That team happens to be the Phoenix Suns, the fifth winningest by percentage in National Basketball Association history, but one that can never quite win an NBA title. But that all could be changing.
It seemed an indication that Ishbia would run his basketball team with the same aggressiveness that he's run his mortgage company.
"What you have in Mat is a man who won't lose," Kortas said. "He is willing to do whatever it takes."
Now, Kortas – who has center court season tickets to Suns games – has a very practical relationship with Ishbia. No company underwrites more loans from Kortas's mortgage brokerage firm, Nexa Mortgage, than UWM.
Still, even mortgage industry insiders who don't rely on Ishbia's business describe him more as a pugilistic conqueror than an executive who creates and sells loan products.
"Mat is a warrior," declared Paul Hindman, who is a mortgage broker consultant at HomeLend. "He has 'competitor' running through his veins."
"He expects singular loyalty to create mutual value," Hindman noted, adding, "For those that fit, it's clearly working."
Ishbia's Suns ownership has propelled him into the rarefied air of competitors like Michael Jordan, who owns the Charlotte Hornets, and other corporate gladiators – including Cleveland Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert, the CEO of UWM archrival Rocket Mortgage.
But Ishbia's Suns endeavor brings scrutiny to how he treated competitors, mortgage brokers and employees on his way to national notoriety. Interviews, safety citations – and multiple unresolved lawsuits – regarding UWM raise several questions, each leading back to one main thought: Is it really okay to run a business in 2023 like you would run an ultra- competitive basketball team?
Ishbia declined to participate in this story. A spokesperson cited his schedule and prior commitments. UWM also declined to answer specific questions, instead providing a written statement that will be quoted from below.
The winner
Ishbia grew up in the prosperous Detroit suburb of Birmingham, the son of Jeffrey Ishbia, a prolific entrepreneur who since 1990 has co-operated the personal injury and business litigation law firm Ishbia & Gagleard. Jeffrey Ishbia founded United Wholesale Mortgage in 1986.
Mat Ishbia attended Seaholm magnet high school and then Michigan State University where he netted a Business Administration bachelor's degree in 2003. The star point guard at Seaholm, Ishbia scrapped his way onto the high-profile Michigan State basketball team as a walk-on, and later snared an athletic scholarship. He was part of Michigan State's 2000 national championship team, and the 2001 squad that returned to the Final Four.
Ishbia's 2019 book "Running the Corporate Offense: Lessons in Effective Leadership from the Bench to the Boardroom" characterizes playing at Michigan State for coach Tom Izzo as a formative – perhaps the formative – experience in Ishbia's business philosophy.
"The spirit of basketball drives my behavior and leadership style every day," Ishbia wrote.
But at five feet ten inches, Ishbia hardly played in Michigan State's games.
Nor did Ishbia, who is white, superficially share much in common with a mostly Black team dubbed "The Flintstones" for its numerous players from Flint, Michigan and other economically besieged Midwestern cities. For example, Ishbia's most talented teammate was future NBA star Zach Randolph, who grew up destitute in Marion, Indiana and spent adolescence shuttled between juvenile detention homes.
Ishbia has addressed his contrasting background from his teammates.
"Fitting in was way more important than showing off what I had. I made sure I wasn't Mat Ishbia from Birmingham but Mat Ishbia the ultimate team player," he wrote in his book.
Ishbia, center, and Mateen Cleaves, left, celebrate after defeating Florida to win the the NCAA championship in Indianapolis in April 2000. Photographer: Jed Jacobsohn/Getty Images
He spent a year as a student assistant for Izzo, and then faced a fork in the road: Become an assistant basketball coach at Cleveland State University, or help his father run UWM. Ishbia chose his dad's business and then grew enchanted with mortgages, or at least the industry's parallels to hoops.
"The mortgage business is actually structured very much like basketball. It's competitive and allows you to track wins and losses against your rivals," Ishbia wrote in his book.
The new court
Ishbia ascended to CEO of UWM in 2009. It was right after a cataclysmic reordering of the home loan market that perhaps really did make mortgages more like a sports league.
"During the Great Recession many banks pulled away from originating mortgage loans. They instead began giving credit to non-bank lenders," said Sanket Korgaonkar, an assistant professor of commerce at the University of Virginia, who focuses on the U.S. mortgage market.
Then, under federal conservatorship, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac set up the rules of the game: Originate loans at more conservative underwriting standards and we'll buy them.
