Why Panorama Mortgage rebranded as SimplyPMG

In deciding to rebrand its company, Panorama Mortgage Group wanted to emphasize simplicity, said Hector Amendola, its president.

So SimplyPMG is now what the company will be known as, he said during an interview at the recent Mortgage Bankers Association Secondary and Capital Markets Conference in New York.

This takes the place of the several doing-business-as names it operated under, including Alterra Home Loans and Travisa Financial in addition to Panorama, Amendola said.

"Travisa Financial was our wholesale arm, and for a long time I think that there was a little bit of a division because of that in our company, and so we thought, you know what, it's SimplyPMG, that's the name of the company," he said.

"We've always been one company, but there's been a lot of complexity added because of the DBAs, and so it was our way of saying we want to keep things simple."

For the company itself, the new moniker is a reminder of the need to keep things simple, because the mortgage industry tends to "add complexity for the sake of complexity," Amendola noted.

Having those multiple brands, different names for different channels, was one of those unnecessary complexities, Amendola said.

"We do different DBAs because we think that's what the people want," he said. "In reality, it's confusing to the consumer."

SimplyPMG is what they fell in love with, as it referred to keeping things uncomplicated. Alterra might have been the better known brand coming in to the process, but the simple portion is what they are looking to focus on, he said.

Alterra Home Loans received private equity funding in 2016 from Panorama Point Partners.

The rebrand was in the works prior to the housing and mortgage market doing a sharp turn starting in March, when rates shifted course as the bond market reacted to inflation as a result of the Iran conflict.

Even though things have slowed down in the last couple of months, "there's still a lot of buyers, the market's still good," he said. "We're still doing well, not as good as we thought, but still doing well."

Yet it is still in a sense market-driven. The company has been working for some time on how to get its loan manufacturing costs as low as possible.

"So the simpler process, better price, doesn't come from nowhere," Amendola said. "It's coming from something we've been working on for years now."

Getting those costs down is something all mortgage bankers should be concentrating on, he continued, pointing to data from the most recent MBA profitability study, where total production costs increased to just under $12,000 ($11,898 per loan).

"It shouldn't be that much," so lenders need to focus on getting those under control, Amendola said.

With the rebrand underway, SimplyPMG is focusing on growing its business. It added a branch in the Phoenix area, getting back into the market.

Its wholesale channel ramped up in December and it has been growing as well, Amendola said.

Retail is a great channel for SimplyPMG, but having wholesale and consumer direct means it is not beholden to a single production model.

He recounted having said "we feel like we're the best kept secret in mortgage, and that's not a compliment to us, right?

"Because we don't want what we're doing to be a secret, we want everybody to know what we're doing, because it's good for the consumer and it's good for the industry," said Amendola in response to his own comment.