Marketing Director
2008 – 2018
HighTechLending, Inc. – Irvine, CA.
During the 08 melt down, US Financial Mortgage transitioned its resources to a year old mortgage company, HighTechLending, Inc. in Newport CA at the time. A small team of our core members made the cut and are considered part of the HTL Founding Members Club, of which I proudly belong.
HTL President/CEO, Don Currie, was a Top producer at Impac Mortgage who leveraged his success by starting his own FHA Full Eagle Mortgage Bank. When US Financial joined the team we brought our Retail Branch model, HECM Reverse Mortgage loan product and marketing expertise to the mix. This allowed me the opportunity to learn more about forward loan products, FHA loans, USDA, VA, 203K, and Conventional.
We spent the first 4 years recruiting internal talent, processors, underwriters, doc drawers as well as LO’s and branches. Our focus was on attacking the Purchase Market with a unique mix of price, products, and service. Once the reverse market started heating back up again in 2012 we shifted more attention to the HECM and marketing support toward this niche. This marked my introduction to Google Adwords campaigns, initially setting up my first campaign and landing page for Arizona, which was very successful and shortly there after Washington, Oregon, California, Florida, Texas, Colorado and Utah. During the same time frame we began building our Wholesale Division. Initially we supported forward wholesale, but eventually settled in the Reverse Mortgage space.
While our forward LO’s and branches benefited from our use of Encompass LOS system and webcenter websites to intake loans online, our reverse branches and LO’s had nothing equivalent. We used Reverse Vision but, they had no online loan application process. They did however offer a reverse mortgage calculator which was an awesome value proposition for gaining lead data.
I had brought the Marketing portal from USF and rebranded it for HTL, along with all of the marketing. As I mentioned we focused on the Purchase market so I developed marketing to support all of the products we offered. Don was more sophisticated in his use of marketing channels and I benefited from learning and supporting them all. Email marketing, voice mail marketing, video and promotional items. One of my favorite projects over the years was designing the wine and champagne labels for HighTechLending.
I am very proud of my contributions toward the achievements that brought us into the top 10 Reverse Mortgage Lenders in the US. and the top 3 in California.
One of the greatest benefits was having the chance to meet and work with some of the most respected Reverse Mortgage leaders in the industry.