Ninety-four percent of UWM loans were sold to Fannie or Freddie in 2022, or transferred to Ginnie Mae, another government-owned corporation, according to UWM's annual report.
"Fannie and Freddie can dictate the size of the industry pie," Korgaonkar said, with the other main industry driver another government actor: Federal Reserve action on interest rates.
Bestowed these clear parameters – borrow money to originate conforming loans, sell those loans to the government, rinse, repeat – Korgaonker sees three main ways non-bank lenders try to rise above the competition: customer service, speed in closing a loan, and fees.
Ishbia's insight was making UWM a wholesale lender, in the business of serving mortgage brokers instead of borrowers. Instead of a fee to those taking out the home loan, UWM charged a flat, per-loan fee to brokers who in turn shepherded consumers through the lending process.
"UWM was to my knowledge the first lender to really go all in on wholesale," said Katie Sweeney, who is the president of the Association of Independent Mortgage Experts, a trade group focused on wholesale lenders.
UWM also developed tech platforms with names like Bolt and Ease to speed up processing a loan. UWM says it closes loans in 18 days compared to an industry average of 50, per the annual report.
"The sales software they developed has micromanaged the system for them," Kortas said.
In addition to a workforce of over a thousand IT specialists, UWM also has north of a thousand account executives, or the people that interact with mortgage brokers.
"A lot of account executives have 100s of accounts. But Mat's got 27 account executives assigned just to us," said Kortas, who added these customer service specialists are seemingly always available to the 2,230 loan officers at Nexa.
UWM takes pride in their swift response time to brokers and quickly getting a mortgage application to the finish line.
"UWM sets the tone, the speed and the expectations mortgage brokers have come to know they and their borrowers deserve," UWM said in its statement provided to National Mortgage News.
UWM went public in January 2021, claiming a valuation of $16 billion and a perch as the largest U.S. wholesale lender by sales volume. Though, as of deadline, the company's valuation has been sliced in half amid a shrinking mortgage industry pie, UWM overtook Rocket as the largest lender period.
UWM won.
The CEO, his father, Jeffrey, and his brother, Justin Ishbia, own 94% of the company through an entity called SFS Holdings Corp., according to public filings.
Additionally, as Inside Mortgage Finance first reported, Ishbia racked up $4 billion in pre-stock dividends prior to buying the Suns stake, and $500 million from UWM's initial public offering.
As of April 23, Ishbia's net worth was $8.43 billion, according to Bloomberg. He is one of the 300 wealthiest people in the world.
The competition
Accompanying the market share UWM has enjoyed of late is a long-running war of words with industry rivals.
"They don't like me and I don't like them," Mat Ishbia declared in regards to Gilbert and Rocket at a Crain's Detroit event in March. "In business we want to dominate and we're going to compete."
Both Gilbert, the CEO of Detroit-based Rocket and Ishbia of Pontiac, Michigan- located UWM went to Michigan State. Gilbert gave $15 million to his alma mater's athletic department in 2016. Ishbia donated more than double that with a $32 million gift to the school in 2021.
Two months after going public, Ishbia announced that mortgage brokers who did business with Rocket and another Big Ten country lender – Madison, Wisconsin- based Fairway Independent Mortgage – could not do business with UWM.
UWM's All-In initiative was the latest salvo in Ishbia's contention that lenders who engage in both wholesale and direct retailing with the borrower manipulate mortgage brokers. They underwrite the loan the broker did the legwork on, only to later contact the borrower, circumventing the broker, Ishbia argues.
Groups like the National Association of Mortgage Brokers and Mortgage Bankers Association, who claim to speak for the industry's overall health, denounced UWM's ultimatum as a harmful solution to whatever problem may exist. Then, UWM acted on its initiative.
"I was surprised they went through with it," said Robert Goodman, a lawyer in Tampa, Florida, who represents broker Daniel Okavage in a proposed class action lawsuit against UWM. Goodman stated that UWM, "limits the choice of lending options available to brokers, and ultimately the lending options available to lenders."
Ishbia's us-or-them choice for brokers, the lawsuit argues, is effectively a unilateral contract by UWM, a company with superior bargaining power over mortgage brokerage firms, many who are small or solo outfits. Filed nearly two years ago in Florida federal court, the case remains in "early litigation stages," Goodman said in March.
