Broker Melissa Puckett survived Great Recession and works at the same family firm where she began
Were it not for her mother’s entrepreneurial spirit, Melissa Puckett may have never gotten into mortgages.
“I always joke that I went from Medicare to mortgages,” she said of her former stint with the federal health system for those over 65. “My background is actually within the medical field. I grew up in a family business where my parents owned and operated a medical equipment supply company. So that’s what I grew up around and when I had graduated high school, it was my intention to go to school for something that was therapy-driven, either respiratory therapy or possibly occupational therapy. Those were the two I was looking into.”
She ended up working for Medicare for a good while, but government cutbacks to the health system imperilled jobs in the sector. And then she’d get a phone call that would change her life.
“I got a phone call from my mom – it was out of the blue, and she said “We’ve been given an opportunity to open a new company. It’s in finance. What would you think of becoming a loan officer and doing mortgages?’ I said: What? What are you talking about? Totally random. What had happened is that my mother’s brother-in-law was a well-established real estate agent and was letting her know of the great need they had for good mortgage brokerages in our area. With my mother’s business acumen, and my father’s ability to network and take care of people, they felt it would be something they would do very well at.”
Her mother would take a crash course in mortgages, Puckett recalled. “Within two-and-a-half weeks, she had the whole thing figured out – from back office to everything else. She said ‘We’re doing this. Do you want to come on board?’ So I went into mortgages, and I’ve been doing that ever since.”
Entering a new career right before the crash
It was 2004, and Puckett was 26 years old. Despite the passage of time, the one constant is the place of employment, the family-run Nexus Mortgage Lending in Idaho Falls, Idaho, where she continues to work to this day as co-owner and licensed mortgage loan originator.
But she did take a stint, after joining the family business, as an account executive for a wholesale lender, which she said yielded invaluable insights into that side of the industry.
“When I had gone into this and done it for a couple of years, I was approached by a wholesale lender who had head-hunted me,” she said. “The account executive was leaving, and I saw that as an opportunity to learn another side of the business. It was very beneficial.”
But there was something in the air. “We could all feel it,” she said. Carried amid those winds of change, implausible deals would flutter by: “I remember the loan programs. One time, they were offering that we could do an 80/20, 100% financing of a four-plex, stated income, stated assets, with a 620 credit score and no previous homeownership required. It was kind of like, well, do you have a pulse? Would you like a mortgage?”
It was the beginning of the Great Recession, materializing just a few short years into her fledgling career. Banks had begun to fail, necessitating frequent visits to the so-called Implode-O-Meter website. “We’d go to that site every day to see what financial institutions had failed that day,” she recalled. “It was very depressing. “I thought it’s time to return to my roots, so I returned to the family business. Two weeks later, that wholesale lender closed its doors.” The wreckage dotted her community too: “When we first started out in the business, there were thirty-odd brokerages, and when the Great Recession hit it was down to three. We went from having 13 loan officers to basically two.”
She is grateful for two sets of families
Yet the company survived to mark its 20th anniversary this year. Given the experience of the Great Recession, she added, the company is kept lean with the lowest possible overhead. “It was legitimately one of the hardest times in my entire life,” she said. “Those of us who went through it carry those battle scars.”
In addition to her biological family, she credits her adopted family – the rank and file of the Association of Independent Mortgage Experts (AIME), of which she’s a member – for unflagging support. She has served on various advisory boards for the group and is an active member of the Women’s Mortgage Network.
“Five years ago, another mortgage broker would’ve been viewed as a threat to me,” she said. “Now I see them as a brother or sister in the trenches. When you realize there’s enough for everybody to go around, and plenty of seats at the table, is what makes it even better.”
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