Broker’s prescient purchase market focus pays off

He gave MPA an outline: “It all goes back to the purchase aspect of things,” he said. “I went from a call center environment to loan officer in 2004 and I didn’t do my first purchase mortgage until 2013. And then I changed to a different city about 45 minutes out of where I was located, restarted my business in 2015, knew one listing agent and just focused on the purchase business since then.”

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To say the least, it’s been a fortuitous focus: “We’ve grown from 2015 zero loans, and in 2021 we did $217 million,” Dahlin said in a recent interview. “It was all about that purchase side of things. We never focused on refi. We’ve always been 65% to 70% or higher purchase oriented.”

For the uninitiated, Dahlin suggested it’s a simple matter of shifting the paradigm: “The whole mentality is you’re not in the mortgage business. You’re in the agent business, and mortgages are a by-product of agents. If you’re in the agent business and do a really good job of making an agent feel good, mortgages are going to be a by-product of it. So I don’t go out looking for mortgages, I go out to look for agents. It’s concentrating on the real estate agent and not the direct consumer as people have been doing.”

With 18 years of financial industry experience, Dahlin has worked with some of the world’s largest banks – both as a salesperson and manager, according to his bio. He launched his mortgage career after earning a bachelor’s degree in business administration from California State University, San Bernardino.