In a lawsuit against UWM that confidentially settled last October, mortgage brokerage firms First Plus Funding, First Allied Services, and Reliance Mortgage Services alleged that the wholesale lender was practicing selective enforcement of its policies.
According to Michigan federal court documents, UWM sent a letter in March 2020 to about 100 brokers explaining that the brokers would now have to repay commissions on loans refinanced by their clients within 12 months of the original underwriting. The prior probationary window was six months.
These contractual changes, the brokers receiving the letter claimed, were not just unilateral but retroactive: UWM had allegedly sent brokers invoices demanding repayment for previously closed refinancing.
In March 2022, Michigan federal judge Laurie Michelson rejected UWM's motion to dismiss the broker's case. In her written ruling, Michelson calculated that the back payments the brokers claimed due totaled $5.2 million, including $870,000 UWM had already agreed to pay back.
Plaintiffs in the case would not comment on the settlement's final total, citing confidentiality provisions. But at least one broker said it made them reluctant to work again with UWM.
"UWM hurts the consumers more than anything," said Anne James, a broker at Reliance Mortgage Service in Long Beach, arguing the company limits where she can send consumers to get the most affordable mortgage.
UWM declined to answer questions on litigation or its All-In initiative. UWM seeks to "further catapult the broker channel and helping to educate consumers that the faster, easier and cheaper way to get a loan is through an independent mortgage broker," per the company's statement.
The teammate
Anthony Casa is the kind of person from New Jersey who reminds people he's from New Jersey. Casa's LinkedIn profile says he has an "inoperative filter," though Casa did insist discussions for this story stay off-the-record.
In 2018, Casa left his job as president of Garden State Home Loans in Cherry Hill, New Jersey and became chairman of the Association of Independent Mortgage Experts, or AIME, a new trade group.
Sponsored by UWM, AIME had a precursor in the Alliance of Independent Mortgage Advisors, which UWM had founded one year earlier. There was also Brokers Rallying Against Wholetail Lenders, or BRAWL, a Facebook group that Casa started in order to confront retail lenders who might cannibalize broker's business.
While industry insiders would not speak on the record about the Ishbia-Casa relationship, stating it might harm their careers, they did assert that Casa and Ishbia are "cut from the same cloth."
Casa seemed to make his mark at AIME.
"There was a lot of fire and passion and abrasiveness when AIME was first founded," said the group's current president, Katie Sweeney, who joined the organization following Casa's departure. "It was a rowdy and rambunctious group."
On July 2, 2020, Casa took a seat, hit record on his phone camera, and said the wife of Rocket executive Austin Niemiec – Theresa Niemiec – performed oral sex on Ishbia. Casa also vowed to mess Austin Niemiec up, "in the 4th quarter."
On July 10 2020, Theresa Niemiec sued Casa for defamation, a case that settled for undisclosed terms.
Casa did publicly apologize to the Niemiecs in a Facebook video. He noted, "I'm from New Jersey. I'm vocal. I'm competitive, I'm gritty, I'm willing to fight for what I believe in," but, "at times, I find myself being a little too vested."
There is no indication Ishbia had any involvement with the video.
With companies like Caliber Home Loans vowing not to assist AIME if Casa stayed on – "We do not tolerate harassment," a Caliber spokesperson said at the time, Casa stepped down in October 2020. Casa told HousingWire that he planned, "a new mortgage brokerage here in Philadelphia."
In fact, Casa took the reins of an existing Lansing, Michigan company called Premier Processing in November 2020, according to state of Michigan records. Premier Processing had been incorporated in 2016 by Philip Cwagenberg, a law partner at Ishbia & Gagleard, Mat Ishbia's father's firm.
In December 2022, Casa changed Premier Processing to its "doing business as" name of UMortgage.
UWM's statement did not answer a question about whether it has financed UMortgage.
In November 2021, Mat Ishbia followed-up Casa on a video billed as a UMortgage sales meeting.
"You will soon be one of the biggest if not the biggest mortgage company in America from a mortgage broker standpoint over the next two to three years," Ishbia said. "You've got great leadership."
"And also, you've got UWM as a partner. We've got your back."
The rotating teammates
Jason Schwebke spent nine months as a software developer at UWM before he was let go from the company in May of 2020. Schwebke is deaf, and in January 2021 he filed a lawsuit against UWM, claiming the company did not accommodate his disability.
