Fairway rebrands with focus on end-to-end lending

September 2, 2025 6:00 AM

In July, Fairway Independent Mortgage refreshed its branding, including revising its name to Fairway Home Mortgage.

The company was started as a mortgage broker by its CEO Steve Jacobson in 1996. It grew by adding regional branches throughout the country.

Fairway has been very successful in retaining staff long-term. David Lazowski, who in 2024 became president of national recruiting and growth, has been with the company for 18 years. Its retention rates are helped because it is employee-owned, having started an employee stock option plan in 2016.

Lazowski began in the mortgage industry in 2005 after a career on Wall Street and quickly became a top producer, a 2010 profile noted. He was on the Top Producer list for 2012 and 2013.

Fairway's rebrand is part of its plans to build an end-to-end ecosystem which promotes homeownership, through its website Home.com, Lazowski said. It should be noted that Costar owns a similarly named and well-promoted website, Homes.com

National Mortgage News recently spoke with Lazowski about what the rebrand is looking to accomplish.

Questions and answers have been edited for length and clarity.

Fairway's rebrand and its goals for an end-to-end ecosystem

Lazowski: We're looking to promote home ownership. When we think about that, it's everything from education to the actual transaction and then post-care of the home after the transaction. Imagine this: you buy a home, and all of your documentation is digitally stored in a vault that allows you to have access to that as you need it, and it has things beyond just your closing documentation, which you always want to have for taxes and things like that.

It also has your appraisal. It also has your inspection, and through what we're able to do with AI now, it now knows that, Hey, Brad is going to need a new roof in three years, or new windows in two years. So you're aware after the purchase of things that you need to do to upkeep the value of your home. That's just one concept of what Home.com will be. We want to be able to offer all the services you would need to reduce the friction in your transaction.

On possible confusion with Homes.com

Lazowski: It's funny, because when Homes.com advertises, somehow our traffic to our Home.com website goes up pretty dramatically. I thank them for that, but that's a different animal. That is a website owned by Costar, it's a real estate website.

We're going to offer search on our website, but we're not selling homes per se. We might have a partnership, or do some things that allow us to help facilitate that. The idea here is to really create an end-to-end ecosystem that encompasses everything you would need to reduce friction.

How this ecosystem helps Fairway's loan officers

Lazowski: We're all challenged right now, but one of the things we want to do is protect and enhance the lives of our loan officers, and the way we're thinking about it is to create additional revenue streams to help the loan officer beyond just the mortgage transaction.

What I'm talking about are things like Fairway Home insurance, Fairway Home Services — each of these things that we're doing have small revenue streams for our loan officers, so it's really an eye on just retention and recruitment. As this industry changes, we feel we need to do something to protect the loan officer and enhance the customer experience at the same time, and that's what this ecosystem will allow us to do.

How its mortgage servicing rights portfolio fits in, especially for recapture

Lazowski: We are servicing right now upwards of $50 billion and that is growing. if we can provide true value through a really meaningful ecosystem where we are helping the consumer truly beyond just the transaction — you're giving people the tools they need to be educated, and then you're able to do the transaction with less friction, and then you're able to provide aftercare.

Our thought is, we can create something that people want to come back to. So on the servicing side, it does help with those loans and data. Let's face it, data is king.

Understanding what the consumer is going to do is what everyone's trying to figure out. One of the things that we have at Fairway, part of our secret sauce, if you will, is what I call T minus 45 because, on average, we know 45 days before a transaction is completed, what the customer is looking to do.

That data has never been more important. Everyone is spending money on predictive analytics trying to understand the customer's next move. Well, we get that information before everyone else.

Using artificial intelligence for business analytics

Lazowski: This is a second career for me, I spent 12 years on Wall Street, and when I got into this business, I really had no Realtor relationships, and I had found a little website. It was free at the time, but it was called Zillow.com and, people were saying, they're not going to do business that way.

Timing is everything. Technology is in a place right now where, with AI, you don't need the massive technology teams to build something out. It is actually much, much cheaper than it has ever been to develop technology and get it out in a working format to the public. You can do things very quickly right now with the least amount of financial investment that I think I've ever seen. If you talk to people in technology today, they have never seen things move this quickly.

