A top executive at Reverse Mortgage Solutions in Houston said the company's third party origination channel expansion efforts are starting to take root and will lead the company's growth in 2012.
Mike Kent said the correspondent flow channel has had a "great launch," with production growing month by month.
Furthermore, the wholesale channel is now also up and running and expanding its purchases as well.
Between the two, Kent said RMS has closed between $8 and $9 million in November and will exceed that when December's numbers are added up.
RMS now has its three regional sales directors in place to guide the TPO operations. As of the end of last year, it had 15 approved correspondents with another 33 in the approval process, Kent said.
"And our aggregation business has pretty much exploded. In October we did $150 million, (November) we did $175 million. We'll do $140 million (for December) and we've already got on the books about $160 million for January.
"So that business in the last six months has more than doubled," Kent declared, with further growth expected in this line during 2012.
He believes that one reason for the growth in the aggregation business is that several top reverse mortgage originators elected to exit last year. The sellers of these loans are looking for "a solid Ginnie Mae issuer."
MetLife recently announced it will not purchase reverse mortgage loans from correspondent originators who themselves had used a third party to originate the loan. Kent believes that will help to increase RMS' share.
Last June, RMS made adjustments in its servicing business to address the problem of defaults related to non-payment of taxes and insurance. The T&I issue is believed to be the catalyst for those large players leaving.
But T&I problems only impact a small number of loans, Kent noted.
The company also has a small call center operation that services its existing loan borrowers. It has a "friends and family" program where those who are already customers can refer someone to RMS and the call center is designed to deal with those consumers.
"Our forte is our HMBS issuance process. We're highly efficient and how ever we can flow business into that, whether it be through our aggregation, correspondent flow or wholesale channels, that is where we are really looking to grow our business," Kent said.
