In the latest episode of the Power House podcast: HousingWire CEO Clayton Collins sits down for a conversation Uplist President Jeff Bell to explore coaching, loan monitoring, recapture strategies and more.
These questions and answers have been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Clayton Collins: Give us an inside look at how you’ve developed as a leader in this industry.
Jeff Bell: I used to work for Keith Tibbles and Ernie Gehre Cobalt mortgage. I was making almost $7 million a month, and Ernie told me to get a business coach. That brought a lot of structure and focus to the broader business community, life planning, family matters and so on.
It really gave me a road map. If you explain it well while you’re sitting there, having a road map makes it very easy to make a decision about what you do business-wise, like marketing, who you do business with, how much time you spend doing business . re-spending in business vs. to family, etc.
Collins: Why did you start a technology company? Why start with Uplift?
Clock: So I have a mortgage company that I am now quitting. About two years ago, as the market turned from refinancing to purchasing, I started getting calls from real estate agents saying, “Hey, can you give me some flyers advertising my properties?”
The market moves 50 basis points on Monday, and now I have to do it again for next week. So I built Uplift for the mortgage company and essentially we automated the entire loan appraisal process. You can perform thousands of loan reviews every month, and a complete analysis will determine whether there is an opportunity to refinance. Once it arrives, the presentation is put together and sent to me as the loan officer.
Collins: With technology and AI, there are some great MSR portfolios available. Servicers are willing to go quite far to ensure they recapture. How do you see this potential mini-wave playing out?
Clock: As an originator, if I were really focused on getting refinances in the emerging potential refinance market, you’re going to have to look at comp. There needs to be some advance planning at this point so that mortgage lenders and lenders can come together and decide what they are willing to give up.
To conclude the episode, Bell explains the benefit that Uplift’s loan monitoring product provides to servicers.
Collins: Going back to Uplift and its new loan monitoring product, this sounds like a tool that requires a lot of integration. How does all this come about?
Clock: So I have a business integration with different pricing engines. That pricing engine opens the gate and we are automatically connected to the pricing of every LO for that company. I have never had a company IT person touch my product. There is no integration.
You upload, we give you a CSV template and you can upload 50,000 loans to us. We link them to all the loan officers in that database, and they are monitored the next day. Loan officers receive a message that Clayton may be able to refinance. You press a button and the whole thing is done in one minute.
