Broker thrives after launching his company at 25
And yet the experience wasn’t a total loss, he said. “The good thing that happened is I was able to learn the process – learn what a mortgage is, how to structure a loan, how to work DTI [debt-to-income ratio], and talk to underwriters. They told me ‘read the guidelines. If you understand the guidelines, you will know what to tell clients and the underwriters.’ So, I made that a priority and did that for six, seven months.”
He then went to Guild Mortgage, a retail office, where he began to build a client base. This is also when the benefits of the broker channel became more apparent. “I had a couple of clients by then,” he said. “I knew the rates at the broker side of things and was trying to price out the same rate with the retail side but those rates were not the same as I was getting on the broker side. They were, like, ‘even if you make zero dollars, you cannot get the rates you were getting there.’ I thought, why is anyone going to a retail bank? Why wouldn’t everyone go to a brokerage?”
Burning the midnight oil
That was the epiphany he needed to start his own company, initially from a guest bedroom in his parents’ house. “I used to go to people’s houses to take loan applications because I didn’t have an office,” he said. “Credibility is everything. People wanted to meet you in person, so I used to tell people that my office was downtown: ‘Let me come to you and take the loan application’.”
By 2018, he was able to lease office space in a Houston suburb, meeting clients during the day and processing loans at night while working from 8 a.m. to midnight closing three to five loans a month. Gradually he was able to hire a couple of processors and some loan originators.
“When we first started, I was literally the one doing every loan – 100% of the volume was mine. Up to 2021, 75% of total volume was all mine. I couldn’t scale the business that way, so I made a priority to get loan officers to come see the value. So we created a marketing team to provide any kind of marketing for the realtors and loan officers.”
