From the Top MN: The reverse mortgage business changed significantly in the late 2000s when you no longer had to have faceto-face applications or counseling sessions. Big national players sprung up, and you had to adapt or be eaten. You can do Google advertising, whether it be somebody doing it for you and putting you on a list in that specific state, or you could do a direct search yourself where your ads are shown to people in certain states. When you do web advertising, you can direct them to wherever the people are located. We get people who call and say, “I want somebody in this city in California to meet with me,” and we tell them we can’t do that because we don’t have loan officers everywhere. In those instances, we tell them that we can handle this by Zoom video to give them that in-person, kitchen table feel. It’s 2023, and most people can find you on Google to do their due diligence. If they feel like they can trust you, and they like your loan officer, they don’t really care where you’re located, or that you are a broker. RM: After being in the reverse mortgage business for almost 20 years, what are the most important lessons that you have learned? MN: I wrote a couple of things down, and it’s mainly from a macro view of our industry. It’s important to have a thick skin. Many people have a negative perception of reverse mortgages, including the people in your professional network and family members. I am a big believer that the traditional HECM pie is what it is until we change the way that we’re perceived. When you take out HECM-toHECM refinances, the volume has gone from roughly 50,000 loans a year down to 30,000 as a result of the upfront mortgage insurance premium changing back to two percent on all HECMs. That’s not a good sign when we’ve had higher home values than ever before and many years of extremely low rates. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development isn’t throwing us a bone when it comes to the present structure of the product. I’ve heard people say that we need to get more word out and more distribution among forward mortgage companies. If you look at the list of originating entities in this business, there are plenty of forward companies with 500 to 2,000 loan officers on staff, and yet it’s not changing the volume that we do as a business. Something else must change. I think it’s partly the high closing cost barrier. If we could have a HECM Saver product or some other low-cost option with a market rate, that would be great. But I also think the industry has to either go head-on and push back on the negative perception issue, or we need to rebrand ourselves with a different product name, whether it’s home equity conversion mortgage or something else. I think we have the right people in this industry to figure it out—it’s just a question of getting together and executing a plan. From the Top continued from page 11 NATIONWIDE REVERSE MORTGAGE FIELD SERVICE EXPERTS FOR OVER 30 YEARS 1.800.639.2151 www.nfronline.com Inspections - Preservation - Insurance Loss Inspections - Violation Management - Vacant Property Registrations - Utility Management - REO Services - Special Services 12 REVERSE MORTGAGE / JULY–AUGUST 2023
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