John Rodgers has built a top producing business around helping service members relocating to North Carolina.
Military personnel who are purchasing houses have many of the same needs and desires that the civilian population does. Yet the nature of their employment does create some unusual conditions that few understand. John Rodgers, the owner of Prime Mortgage Lending, Apex, N.C., has an understanding of what this population needs as a veteran himself.
His production in 2009 was $90 million, and he ranked 26th in Origination News’ top 150 loan originator survey. For 2010, he did $78 million, but his revenue was up for the year because of better secondary market conditions.
Rodgers started in the mortgage business in 1999. Prior to that he was a special operations person in the U.S. Air Force with every intention of extending his enlistment.
But circumstances led him to decide to leave. Another person on his team was leaving the military and he asked him what he was going to do.
That person told Rodgers that he was going to make “six figures in the mortgage industry,” to which Rodgers said, “Sign me up.” But it really wasn’t the amount of money as much as need to make money so he could live.
Rodgers recalled telling the person he was going to work for that he needed to make $40,000 a year; that person laughed and replied “you’ll fall into $40,000 a year.”
When he first got into the business, he was working in a call center-type operation, with a lot of cold calling, which he was not fond of. After nearly 18 months to two years of doing this, Rodgers began to feel burned out.
So deciding he needed to find a better way of doing business, Rodgers started going to the Realtors in his community and asked them for business.
Given that he was near Fort Bragg, he began to do a lot of government loans, especially Veterans Affairs-guaranteed loans.
Rodgers then opened a branch for now-defunct Advantage Investors Mortgage. He had an office in Fayetteville doing VA loans “and it was great!” He began hiring staff and before he knew it, he had 20 or so people working for him.
In 2005, he opened Prime Mortgage Lending. VA is still his niche, accounting for 44% of his business in 2010.
As a veteran Rodgers finds that he is better able to relate to this market segment. “I know the lingo, this buyer trusts other veterans. They just need the deal done; they don’t have a lot of time normally.
“Some of these guys work in sensitive jobs,” and without them being allowed to elaborate, his background gives him the ability to figure it out. He knows what questions to ask and not to ask.
More importantly, Rodgers knows the VA product. “There are a lot of loan officers that don’t even know how to do a VA loan. It’s sad.
“During the boom, I saw a lot of people steer people away from VA loans and into subprime products because they didn’t know how to do it.
“The veteran doesn’t know any better. The veteran only wants their payment to be a certain number,” he said, adding that it is the responsibility of the loan officer to know the available products and act in the best interests of their customer.
A fair amount of Rodgers’ business comes from Northern Virginia and he said loan officers there would steer military people away from VA into subprime products like two-year interest-only loans.
Rodgers admitted it was hard to compete against that at the time.
For his marketing, he makes direct contact with the Realtors that serve markets where military people are likely to reside. He also purchases leads from cites that cater to military personnel.
As part of his marketing to those Realtors, he does a weekly newsletter. The Realtors he works with include the spouses of current military personnel as well as veterans.
His marketing manager contacts past clients about refinancing. The VA loan is probably the easiest one to refinance, Rodgers declared.
Customer service is vital. He told an anecdote about a local Chamber of Commerce person commenting that he still answered his own phone. “When no one else is answering the phone, I have to answer it,” Rodgers said.
He does originate a full range of products, including the U.S. Department of Agriculture loans (which is the smallest percentage of the loan types he does).
Last year, North Carolina accounted for 90% of his loan volume and Virginia, 9%.
Apex is located in the Research Triangle area of North Carolina, and Rodgers noted it was one of the last markets to be hurt in the downturn. Some builders he has spoken to have little or no traffic. There is some pickup in demand lately though.
The market in the Fort Bragg area is affected by movement in the military and that area has seen some fall off as it is waiting for people to be shuffled around to new assignments.
The military, he noted, constantly moves people around because of their rank and their job. So there is always an influx of people coming into the bases in the area. Besides Fort Bragg, North Carolina is the home to Seymour Johnson Air Force Base, as well as a number of Marine Corps facilities.
While typically this makes much of his business purchase loans, last year, Rodgers noted his share of purchase to refinance volume was about 50-50.
Most of the people he works with are in what he called “middle-management” roles in the military, who already have served at least one term and have stayed. Those are the ones likely to be buying houses, Rodgers explained.
Given the nature of their assignments, they don’t have a lot of time to commit to the homebuying/finance process. They are typically in a hurry; they might only start looking for a house a month before they are scheduled to relocate. “They don’t have a lot time to mess with it. They just need somebody who knows how to do it and get it done,” Rodgers said.
It is a lot of the little things that some might think are simple and get taken for granted in helping these people, such as knowing the military pay charts, knowing how to find the information on how these people get paid, knowing what pay is usable and not usable and knowing the VA program rules inside and out.
“If you can tell the guy he is good to go for the loan in one conversation and be able to have an operation where you don’t have to meet them face-to-face because these guys simply don’t have the time to be running around town,” he said, noting his firm does a lot of its work via FedEx and e-mail.
An example he gave was someone who had been assigned to a base in Washington state that came in for the weekend house hunting. The person goes back to the West Coast and the next time he or she likely to be in North Carolina is when they move.
Rodgers gives them a checklist they can follow and 99% of the time it works great. This means Prime needs to be great on communications skills because they can’t come to his office.
In what some might see as an irony given the nature of his clientele, Prime does not take applications online. It found the borrower is likely to put in data with errors. The online app gets directly imported into the system and time is wasted chasing down mistakes.
So Prime has “a skinny little contact form” that lets the company know someone is looking for a loan. Borrowers receive calls and provide their application information over the phone.
