Success Stories in IMB Multicultural Lending
(l. to r.: Marcia Griffin, Amanda Tucker, Camilo Escalante)
AUSTIN–IMB leaders always look for new ways to be the lender of choice for fast-growing demographic markets. Two independent mortgage bankers spoke at MBA’s IMB conference to share their multicultural lending success stories and discuss strategies that produce measurable results.
Moderator Marcia Griffin, CEO and Founder of HomeFree USA, asked Atlantic Bay Mortgage Group Chief Risk & Compliance Officer Amanda Tucker about Atlantic Bay’s lender-funded down payment programs.
“We saw an incredible opportunity in 2024 to bring to all of our communities a lender-funded DPA that is a non-repayable grant,” Tucker said. “Over the prior several years, we had begun to see some challenges, especially with first-time home buyers in either qualifying for traditional down payment assistance programs or understanding that with several of the down payment assistance or housing finance authority opportunities, they came with some repayment obligations.”
Atlantic Bay saw an opportunity to streamline the process of working with different DPA programs for first-time home buyers. “We developed the HomeBound grant program, our lender-funded grant. We offer it in all of our communities, it’s $2,000 and it is paired with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s HomeReady/Home Possible programs. For some of our first-time home buyers, there’s also the opportunity to pair it with additional credits offered through Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.”
When Atlantic Bay brought the program online, it drove additional business that had previously not been captured, “especially with our first-time home buyers in some communities that were a surprise to us,” Tucker noted. “We’ve seen it be incredibly popular in the Washington, D.C. metro area. It’s brought in additional business and volume. They’re great loans because they’re paired with and they underwrite to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s program. We don’t do any pricing exceptions, and so we have found, even with the $2,000 grant on each loan, that there’s still an opportunity for the company to recognize that volume and revenue.”
Griffin noted Rate has also created an excellent multicultural strategy. She asked Camilo Escalante, Executive Director of Diverse Segments at Rate, to explain how it approaches and executes its multicultural strategy.
“I think the first thing when we talk about multicultural markets is that it’s an external business strategy,” Escalante replied. “So this is not about internal policy or training. This is really looking at what’s happening out there in the country, in the first-time homebuyer community.” He noted that more than 50% of first-time homebuyers are minorities.
“To repeat that, over 50% of first-time homebuyers are minorities. So, this isn’t like an emerging market. This is a mainstream market, and if a company doesn’t have a business strategy to attract and service that community, it’s leaving a lot of originations on the table. This isn’t about politics. This isn’t about anything except how to empower our company and our loan officers to close more business in diverse communities across the country.”
Escalante said the first thing needed was a new mentality. “We started that in 2019, and then you’ve got to look at the core of your company as well, because every company is different,” he said. “For us, it’s something like over 90% of our post-funded volume comes from our retail loan officers. These are individuals that are lending to their network, lending to the community. It’s not necessarily marketing that goes to a call center. It’s our retail loan officers. So we understood that we had to recruit originators that are servicing more diverse communities.”
As for the execution, “because that’s very important, we first invested in leadership,” Escalante said. “We invested in leadership to help us run enterprise-wide initiatives. We’re not talking about a little side project that doesn’t have any sort of budget or roadmap.”
Rate put together “roadmaps” for two major projects across all major departments: language access and community outreach, Escalante said. “We put leadership to run that through, and then we set resources that include processing, technology and sales leadership, and then we put budgets behind it to get it done. And we’ve seen amazing results.” “So that is the approach,” Escalante said. “Mentality, business case, sales opportunity, understanding that there is 50% of first-time home buyers are multicultural, and then putting a sound business plan behind it to execute.”
