When Reverse Mortgages Bring Families Together and Evoke Woodstock By Thomas A. Barstow NO ONE HAS a secret sauce or single ingredient that will make a business or industry prosper. And I wouldn’t think of suggesting that I have such a formula. However, for any business that relies on word-ofmouth referrals to bring in new clients, one key to success would require a reputation that transcends a single quarterly report or yearly cycle. It takes time to build trust. And it takes diligence and a reputation for fairness to keep it. In this issue of Reverse Mortgage magazine, we discuss how some reverse mortgage professionals are building on their hard work and earnestness—developed over years, if not decades, of networking in their communities—and passing it on to the next generation. And I mean literally the next generation: NRMLA members who built their businesses and then brought their relatives into the industry. In the article All in the Family (p. 22), writer M. Diane McCormick explains how the Turks, Skaggses, Downeys and Coopers have made reverse mortgages family affairs. The Coopers, for example, work in different offices at Mutual of Omaha in California but collaborate often. “It’s really helpful to have a partner in this business, someone you know you can trust just to talk things through,” Mitchell Cooper, CRMP, tells McCormick. It isn’t always the older generation passing along wisdom to the younger generation. “He’s taught me the passion of every single day and every single client,” Launi Cooper, CRMP, says about her son. “We do really work well together playing off each other. The best day is when we get to meet a client together.” This issue, the first of 2024, features other articles that celebrate NRMLA members. In what we think will be an annual theme, we have an article titled Milestones (p. 28). It looks at members who are celebrating anniversaries this year in five-year increments—2019, 2014, 2009 and 2004. The goal of this is simple: NRMLA’s members are its backbone, and we want to hear from people who hit this milestone. We also talked to some members who have been with NRMLA the longest, regardless of their official anniversary, in the cover feature Taking Account (p. 16). With a modest start long ago, the industry really began taking off in the 2000s. It continues to weather numerous changes, including right up to the end of 2023. In the fall, the Federal Housing Administration published its long-awaited Single-Family Housing Policy Handbook In Reverse 2 REVERSE MORTGAGE / JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2024
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjQ1MzY1