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HomeBridge’s Brian White on inclusivity in mortgage lending

This HousingWire Daily interview features a crossover episode from HousingWire’s Housing News podcast, a show that highlights a new mortgage or real estate executive each week to add perspective to the top stories crossing HousingWire’s news desk.

In this episode, HomeBridge Chief Diversity & Inclusion Officer Brian “Woody” White discusses what increasing diversity within the housing finance industry looks like on a practical level.

Listen to the full episode here and make sure to subscribe to the podcast on iTunes. If you’re an HW+ member, you have access to the full transcription below.

Here is the transcription of the interview with White. The transcript below has been lightly edited for length and clarity:

Sarah Wheeler:
Welcome, everyone. I’m Sarah Wheeler, editor-in-chief at Housing Wire with our latest segment of The Housing News podcast. Today I’m interviewing Brian “Woody” White, who until October, was the Chief Information Officer at HomeBridge Financial Services but in October, assumed the role of Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer at HomeBridge. We’re excited to dive into what prompted that unusual shift of roles and also what he hopes to accomplish there. Woody, welcome to Housing News.

Brian Woody White:
Hello. How are you? And I’m happy to be here

Sarah Wheeler:

We’re happy to have you. So, we have a lot to get into, but the very first question we always want to ask people is how did you end up in mortgage? All the executives we talked to, it’s amazing where they came from and where they ended up.

Brian Woody White:
Well, let’s see. I actually started at the Mortgage Bankers Association after I graduated college. I was on the media side, so I built a lot of what you would call master control centers for CNN in DC and C-SPAN and did that during college right after. And one of my first big gigs was at the Mortgage Bankers Association. And I may have gotten them in a little bit of trouble because at that time programming at the PC level was kind of new. And I developed an application with the Mortgage Bankers Association called echo, and that was in the eighties. And every lender was using echo, FHA class with HUD. And I think the problem was MBA was making too much money in that particular channel. So, they decided to eventually shut it down, but it worked out very well.

Sarah Wheeler:
Wow, that’s an interesting start and definitely a different way to get here. Now then most of your work has been in tech, so tell us about that. Tell us some of the things that you’ve done.

Brian Woody White:
A whole lot. I’ll tell you, I’ll have to go all the way back just to give you an idea of how I got into tech, because I was actually in high school and I worked for a Congressman. His name was Congressman Phizer in New York. And I went into the office, I was an intern and there were all these computers just sitting there collecting dust. So, I picked up a manual and taught myself how to use their system and didn’t realize I was teaching myself COBOL. To me, it was just learn how to use it. So, I taught myself COBOL PL1 and I basically learned how to use the systems. And I did that for the Congressman. And when I went to University of Maryland College Park, it was interesting because they were teaching me all this mainframe stuff for computer science, but I was running the educational technology center and I was receiving computers, personal computers in 1981 for the first time.

Brian Woody White:
So I immediately thought this was the future, but there were no classes. So, I taught myself basic AppleTalk, whatever it is I could get my hands on. And from there, it just spiraled up. I finally got my job at, for example, the Mortgage Bankers Association, I worked at Sallie Mae, did a lot of digital imaging, worked at the Pentagon, worked on digital imaging on submarines, doing that type of stuff. Many things, I even worked at Aetna running all their information architecture and data architecture, just so many different places, so many different things, so many different technologies. I’m a tech head, I’m a gadget head, I did a lot of the same things for HomeBridge in terms of rearchitecting HomeBridge for the cloud, as well as all the new security architecture that deal with hacking and things like that.

Sarah Wheeler:
That is so impressive to hear someone who just picked up a manual and taught themselves COBOL, like what? That’s crazy.

Brian Woody White:
Yeah, well it was mainframe back in the day, but when computers flipped over and I was right there, you had to teach yourself, there were no classes.

Sarah Wheeler:
I feel like that’s really the heart of tech is being willing to look and find the answers that aren’t immediately in front of you. So, I’m sure that served you well through the years, but it’s still nonetheless a very impressive accomplishment to be at that forefront, you know?

Brian Woody White:
Yeah. It was a fun ride, I’ll tell you.

Sarah Wheeler:
So, let’s go from there. So here you have this entire career in tech, a very impressive career in tech and you’re at HomeBridge and you’re their Chief Information Officer. What prompted the change? How did that new role come about to switch to their Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer?

Brian Woody White:
We’re always going to throw the George Floyd incident into it because that was the center for many things that drove many conversations, but there were conversations at HomeBridge a couple of years prior. And it’s like every other company, right? You’re doing business and you’re trying to make this pivot, but it’s just a lot of volume. I was running IT and I just couldn’t move into it. So, we finally had a really good conversation and I liked everything that our CEO and COO had to say, they liked everything I had to say, and we just decided to make it happen.

Brian Woody White:
And it was a big change for both of us, but I’ve been doing a number of things in the community along these lines, speaking at churches, holding personal finance classes. I didn’t mention, but I also used to be a certified financial planner and other things like that. So, I did that and worked, just helping in the community, teaching people about mortgages, helping them get homes and things like that. And all of that culminated into that conversation and here we are.

Sarah Wheeler:
Wow, that’s great. So, what is the goal of your role? What are you hoping to accomplish?

