By KIMBERLEY HAAS The senior vice president of business development at Rocket Mortgage says their partnership with Boston-based Santander Bank is an example of the kind of relationship they hope to cultivate. Tom Dempsey recently sat down for an interview with The Mortgage Note. He said partnering with Rocket Mortgage gives companies access to their technology. “We’re offering partnership models that externalize our models and systems,” Dempsey said. “The key thing is that at Rocket we’ve created a number of partnership models for banks and credit unions.” Dempsey called this a holistic approach to offering customers what they are looking for as lenders pull into and out of markets. On Aug. 5, leaders at Santander Bank and Rocket Mortgage announced…
By KIMBERLEY HAAS Three providers of customer relationship management services say that as the housing market changes and technology becomes better, focusing on the people behind the transactions pays off. Petra Cephas President Bishoi Nageh, Bonzo CEO Chad Jampedro, and Big Purple Dot CEO Roxana Davidoff recently sat down with The Mortgage Note and this is what they had to say on the topic. Leaders at Petra Cephas in New Jersey recently announced that its sales team has grown by 100 percent over the past 12 months. They attribute that growth to the boutique mortgage company’s human-based customer relationship management system and their ability to free up loan officers from non-sales related tasks so they can spend all of their time…
By CHUCK GREEN Alleged bad behavior and fraudulent activity in the mortgage industry have made news headlines in recent years and despite attempts to get lending leaders to shape up their ships, at least one person who reports on these issues says problems are common, even “rampant.” One of the most recent examples of these alleged incidents involved sham job interviews for Black and female candidates at Wells Fargo & Company. Wells Fargo in California has approximately $1.9 trillion in assets. They serve one in three U.S. households and more than 10% of small businesses in the United States. According to former executive Joe Bruno, company leaders at Wells Fargo allegedly put minority candidates through the interview process for positions…
By KIMBERLEY HAAS This Labor Day weekend, some workers are wondering what happened to the American Dream of earning enough from a nine-to-five job to buy their own home — with or without the white picket fence. According to officials at the U.S. Census Bureau and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, the median sales price of a new home in July 2022 was $439,400. The thumbnail measurement for home affordability is a house that costs roughly 2.6 years of your household income, or a 2.6 “price-to-income ratio.” Using the 2.6 price-to-income ratio, your household’s earners would need to bring in $169,000 a year to be able to afford a new home. That is higher than most U.S.…
By KIMBERLEY HAAS The executive director of the New Hampshire Home Builders Association says the biggest problem they are currently facing is unstable prices due to inflation. In a recent interview with The Mortgage Note, Matt Mayberry explained that contractors are trying to stay within their budgets on projects but it is difficult because prices are volatile due to inflation and supply chain issues. It’s also difficult to bid on upcoming work. “How do we estimate jobs correctly? What are the metrics we use to do this?” Mayberry said. One thing that has improved, Mayberry said, is the waiting time for projects to be completed. During the pandemic, many projects were pushed out to a year and a half for…
By KIMBERLEY HAAS The new executive vice president and chief operating officer at LendArch says they can enable lenders to optimize the mortgage experience from start to finish by digitalizing the real estate financing process. Karthik Kumar has 25 years of experience in the industry. He worked for Tata Consultancy Services from 2004 to May of this year. Citigroup and Standard Chartered Bank are among his previous employers, according to a press release. Kumar shared his excitement about the new position during a recent interview with The Mortgage Note. “I am in a company that is capital adequate, that has given me all of the empowerment to create, to experiment, in a way, to transform, to disrupt, so I am…
By KIMBERLEY HAAS Bank of America has granted the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia’s Center for Health Equity $1 million to launch a program that promises to improve children’s overall health in West Philadelphia. Tyra Bryant-Stephens, MD, Chief Health Equity Officer of the Center for Health Equity and Medical Director of the Community Asthma Prevention Program at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, talked in an interview with The Mortgage Note about how residential segregation and economic inequality have left some neighborhoods so run down they are unhealthy for children to grow up in. In West and Southwest Philadelphia, more than one-third of children live below the poverty line, according to a press release. “Because of systematic practices there have been homes that…
By KIMBERLEY HAAS Officials at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau are cracking down on a mortgage company that allegedly discriminated against minority families and a bank that is accused of pressuring employees into unlawfully accessing the credit reports of customers. With the aid of the U.S. Department of Justice, CFPB officials took action to end Trident Mortgage Company’s alleged discrimination against families in minority neighborhoods in the greater Philadelphia area. It is alleged that Trident violated the Equal Credit Opportunity Act and the Consumer Financial Protection Act. DOJ officials also claim Trident violated the Fair Housing Act. In Philadelphia neighborhoods that were more than 80% minority, more than half of the applications Trident generated were from white applicants, according to…
By KIMBERLEY HAAS The Breakers mansion is a grand summer “cottage” that symbolizes the Vanderbilt family’s social and financial pre-eminence in the Gilded Age and you can tour this luxurious estate by the sea. Built between 1893 and 1895 at the cost of over $7 million, this National Historic Landmark located at 44 Ochre Point Avenue in Newport, RI, was the summer home of Cornelius Vanderbilt II. He became the president and chairman of New York Central Railroad in 1885. The Vanderbilt family was one of the wealthiest and most prominent families in America. According to The Preservation Society of Newport County, the Breakers was everything a millionaire of the Gilded Age could want in a summer getaway with its…
By KIMBERLEY HAAS Officials at the US Department of Justice say a Michigan real estate consultant and accountant will serve 18 months in prison after he filed false tax returns with the Internal Revenue Service. Steven Mills, of Harbor Springs and formerly of East Lansing, was retained by a corporation to supervise several real estate agents. Between 2012 and 2015, Mills demanded and received about $577,000 in kickbacks which he did not report on his tax returns, according to officials. Mills did not report all of the income he earned when he operated Mills Real Estate Consulting LLC. Officials say he did not report $100,000 he received from a real estate developer between 2013 and 2015. IRS-Criminal Investigation led the…
