Immigrant parents' grit has loomed large in honoree's career
For Eddy Perez Jr. (pictured), CEO of Atlanta-based Equity Prime Mortgage – better known for its acronym EPM – the value of homeownership is primordial.
The son of Cuban immigrants fleeing a Communist regime, he knows what it feels like to have it all taken away. “So I saw the real benefits of freedom because that’s what homeownership really does. It promotes what I call the American gift. Homeownership is the first thing they take away from you to lose your rights – like what happened to my family – because property rights are fundamental for freedom.”
To this day, guarding his version of the American Dream is what drives him. That energy helped propel Perez to the Global 100 list of the top practitioners in his field. One of only 24 US industry officials so named, he is among the rarefied ranks vetted carefully by Mortgage Professional America and its sister publications across the world.
Chasing the American Dream
Safely ensconced in America, his family set out to carve out their own version of the American Dream of which the benefits of homeownership loomed large. “My father had been in construction, and I’d grown up around homeownership,” he said of his late dad who passed away in 2007.
But Perez didn’t immediately gravitate to being a loan originator. Instead, he began his career as a financial advisor. The economy would then then take a downward turn, and intrusive technology allowing people to trade from the comfort of their home on their own computer made his role all but obsolete.
“Stockbrokers don’t exist anymore,” Perez, 47, said. “Lord, you can trade from right here,” he added as he motioned to his computer during a virtual interview. By then, he was married and starting a family. A fruitful career was of the essence.
That sense of freedom informed him the entire time, he suggested, expounding on his parents’ journey to America. As an aside during his chat with MPA, he noted his parents didn’t meet in Cuba but in Atlanta where both had migrated.
“They got here with different routes. My dad got here in a rowboat with six others, three days at sea,” he said. “My mom came a little bit differently. They met in Atlanta and didn’t meet in Cuba, believe it or not.”
Dad would loom large in his son’s career
As Perez was coming of age, his father would figure prominently in his mortgage career. “He was smart about it,” Perez said. “He said ‘cut your teeth, make sure you like this, and then I’ll introduce you once you cut your teeth into builders. After two years, I was doing well and he said ‘OK, now I’ll introduce you to my relationships’.”
He was on his way to flourishing in the mortgage industry. “I started off in a call center,” he said. “I was a call center LO then transferred as an outside LO, building real estate and builder referrals, stuff like that. And then in 2005, I started a mortgage brokerage shop and then in 2008 I decided to become a mortgage banker in the height of the crisis,” he said of the year he launched EPM.
Undeterred in the midst of the Great Recession, he pressed forward with the same drive he witnessed from his parents. “I felt like the door was going to shut soon and I needed to jump in the elevator to go up,” he said. “I always made a commitment to get back into wholesale at some point because I had been a mortgage broker, and I knew the benefits there and what they do for the community and how local they are.”
He assesses his trajectory modestly: “So that’s how I did it,” he said. “There’s nothing crazy to the story. I was an originator, I performed well. I’ve had a lot of people around me and collectively we’ve gone really far together.”
Unlike his own sense of modesty, the growth of his firm has been anything but. Equity Prime Mortgage has grown from a company with two employees to one with a staff of some 280 people. Yet there was a slight alteration that needed to be named four years into the launch. Having hired a public relations firm for counsel, Perez was advised to change the name of the firm.
“Our original name was giving us an identity crisis,” he said. “Our original name was Equity Loans, and everybody thought we were a second mortgage company. At the time, I didn’t understand it, but I understand it now. The PR firm said, ‘oh man, it’s great that you have equity; nobody has equity first and, and people need to build equity.’ But they said, ‘you’re missing mortgage; all the top lenders have mortgage in their name’.”
A handful of names were considered. “I personally liked Equity Capital Mortgage, but they said it sounded more like a REIT,” he said. “No bs, I did not like Equity Prime Mortgage because I’m not an arrogant person, and it does look like I named it Eddy Perez Mortgage and I had a business partner at the time. I did vote against it for that reason, but I was outvoted – six out of seven people liked Equity Prime Mortgage.”
Perhaps it was serendipity that the company name coincidentally contains his initials – not unlike his immigrant parents meeting nearly 1,000 miles away from their homeland. Or perhaps – like his refugee parents landing in the fabled land of opportunity after fleeing oppression – it was simply destiny.
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