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November 2024
November 2024 »
selling investments is finding people with
money to invest.
What I discovered was that it was
easier to sell the mortgage coming off
high interest rates than it was to sell the
investment, and the investment was
costing me mortgage sales. I ended up
making more money on the mortgages
than I was making on the investments.
And voila, there I was.
Q:
Could you talk about some
of the biggest shifts that
you've experienced in the industry
during your time in the industry?
I've seen a lot of change. When we
started in mortgage, we had rooms full of
typists, and we had to type verifications of
employment and verifications of income,
send them to the employer, and get the
bank references from the bank and get
them back. We had typewriters, and we
used carbon paper. It was a different world.
In 1993, the largest servicer of residen-
tial mortgages was the General Electric
Capital Company. They were the first
hundred-billion-dollar servicer. They
were located in Cherry Hill, New Jersey,
and they took up three big office build-
ings. Today, Freedom Mortgage services
$650 billion worth of loans, and we do it
with about 3,000 people.
It's very interesting to have been able to
bear witness to the evolution of an indus-
try that grew through technology, wisdom,
and major advances. I've seen the savings
and loan industry, which was the majority
of all mortgage origination and servicing,
but it was a fractured industry where vir-
tually nobody had more than a percent or
two of all the servicing and origination. It
was a very localized business, to the point
where it turned over to commercial banks
and mortgage brokers, and then mortgage
bankers, and today what we call nonbanks.
We've seen a lot of changes over the years
as we saw the birth and growth of an
industry that has evolved enormously. I've
been fortunate enough to have a front-row
seat and even sometimes to be a partici-
pant in those changes.
Q:
The title of your new biog-
raphy, Seeing Around Cor-
ners, seems to speak to what we're
talking about—the perspective of
seeing and anticipating change.
How did you settle on that title
and what does it mean to you?
Everything is interconnected and no-
body ever really has an original thought,
right? All great ideas are birthed by other
ideas that came before them, and you can
help those ideas evolve or make connec-
tions between ideas that can lead to new
ideas. I was contemplating the name
Connecting the Dots for the book, which
I thought would've been a good way to
describe what we do, which is taking ex-
isting activities and working around them.
I was sitting in the jacuzzi with a
neighbor of mine who has since passed,
a good friend, and he was very flattering
to me. He said, "So many people spend
their time living in what has happened
and making decisions based on what has
happened. And you seem to be making
decisions based on what will happen.
There's very few people that can see
around corners to do that." I was very flat-
tered by that. It was Dr. Bruce Levine, and
he was a terrific guy so I thought it was
fitting to use that as the title of the book.
Q:
To what do you attribute
that quality he saw in you?
Do you think it's just purely the
experience of having been in this
industry for all this time or is there
more to it?
If you go back to that '80s timeframe
when I first started originating loans and
sold them to savings and loans, I used to
take boxes of loans to Camden from my
home in South Jersey, and I would meet
with the president of the bank and he and
I would chit-chat. I didn't know anything
about lending, but he shared with me
about the real estate cycle. Shortly after
that, he was a victim of the savings and
loan disaster, which was very much a part
of the cycle that he described to me.
E X P E R T I N S I G H T S
Editor's note: Stanley C. Middleman's biography,
Seeing Around Corners, is now available from
booksellers. You can order it via the QR code.
