The market in California has made sound gains over the past decade, but the Great Recession is never far from the minds of anyone in the real estate or the mortgage business.
Market fluctuations and staying on top of compliance make for significant pain points to overcome.
Mike Brown saw these needs as he worked in the mortgage industry after a stint in Silicon Valley in the middle of the early 2000’s tech bubble. “I started out as a loan officer, transitioned into processing where I found my niche and was quickly moved into the management track as a processing supervisor,” he told California Business Journal.
He moved from there to processing manager, to ops manager, to senior ops manager, and eventually into executive operations management roles. He knows the industry from the ground up. Eventually, the trials he saw at the companies he worked led to the move over to the consultancy side.
With BlueLine, his mortgage consultancy, Brown can put his Master’s in Information Systems and his in-depth knowledge of the mortgage industry to good use. To make it in the mortgage business, you must be able to understand analytics and create efficient processes from the time a loan application is submitted right through final approval and closing.
Like many industries, there is often a disconnect between doing the work and growing a business. Having the technical knowledge of how a loan is manufactured is great, but it does not always translate into knowing how to scale a business. Brown sees this all the time.
“You have director or division level managers that have deep domain expertise in their specific function such as underwriting or post-closing,” he says. “And a lot of executives that are super sharp and know a lot about the big picture, but haven’t had to roll up their sleeves and deal with the minutia for a decade. So, they don’t always personally have the in-depth knowledge of the day-to-day operations.” The industry needs people who can put the big picture and the minute processes together into a thriving business plan.
That’s where Brown comes in. One of the key challenges in a growing mortgage company is staffing. Because of the fluctuations in work volume, mortgage companies tend to have poor load balancing. A company may have three people working the lock desk — that’s the function in the industry of locking in the interest rate — and they may be busy for a few weeks, then be at 60% capacity the rest of the time.
Brown helps companies develop systems and processes to effectively handle each job function, to eliminate these types of inefficiencies and allow the company to properly manage changes in volume. Career paths are rarely a straight line, and Brown’s is no exception. But he keeps coming back to consultancy work as a mainstay of his career trajectory. After obtaining his MIS degree from University of Arizona, he was ready to get that lucrative Silicon Valley gig.
He moved to San Francisco in 2000 to get a tech job, but that was during the dot-com bubble. So, the job opportunities and career paths for recent college grads were limited. From there he moved to Southern California to become a loan officer. “Sometimes doing what you have to do leads to bigger opportunities,” he says. He now enjoys the flexibility and challenges of consultancy work, and has found a niche in helping companies build out compliance and operations to scale.
What’s next for the mortgage industry? There is incessant talk about how blockchain is going to revolutionize mortgage and title services with the promise of greater speed, security, and transparency. So far, that is mostly talk. Brown sees a trajectory of 10 plus years before truly secure and instantaneous mortgage processes can be facilitated by blockchain technology.
In the meantime, increasing levels of digitization in the mortgage process is the current wave of change. Digitizing more of the loan approval process means lowering the time and friction — that is all the eyes and paper pushing needed — in order to process and approve a mortgage. “Digitization, for instance, remote, online notarization, will quickly become the new normal,” Brown concludes. “The number of steps in the process being digitized has increased exponentially over the last five years. That’s only going to continue.”
