Lessons learned on the pathway to the American Dream of Homeownership.

Paving the road for a new generation of Homebuyers

Almost six years ago, I was presented with the opportunity to not only change my career but to assist First Community Mortgage in changing the lives of underserved families and individuals for good.

With Keith, Andy, and Brandon's support and leadership, we started an intensive learning process on the homebuying financial needs of diverse and underserved communities that quickly transformed into an ambitious Multicultural Lending action plan focused on generating more and better homeownership opportunities for these communities.

While we are currently experiencing an increasingly challenging multi-industry home affordability situation and a rapidly evolving multicultural homeownership environment in our country, here I want to look back and share with you some relevant experiences in this challenging, yet very rewarding journey:

1) Know where you are: Be open to learning from as many sources as possible, starting by looking inside your own organization. You need to be authentically interested in making the tough questions in the boardroom and even ask for the assistance of your business partners and friendly competitors to get an unbiased perspective of where you are really standing on this matter. David G. Kittle, CMB, Rich Swerbinsky, Jim Park, and all the team at The Mortgage Collaborative gave us the opportunity to contrast our ideas and even metrics with other Mortgage Lenders in a collaborative and transparent manner.

2) Ask for help: Reach out to the relevant community leaders, to the experts in your industry, and even venture outside of what can be considered your traditional intelligence sources. For us, it was very refreshing to find out that the biggest players on Multicultural Lending were also very generous leaders that shared valuable insights and advice on how to advance our initiative: Jason Madiedo, Patricia Arvielo, Eddy G Perez Jr, CMB, Gary Acosta, L. Maria Vergara, MBA, Luis Peralta, J. Tony Thompson, CMB, Anthony Hsieh, and many more multicultural lending trailblazers were instrumental in this process. Nevertheless, the conversations with construction workers and homebuilder entrepreneurs such as Mr. Moises Pereira, Ms. Alejandra Patino, and especially Mr. Mac Morales provided us with a fresh and genuine perspective on the needs, opportunities, and challenges ahead of us.

3) Getting it done: With the wealth of information acquired, we realized that to create a real impact with our initiative it was necessary to build a team with the right people, empowered with relevant solutions and with organization-wide multi-level support. At this point, we decided to “build” our own Multicultural Loan Originators based on their community service background and a true bi-cultural sensitivity to the homeownership needs of the community and trained on the mortgage origination process by seasoned mortgage veteran Jeremy and mentored by some of our most tenured Mortgage Loan Officers and Lending Operations Experts like Tammie, Kim, Johnny, and many more. Here is when we started feeling the pressure of providing a great first mortgage experience to a traditionally underbanked and in general underserved community. It took some general reality checks and many adjustments to our traditional processes to adapt to their unique needs and backgrounds. We knew that to serve them properly we needed a higher level of customer care, more relevant and useful information that could be easy to access and understand, and more importantly; we understood that it was not them who needed to fit in our “sandbox”, but that we needed to adapt it to them, including establishing our first service center (Home Opportunity Center) right in the middle of the multicultural epicenter of Nashville back then; Plaza Mariachi.

4. Partnering up: Having the right allies can amplify and speed up the impact of your initiative. For us, the partnerships and collaboration with multiple Associations, Institutions, Corporations, and even individuals, proved to be a great way to propel our message and services to multicultural and underserved communities. NAHREP, NAREB, MBA, TNMBA, NMBA, THDA, THE HOUSING FUND, Habitat for Humanity, NACC, RCCC, TLACC, HCC of Kansas City, Goodwill, Urban League, and many other organizations and outstanding individuals that supported us, and still support our efforts.

5. Keep learning and keep improving: There is this saying that “If you are not growing/improving you may be shrinking”. After almost six years, and over 1500 Multicultural homebuyers served in Tennessee, Georgia, Kentucky, Texas, and Alabama, 2 National Diversity Equity and Inclusion Awards for Market Outreach Strategies, a Hispanic focused brand (HOLACASA), and an expanding presence in the Middle Eastern communities of Tennessee, for our team to achieve sustainable growth, our President Dan always recommends staying “Humble, Hungry and Smart” looking for new ways to increase our impact. Especially in this constantly evolving housing and mortgage lending environment, we feel the responsibility to continue expanding our efforts to generate more sustainable homeownership opportunities for more underserved families in more regions.

Thank you to all our team members, shareholders, partners, and clients for your trust and support to continue paving this pathway towards the American Dream of homeownership.?