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Fairway Independent Mortgage Corporation, a large mortgage lender and a top 10 lender in the reverse mortgage industry, will aim to expand its focus on its reverse mortgage arm in 2025 owing to the efforts of David Lazowski, the company’s new president of national recruiting and growth.
Emboldened by its efforts in the purchase mortgage arena and hoping to replicate it with its use of the Home Equity Conversion Mortgage (HECM) for Purchase (H4P) program, Fairway is seeking to “expand its reverse mortgage channel through aggressive recruiting, strategic partnerships, and […] integration of its forward and reverse businesses,” the company said in an announcement.
Lazowski will collaborate with Fairway’s reverse mortgage leaders including VP of reverse mortgage recruiting Tim Harder and president of reverse mortgage lending Dan Ventura to accomplish these goals, the company said.
“Our forward mortgage success provides an incredible foundation to expand our reverse mortgage business, especially HECM for Purchase,” said Lazowski in a statement. “By recruiting top talent and building meaningful partnerships, we can create seamless connections between forward and reverse channels, empowering both our loan officers and clients.”
This initiative will include new educational efforts and materials aimed at ideal H4P referral partners including real estate agents, homebuilders and financial advisors, the company said. H4P remains a severely underutilized variation of the HECM loan, and the team said it wants to highlight that attribute “and equip loan officers with tools to self-source business effectively and optimize those lead channels,” the company said.
Ventura added that a current lack of awareness can translate into a market opportunity, so long as the company can adequately educate originators while “simplifying messaging,” he said.
Harder said that the company’s recruitment goals will be bolstered by monthly confidential virtual meetings with outside originators who may be seeking to “elevate their reverse business,” he said.
The first such virtual event will take place on Jan. 30, and interested parties can register online.
“H4P remains a severely underutilized variation of the HECM loan, and the team said it wants to highlight that attribute ‘and equip loan officers with tools to self-source business effectively and optimize those lead channels,’ the company said.”
Is the company saying that they will be trying to do something that has never done before or that they will be doing it in a new way? The incredible thing would be if they as a HECM lender could get more than 250 H4P endorsements on a simple monthly average basis for a continuous 12 month period (or 3,000 annually). The industry has a whole has NEVER reached 2,700 H4P endorsements in a single fiscal year since Congress first allowed HUD to endorse H4Ps through the passage of HERA (the Housing and Economic Recovery Act of 2008) when President GWB signed it into law on 7/30/2008.
Just what the industry needs another H4P education and marketing campaign, really? Notice that there is NO mention that the industry as whole did not even reach 1,700 H4P endorsements last fiscal year (ended 9/30/2024). As Dave Ramsey says, lets get started with Baby Steps, just trying to average 100 H4P endorsements per month for the calendar year 2025 and build from there. (Yup, Ramsey’s Baby Steps.)
It would be great if the team at Fairway told us how their efforts will differ from those of Mutual of Omaha and other H4P endorsement leaders (including Fairway) who have unsuccessfully tried to turn H4P from a severly underutilized mortgage product into just an underutilized mortgage product. Although I doubt its success, we all can be wrong and this is but another instance where I hope that I am wrong. Best of luck.