The case is still pending in Michigan federal court. In August 2021, Schwebke's lawyer, Deborah Gordon, deposed Annamaria Tushaj, who then held the title of UWM senior benefits specialist.
Tushaj testified that, amid a workforce of thousands, she was the only human resources team member assigned to handle workplace accommodations.
Tushaj, who no longer works at UWM and did not respond to messages, said under oath that the only accommodation she ever approved on her own at UWM were "desk risers," the device that lets one stand at their desk.
What about requests to work from home due to disability, the lawyer asked.
Tushaj replied there were no such formal requests, stating, "Everybody's working in the building."
Even during COVID?
"As far as our policy with regard to COVID and working from home, we are working in the office," Tushaj said, according to the court transcript.
What about immunocompromised patients, Gordon asked.
"We are an in-person company. We do not work remote," Tushaj answered.
Even as UWM grew, the company maintained a single office, first in Troy, Michigan and now in Pontiac, a city of 62,000 people 20 miles northwest of Detroit. Besides the discontinued eponymous cars, Pontiac is perhaps best known for the Silverdome, where the Detroit Lions NFL team and Detroit Pistons NBA franchise used to play. Demolished in 2018, the Silverdome site is today an Amazon distribution facility.
Pontiac is the county seat of Oakland County. In August 2020, the Oakland County Health Division issued an emergency order against UWM following complaints the company did not follow COVID health and safety protocols.
Records obtained from Oakland County show that the UWM employee complaints continued.
That seemed to pique Gordon's curiosity.
Oakland County sent these complaints to the Michigan Occupational Safety and Health Administration. It was a busy time for an agency that had been allocated a $30 million budget for the 2020 to 2021 fiscal year. Michigan OSHA received more workplace complaints between March 2020 and December 2021 than it received in the previous five years combined, an agency spokesperson said.
Michigan OSHA did four on-site inspections of UWM between 2020 and 2022, the spokesperson said, resulting in "two serious and one other-than-serious citation."
Michigan OSHA proposed UWM pay a penalty of $9,800.
UWM's statement did not answer questions about its COVID policies.
Overall, former employees painted a picture of a frenetic workplace, helmed on the sales side by account executives less than 10 years out of high school with UWM their first serious job.
"I was a college dropout. UWM provided a sense of purpose and culture," one former account executive in their mid-20s recalled. "Everybody bonded over the stress."
Said another ex-account executive in their late-20s. "When I was there, they had a t-shirt that said 'never relax' in all caps. They liked to push people to the edge."
In March 2022, UWM settled for $2.75 million a lawsuit by a former account executive, Annie Haberlain, that she and her former colleagues worked stretches of time without pay. Haberlain, who declined to comment, alleged that while she clocked in at 10:00 a.m., she was required to attend work by 8 in the morning for a "Dominate at Eight" pep talk.
Haberlain's other allegations included a UWM program "Weekend Plays," where account executives had to send 12 text messages to potential clients over the weekend, and screenshot the texts to their supervisor. They were allegedly not paid for this work.
Schwebke and Haberlain are part of an unknown number of workers who lasted less than one year at UWM.
The company reported "more than 8,600 team members" at the end of 2020, but just "approximately 6,000 team members" on Dec. 31, 2022.
A 30% attrition rate over two years is common in the cyclical world of mortgage. Not common is UWM's claim to have never laid anyone off in the company's 37-year history.
One former employee said that UWM gets around the no layoff policy by "just fricking firing people, for things like clocking in a minute late."
The no-layoff policy has other practical outcomes. One is that UWM did not report mass layoffs under federal and state Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification, or WARN laws, which meant that they did not have to plan attritions in advance. Also, unlike laid off employees, those who quit or are fired cannot apply for unemployment benefits under Michigan law.
UWM's statement did not address employment policies. A spokesperson told National Mortgage Professional in March, "Through natural attrition, for various reasons – relocation, a family commitment, new opportunity, etc. – our team member count has balanced out."
The next game
On a March earnings call, Ishbia said that owning the Suns and Mercury, if anything, would add to his work at UWM.
"I actually think I have more time on my hands now that I'm not chasing a team," Ishbia said.
Added UWM in its statement: "UWM is proud of the positive impact we've made on our team members, independent mortgage brokers and the mortgage industry overall. Mat Isbhia's competitive leadership style has proven to be healthy and productive for our business, team members and wholesale channel growth."
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