After finishing his football career with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, Casey Crawford found a new field to conquer: mortgage lending.
According to a Bloomberg article, Crawford had already invested in real estate, buying houses in the off-season and then renovating and selling them quickly for a profit.
He founded Movement Mortgage in 2008, and since then, it has rapidly grown from two offices and 12 employees to over 280 offices in 23 states.
“I actually Googled ‘how to start a mortgage bank,’” Crawford, 37, said in a telephone interview. “We got to build from the ground up what 21st-century customer experience can and should look like.”
Crawford joined the business at a good time, joining the surge of nonbanks that are slowly taking over the business.
Movement Mortgage is one of the many nonbank lenders gaining ground as companies including Wells Fargo & Co. and JPMorgan Chase & Co. cut their home-loan divisions. Four of the top 10 mortgage originators in the first quarter, including Quicken Loans Inc. and Freedom Mortgage Corp., weren’t banks, according to data compiled by Inside Mortgage Finance. These firms were responsible for 37.5 percent of loans made last year, up from 26.7 percent in 2013, the newsletter’s figures show.
