She regrets not having entered the broker space sooner
Mother really does know best.
Amanda Solari (pictured), a loan officer in Jacksonville, Fla., for First Coast Mortgage, entered the industry in 2004 after a lackluster job at a restaurant. “I was 24 years old, and my mom was a loan processor at a company and a position for a receptionist opened up,” she recalled during a telephone interview with Mortgage Professional America.
“I was kind of a lost little 20-something waiting tables. I didn’t have much of a career path going on. She said ‘let’s get you out of the restaurant into an office setting, and maybe things will open up.’ That’s how I got my foot in the door.”
She got the receptionist’s job at CTX Mortgage, marking her entry into the industry. She offered no resistance to mom’s suggestion, she noted. “I was ready for things to change,” she said.
From waiting tables to learning the mortgage trade
It beat waiting tables, Solari said, and she steadily rose up the ranks of the mortgage company. “I ended up moving my way into different positions,” she said. “I went from receptionist to closing assistant, so I helped with title and insurance orders. I did a little bit of loan officer assistant work. They put me where they needed, but when they did that, I was able to learn all the processes.”
Her meteoric rise was interrupted when the Great Recession hit, she said. By 2007, she was laid off and took a job at a publishing for nine months. Once the dust of the mortgage meltdown began to settle, she said her old manager asked her to return to train as a processor.
“I came back, and they taught me how to process,” she said. “An originator came on board two years later in 2010 and said, ‘I’d love for you to be on my team, on the sales side,’ and I was a team loan officer assistant.”
That originator would loom large in her career, she said: “I kind of built my career the way she did – doing the loans nobody else wants to do – the credit repair buyers, the ones that don’t know where to start. We had pipelines of people who would hang around for months and years at a time.”
To be sure, Solari was undaunted by those difficult loans. In other words: “She taught me how to turn chicken sh** into salad,” Solari said of her colleague.
By that time, CTX was swallowed up by PrimeLending although the staff didn’t change. “Our team opened up a new construction lender,” Solari recalled. “We started the company for a builder out of the creation of Jet Home Loans. It was still under PrimeLending, and it was still retail,” she said.
That’s when things began to change for Solari in a big way. “That’s when my career took off in 2018,” she said. She would post $50 million to $70 million in volume, and began earning industry awards and accolades – recognition as being among the top 1% of originators since 2018, one of the top 200 women in the industry in 2019 and Lender of the Year from the Northeast Florida Builders Association.
Reaching a crossroads in her career
But the work soon became all-consuming, she said. “And I absolutely love helping my buyers,” she added. “I’m huge on relationships. They kind of pick on me because by the time the process is over, I know the names of every child, every pet, siblings. I get very involved with my buyers. I have buyers that have continued to use me even when they’ve been offered preferred lenders just because we’ve built trust and I’ve become friends with them. This is how I pay my bills, but I do very much put myself in their shoes.”
By 2021 she was at a crossroads. “I really missed originating, but I didn’t really want to do it under the builders’ thumb to be honest. And I needed life balance and that really wasn’t possible when you work in that type of format.”
As it happens, her former manager – the one she had succeeded after his departure two years prior – asked her to join him at First Coast Mortgage Funding where she remains today. “I made the leap into the broker world, and my only regret is I didn’t do it sooner.”
She did it her way, and it’s reasonable to think she’ll be making more of those figurative chicken salad sandwiches in her second act.
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