On being careful about how AI is used

Lazowski: We're going to crawl, walk, run, and what I mean by that is we are not looking to fill the top of the funnel today. We know what we have in our customers because we're located in brick and mortar in all 50 states, our customer comes to us differently than a traditional customer might find some of our competitors online.

So that is the crawl part, and we're using that to really learn about our customers, and because they do come to us at T minus 45 we're not using AI for that. We're using AI to reduce the cost of producing a loan. We're using AI to be more efficient, not to find our customer, per se. We believe at this stage, we actually have that answer already, because of when the customer comes to us, T minus 45 is a big advantage.

It's the friction in the transaction that angers customers

Lazowski: The friction is where we win. Fairway has always been built for speed to respond, but we still have had to have people go to outside sources for the other pieces of the transaction.

If we truly can reduce that friction, like we're doing with insurance — that was a big learn for us, because it wasn't just easier for the consumer, it was also easier for our operations, because we were getting quotes so early in the process that we can go to underwriting right away. We weren't waiting for a binder or an insurance quote from their outside person. That helped us not just reduce the friction with the consumer, but also operationally, we're getting more efficient.

How this compares with what Rocket is doing

Lazowski: Here's the difference, they're filling the top of the funnel and we're filling the bottom of the funnel. How does Rocket acquire their customer? They have spent millions and hundreds of millions of dollars through marketing. That's not who we are. Fairway is not owned by a hedge fund.

We're not public, we're not going public, we're an ESOP. We're owned by the employees, and we're entering our 30th year of existence. We would have gone public already. We would have done something if we wanted to grow in that way.

Being the leader at something is very expensive, and it makes mistakes. We'd like to listen and learn and then act. We're doing it in a way, as I mentioned, it's this crawl, walk, run strategy. We will run when the timing's right. I give credit to Rocket, what they're doing is very smart. They are trying to do something that hasn't been done, and I hope they are successful, but there is room for more than one Rocket.

The trust that our client comes to us is different at the bottom of the funnel, and that's what I mean by bottom of the funnel. We work by referral only. We work within the real estate community. We are not the online go-to, and that is different than Rocket. That's what I mean about the bottom of the funnel versus the top of the funnel.

On Rocket spending money to feed its marketing machine

Lazowski: Listen, it's a smart strategy. Just not who we are, we've always been about supporting our loan officers, the nonprofits that we support, the charities that we support, the communities that we live and work in. We start there, and then what comes from there. We start with actually doing loans well, underwriting and closing, but our approach is just different. We don't have the same hedge fund investment that someone like a Rocket has. We're not publicly traded, so we have to be careful in how we approach things.

Different ways of getting to the same end point

Lazowski: We're all been learning, we've all been adjusting over the last three years. And they say, what got you here, won't get you there. Timing is everything, and our belief is that as we move forward, we look at Home.com as a vehicle for us to be able to really help the consumer reduce the friction, become more efficient overall through what we're seeing in AI, and that's how we win going forward.

On why some people remain at Fairway for years, while others might leave

Lazowski: I'm going on 18 years, so this is home, no pun intended. Listen, people have come and gone from Fairway. I never judge folks. This is a commission-based business, and people have situations in their families. There's been a lot of money put forth in this industry to acquire people and I understand it. Sometimes we have said to people, "you know what? That's probably something you should do for your family." There's folks that, let's face it, we've asked to leave, and some people leave for financial reasons. I get it. But a lot of people do seem to be happy here. And I can't tell you how many recruiters have said I just can't recruit from Fairway.

Why recruiters have be unsuccessful in picking off Fairway employees

Lazowski: What I've learned over the years is nobody has it all figured out. We certainly don't. If you approach things with a certain humility, but you're still never thinking you have it figured out, you're always trying to get better, and you're always trying to adjust. You're always trying to adapt.

That is the mindset of this company from the top down. Our theme, our thought process, is it doesn't matter who the stakeholder is. If it's the consumer or the people that work here, both on the sales side or the operational side. We think that everyone has a stake in Home.com in one way or another.

We say all roads lead to home, and that is kind of the mantra of Home.com or the theme of Home.com. Whether you're an employee here on the sales side, operationally, whether you're the consumer looking to learn or do a transaction or have care for your home, going forward, all roads lead to home.