It may be a tough period, but one CEO is confident of change
This has been one of the toughest periods for the mortgage industry, what with high interest rates, affordability erosion, inflation, low housing inventory and that peculiar inverted yield curve. And people who locked in historically low rates amid the pandemic are staying in their homes to secure those coveted note terms, keeping home sales at a further standstill.
Don’t tell Corrina Carter (pictured) all that though, as she didn’t get the memo. Well, she got it, but refuses to let the market challenges impact her business. Owner and CEO of CMS Consultants Inc. and CMS Mortgage Solutions Inc. in Chesapeake, Va., Carter said it’s a time to hustle for business with expectation of better times ahead.
“I think some people need to get out of their own way and delegate with confidence and [look at] how they can use that to excel and scale their businesses,” she told Mortgage Professional America during a recent interview. MPA caught up with Carter during the annual FUSE conference in Las Vegas organized by the Association of Independent Mortgage Experts (AIME).
Time to improve one’s business
Carter said owners should take this down time to examine their operations – “digging into those operations and really creating a better process for your people,” she said “Leaning into that to help your loan officers. It’s about creating better processes for everyone who’s out there on the streets originating, [so they] can be confident when they bring in the loan that operations will be able to handle it.”
She noted her company’s machinations were already smooth: “Fortunately for us, we had a good infrastructure already, so when we were really busy we were still working on the infrastructure. Now, we’re plugging a few of those pieces to add hospitality to our loan officers. Those are the things people need to take seriously,” she said of such fine-tuning.
Carter entered the mortgage industry in 1994 as a mortgage loan originator. Before long, according to her bio, she was taken under the collective wing of powerhouse mortgage lenders – propelling her to sought-after status in the Hampton Roads and Northern Virginia areas. She has worked independently since 1998, running a full-net branch operation before opening her Chesapeake-based mortgage company in 2005. By December 2014, CMS opened its first Northern Virginia branch in Fredericksburg, Va.
Carter was a spotlight speaker on the third day of the FUSE conference, with her talk titled “Own Your Day: Creating Operations Opportunities.” She dispensed advice on learning where and how to grow and identify abundant opportunities and how to put them to use toward strengthening and streamlining an owner’s operations and pipeline.
Accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative
To succeed in this tough market, one must banish negativity: “I would say that they not think about it as a challenging market, and think about their personal business plan,” she said in the spirit of giving advice to industry newcomers. “If they get up and own their day and go out and hustle – I call it grit, grind and hustle. Sometimes we get tired and it’s exhausting, but it will pay off.”
For now, it’s best not to yearn for a change in the market. “Everybody is really talking about how it’s going to change,” she said. “It really changes when you change. Whether the market changes in three months from now or six months, your mindset changes today. I feel we’re getting a lot of that right now with this convention.”
To buttress her point, she noted she has new hires who are producing. “I have new people coming in producing. I have 15 loan officers who never turned a loan before turning in a loan this month. You just have to dive in and really hustle.”
As impressive a trajectory as hers has been, she noted how much she’s gained from being a member of AIME. Joining the group has reinforced the need for collaboration, she suggested. And as a woman owner in a male-dominated industry, she noted how gratified it’s been to collaborate with other women who are members of AIME as well.
“AIME has done a lot for my business,” she said. “Being involved in AIME and reaching across the aisle to work with other brokers,” she said of one of the important lessons learned. “We mastermind and I have a community of women I meet with every single day that I met five years ago. I created truly a whole second family for life. I really owe a lot to them.”
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