I say that – it’s a full-time job and you have to have a brand behind you to make it recognizable. I actually hired a friend last year, so she manages all my social media, and she does a great job with it.”
The content needn’t be all focused on mortgages either, she added: “It’s not necessarily mortgage-related,” she said. “It’s brand awareness. That’s what I focus on. The more people that recognize you, the more people who will come to you. If you check out my social media, you’ll see a lot of humor, TV references, stuff like that. And a lot of it is making fun of myself or because I’m a newly-wed,” the 33-year-old who was wed in June said. “Self-deprecating humor, because a lot of people can relate to that.”
