From the mortgage born

Anecdotally, it would seem that, to a person, mortgage industry professionals didn’t initially seek such careers but gravitated toward them via a variety of happenstances. Jamie Cavanaugh (pictured) is a living rebuke to that notion.

Her narrative also illustrates what it is to come full circle – in her case, several times throughout her career.

“My mom was a real estate agent until she retired,” she told Mortgage Professional America during a telephone interview, referring to her first exposure to the housing market. “And when I was in high school, my parents said ‘if you want to drive our car, you have to pay for your own insurance. So you better figure it out.’ It just so happens one of her loan officers needed a telemarketer to call potential clients. And I did it! I was 16 years old.”

That marked her entry into the mortgage industry, and she hasn’t looked back since. “That was my first foray into the mortgage world,” she said. “And from there, I transitioned into a loan officer assistant. I did that part time while going to college.”

She was hooked.

“It did not take me long to catch the bug that we all catch – the feeling that every customer’s loan is a puzzle, and they’re all different,” she said. “And I was really intrigued by that.”

Early on, Cavanaugh would bear witness to the less-sunny side of homeownership when things take a lamentable turn: “So about the time I was a little over 18, I took a full-time job at Countrywide in their foreclosure trustee department and I really, really got a lot of experience about what happens when a loan goes the wrong way – what happens when it closes and then somebody can’t make their payment.”

She would then come full circle: “I got an opportunity a couple of years ago to jump back at the same brokerage I had started with when I was in high school. I learned how to be a processor from the bottom. I started as a receptionist, I learned how to be a junior, I learned how to be a senior. I couldn’t wait to learn everything else, so I learned how to fund, I learned how to underwrite. I did all these things over a period of years.”

From stunning success to cataclysmic crash

Then in 1999, she met Brad Rice. “He was starting a new company and needed a processor, and I jumped over to work for him. It’s been a ride, but I will tell you Brad Rice is my partner today at Amerifund,” she said of the company where she serves as president today.

But there were rough roads along the way. She and Rice grew a fairly large retail and wholesale operation with more than 300 employees in those halcyon days in the early aughts. The company was funding in 48 states, selling loans directly to Wall Street and even generated its own product.

Like many mortgage companies, it all came crashing down by 2008. “With all things in ’08, the Great Recession and the crash hit us and we had to shut the doors,” she said.

She was barely 29 years old at the time, having to lay off people as COO of the firm.

Coming full circle, again and again

Soon, she would find herself coming full circle yet again, at mom’s side. “I took a little time off,” she said. “I sold some real estate with my mom for a little while.”

And then again – you guessed it – another full-circle moment: “Bank of America needed someone to run the foreclosure division and I was back on the other side of the business again, which I did, briefly, for a little bit.”

A stint with Prospect Mortgage LLC would follow before her friend, Rice, recruited her for a second go-around at a brokerage. She’s now president and partner at the thriving Amerifund Home Loans – back to the future with her former business partner.

She described the fortuitous timing of Rice’s second appeal. “Life was perfectly timed because my daughter was almost a year old, and the company I was with was looking to relocate people and relocation was not going to work for my family.”

A life defined by circles, tightly coiled together across the course of a career.

This past September, however, an unforgiving circle centered on life’s cycle would emerge with the passing of her mom – a looming figure, both personally and professionally. But like a circle’s status as the strongest structural shape, mom’s teachings and her memory will endure.

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