While many people in the mortgage broker industry are members of their state trade groups in name only, others make the commitment to take a leadership role, while at the same time still having to work on their businesses.
Martin Pfeiffenberger was installed as the president-elect of the New York Association of Mortgage Brokers at the group’s annual convention in Melville, N.Y., on Nov. 13, moving up after serving as the group’s vice president.
He had started out in the securities business and a childhood friend who was a homebuilder recommended they start a mortgage company and that was about 10 years ago.
That means Pfeiffenberger joined at the start of the boom times and has survived the bust. He is the president/owner of as well as an originator at Maple Tree Funding in Latham, N.Y., a suburb of Albany, the state capital.
When he became a mortgage broker, he also joined NYAMB and attended its functions. Robert Duquette, who is now a past president of the organization and happens to be from the Albany area, stopped into his office and asked Pfeiffenberger to join the group’s board.
“When I first started coming down to go to the convention or to go to the wholesale conference in April, the things you learned at both were instrumental, because as a broker you are a small entity out there and you don’t have a lot of people to bounce things off of.
“So it was a great wealth of information, I got to talk to people in the same industry, get some ideas, meet a lot industry experts, meet a lot of lenders and get exposed to items that were great for the business. I learned some marketing ideas, I learned a lot of regulatory and compliance issues and just learned how to run the business. So it has been a great help.”
And he is looking to use his leadership role to help others in the industry. He believes the association can be a resource for those getting into the business as well as those who are expanding their business, “so I would like to give back what was given to me when I first go into it.”
What kept Pfeiffenberger in the business during the bust years is that being a numbers guy he always liked mortgage originating. But even during the down times, Maple Tree Funding has been able to grow.
“We’re pretty good at what we do, if I say so myself. We have great referrals and long-time referral sources that stuck with us through time and we’ve expanded a lot in the last couple of years,” he said. This includes the company opening an office in Queensbury, N.Y., which is in the Lake George area north of Albany.
His company’s origination mix includes 35% Federal Housing Administration loans, 35% conventional, 25% U.S. Department of Agriculture product and 5% Veterans Administration loans. As a company, it has done approximately 250 units totaling $45 million.
The Queensbury office does a lot of the rural loan production. USDA, Pfeiffenberger said, “is a great product that we do very well with up there. We got involved with it about three-and-a-half, four years ago. As we’ve used it more and more, a lot of Realtors like it.
“We understand it, we write a lot of USDA loans. We work with quite a few different lenders on it. It is a great product for the right people in the right areas.”
And being able to offer USDA loans is a way to differentiate his shop from the competition. There are people in these markets that might not qualify for other kinds of financing, but fit into the USDA guidelines.
In terms of marketing Pfeiffenberger said he does a little bit of everything. The company has its own website, it has done radio advertising and most recently has added television to the mix.
The first night his commercials were scheduled to appear on the local cable system’s feed of the Weather Channel, it was the night Hurricane Sandy struck. He said got calls from friends saying they saw the ads.
There is also a lot of word-of-mouth advertising. Maple Tree Funding goes to a lot of Chamber of Commerce meetings. The company sponsors schools and Little League teams and it works on chartable functions with other entities.
And as the company has grown, he said it has increased its efforts to give back to the community. He tries to have the company involved with what endeavors his employees are involved with.
On the B2B side, Maple Tree has a newsletter that it sends to its referral partners and vendors. It is typically consists of things like guideline changes, plus a little anecdotal item at the top. “We just alert people to say, ‘hey, this is what’s coming just so you know what’s happening.
“That is how we usually stay on top of them on a month-by-month basis,” he said, adding the other loan officers at the company also do some of their own things.
There are a total of 15 people on the company’s payroll; besides Pfeiffenberger, Maple Tree has 10 licensed loan officers, a full-time compliance officer, along with two others awaiting New York Department of Financial Services approval to be active LOs, plus two processors and a junior processor. The nature of the business today required him to hire the compliance officer.
Running a growing company requires a balance between the managerial side and being an active producer and as Maple Tree Funding has grown, Pfeiffenberger said focusing on the business has reduce his personal production.
“Our strength is in that we’re building a bigger and back office. We constantly stay in touch with the Realtors during the process to let them know what’s going on, so we can give timetables,” he explained.
The new emphasis on compliance has lengthened the timeline and it is not necessarily the bank’s fault. “What used to take us 31 days to close a loan, is taking us 42. So it is 11 extra calendar days. We’re trying to see what we can drive out of the system on our end because we can’t on the bankers’ end.
“What we can do is at least let the Realtor and our clients know ‘this is the timetable. I know you want to close quicker. If everything goes perfect it will, but when reality sets in this is where it is probably going to be.’”
That is the one great thing being active in NYAMB, said Pfeiffenberger. He can come to the meetings and talk to everybody and get different opinions about what is happening in the mortgage business.
