Mortgage veteran – From humble beginnings to speeding up the lending process

The advice led him to Columbia mortgage and investment, a small brokerage firm in Washington. “This guy ‘I’ve got these old files from my dad’s old mortgage company,’” Stein remembered. “I sat there thinking ‘I’ve got a college degree, I’ve got a brief but successful track record, and this jackass wants me to telemarket for him’,” he said with a laugh. “But I didn’t really have anything to lose, right? So, I worked my bank job ‘til 5 o’clock and then drove over to the little office they had, picked up these files and called people ‘til 8 o’clock at night. I think inside of four to six weeks, I had a pipeline with probably $20,000 in in commissions.”

One thinks of the “Karate Kid” skeptical of the “wax on, wax off” method during his nascent martial arts training that ultimately pays off. Indeed, Stein described a similar bewilderment at the beginning when he first learned the trade. “I knew absolutely nothing about mortgage and their training was pretty minimal,” he said. “I learned mortgage in the trenches from the account executives and loan officers around me. I started processing my own files, so learned the operations side and became a junior partner in that company.”

By now comfortably ensconced in the industry, a prescient focus turned to digital origination – at a time when that wasn’t really much of a thing. “Around 1997, I started talking about digital origination,” he recalled. “I couldn’t get them to spend any money on R&D Back in the day, the mantra was ‘you need the biggest yellow page ad and the biggest newspaper ad’. I was like, ‘hey guys, that stuff’s all going to go away’.”

Unable to convince his colleagues of future developments, a disagreement over how to run the company emerged. Stein made a bold move: “I wound up buying my branch out. I wrote them a check and said ‘you can take this money and I can take this branch, or I can walk away and the branch will follow me. Would you like this check?’”