Three years into his pro football career, Casey Crawford called it quits.
After two seasons with the Carolina Panthers and a Super Bowl ring with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, Crawford, who played tight end, wanted to do something different, something bigger.
He got into the mortgage business in 2004 at a time when everyone was buying. "The only bad move you could make was not to buy," Crawford said.
In 2008, when the mortgage industry was crashing, Crawford and partner Toby Harris formed Movement Mortgage with four people.
Last week, Movement Mortgage, with more than 1,600 employees, made its biggest move so far, announcing it is building its national headquarters at the Bailes Ridge Business Park in Indian Land, S.C.
Movement Mortgage will invest about $22 million in its new 104,000-square-foot headquarters, with plans to hire 490 employees over the next five years. The 160 employees at the company's Charlotte office in the Ballantyne neighborhood will relocate to the Indian Land office, which should be open in about a year.
Average salary for the new employees — most of whom will fulfill mortgage loan applications — will be about $56,000, Crawford said.
The company will keep its operations in Virginia Beach, Va., which employs about 350 people.
It also operates about 200 mortgage sales office nationwide.
Last year, the company processed 25,000 government guaranteed loans — $4.3 billion in closed mortgages. That's 1% of financed purchases in the U.S., Crawford said. The company is on track this year to process $6.4 billion in home loans, he said.
The company's growth rate runs counter to the industry, Crawford said. While the industry is constricting, Movement Mortgage's growth rate has been 35%, he said.
Movement Mortgage is one of the top 25 private mortgage banks in the county and has licensed operations in 40 states. The company was named the nation's fastest-growing, privately held mortgage bank by Inc. in 2012 and 2013.
The greater Charlotte region is appealing to the company, he said, because it has a wealth of financial service professionals.
"There was a very healthy talent pool," he said.
Charlotte is also where Crawford lives.
Company officials picked South Carolina over North Carolina largely because of incentives from the state, Crawford said.
The governor's office, the S.C. Department of Commerce and Lancaster County economic development officials worked collaboratively to assemble the deal and tax incentive plan, Crawford said. The project took about a year to complete, economic development officials said.
Under the deal, Movement Mortgage is getting about $53 million in Lancaster County and state tax incentives.
The Lancaster County Council approved a fee-in-lieu agreement that reduces the company property tax by about $2 million over 30 years, said Keith Tunnell, the county's economic development director. The company will pay about $9.5 million in property taxes over 30 years.
Movement Mortgage qualified for a special source tax credit that will give the company about $966,000 that can be used for site development, Tunnell said.
The company also qualifies for job tax credits, which are offsets to state income tax, and job development credits from the state's Coordinating Council on Economic Development.
Newly created jobs will qualify for the full job development credit while existing jobs will get a partial credit, according to the state Department of Commerce. To qualify for the credit, the jobs must be created within five years. The job development credits are worth about $20 million if all the jobs promised are created, Tunnell said.
The job development credits rebate a portion of new employees' withholding taxes that can be used for a company's specific needs.
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