Brian Woody White:
Well, I kind of put things into three major pillars in terms of what I’m trying to accomplish at HomeBridge. The first thing is always the issue of opportunity. I’ll throw it out there, HomeBridge all like many other companies, especially where you have a company that’s filled and people know people, you bring in people, you bring in friends and that’s just how the mortgage and many industries work. But when you look around, you don’t have the diversity that you plant. It’s just not there. And one of my first pillars is to really get into recruiting and monitoring and not so much trying to move into the HR space and get into recruiting in that manner, but really put into mechanisms to make sure our recruiters understand we plan to be a diverse company.

Brian Woody White:
I can tell you, I remember in IT recruiting from One Recruiter and I think I had 10 positions open and there was no diversity in any of the positions, in any of the recruiters, anything this guy was sending me. And I finally called them up and I said, “So I’m trying to understand, how is this possible? I know where we’re located in the New York, New Jersey area, how is it possible that there’s no diversity in any of the candidates you’re sending me?” And I basically told them, you either figure that out or we’re not doing business anymore. So the first piece for me is really getting a good plan around monitoring. It sounds simple to monitor recruiters, but it’s not as simple as it sounds. So that’s the first step.

Brian Woody White:
The second step is the DNA of HomeBridge. We have ADP, we have tools that tell us how many black men here, how many Hispanics are, things like that. What I want to do is put that on steroids and really make sure we know almost real time what’s happening, because I’d like to know if something’s going on, for example, and in one month, 12 Hispanic people left out of IT, I’d like to know why. What happened? So that’s my next step is to really dig into the analytics and make it more real time, so we all know, not just me, but all the managers in the company understand where we are with our DNA concerning diversity at HomeBridge.

Brian Woody White:
And the third is the community side. It’s affordable lending. One of the key pillars for me was to really get into affordable lending. It’s not that HomeBridge or any mortgage company doesn’t do some level of affordable lending. They do Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae, and work with HFAs and things like that. It happens today, and even around affordable lending, it’s not like the products are not there. I believe the products are there, but in order for us to address affordable lending, there has to be a certain level of commitment, period, to really focus on affordable lending, LMI, and that’s what my focus is going to be, working with our retail wholesale divisions, working with the executives to deal with the quagmire. There is a bit of a quagmire when you talk about it. And I mean, I could get into that, but the bottom line is I want to focus on affordable lending so that we can increase our participation if you could look at it that way.

Brian Woody White:
And even though I have three pillars, there’s one fourth pillar that I have, and that has to do with our business contracts. I want to go through our business contracts and see where we could advance the opportunities for women owned and minority owned businesses. We write so many contracts a year, whether it be on catering, whether it be on a appraisal services, and I think now’s a good time to really go through that portfolio and try to grow that portfolio with women owned and minority owned businesses as well.

Sarah Wheeler:
Well, I really appreciate you breaking it down like that, because that gives other people who are maybe not as far along as HomeBridge is in this as they look at this and go, we want to increase diversity and inclusion, we want to do some of this, but where do you start? What does that even look like? And four things that you just said, and any lender, could take those four things and build a roadmap out of it.

Brian Woody White:
Absolutely, absolutely.

Sarah Wheeler:
Really interesting. Talking about the recruiting part, anytime you’re a lender, whoever you have on the other end of the lending situation as the ELA or whatever, that’s who they’re going to naturally reach out to, that’s their community, their affinity, so tell us a little bit about why it’s important to have people at that level who are diverse.

Brian Woody White:

Yeah, and it’s not just at that level, it’s at the executive level too. I mean, I can tell you, as a black man, that when I go out, and I was hunting for executive jobs, I would go to www whatever that company was, and I’d try to figure out, is there any diversity at the top? On one hand, if they hear a company say, “We’ve been in business for 90 years”, but I go in and I look and I see no diversity at the top, so it’s like that for everything. The bottom line is we’ve heard the melting pot scenario. If you look around this country, different people are everywhere, it doesn’t matter where you go. And if we can’t reflect that internally, then we can’t even identify with the people we’re actually trying to sell our products. So that’s the primary focus and I think if we’re in an African American neighborhood, we should understand the community. If we’re in a Hispanic neighborhood, we should understand the same, same for LGBTQ community, having different challenges. We should understand all of that. So we have to be diverse as a company.

Sarah Wheeler:
When you first joined HomeBridge, I mean, did you realize, like obviously the other executives there are very committed to this or they wouldn’t have created this position, what about HomeBridge did you see that right away that you’re like okay, this is a company I want to work for?

Brian Woody White:

Yeah, I did. Actually, it happened for me at the interview. During the interview, everybody was pretty open, one of the things I said, which normally I wouldn’t get the job for, but one of the things I said was, “I’m not the yes man. I’m not the person to make you feel good or give you the answers you want to hear. The bottom line is technology is complicated, and I’m going to tell you what you need to know.” And everybody received that wrote rather well. And I’ve been received well at HomeBridge and it’s been a great experience.

Sarah Wheeler:
That’s great. One of the things we’ve talked about at Housing Wire on different podcasts, we had a whole session on it in the fall at our annual event is kind of like how do you create an atmosphere where people feel like they can be themselves in the workplace, whatever diverse background they’re coming from, but specifically black people in the mortgage industry who, I mean, you look around, it’s still pretty rare. So how do you foster a community within the company where that’s happening?

Brian Woody White:
Well one of the first things and one of the first major communications I’ve put out to everybody in the company, it started with, it’s safe to be honest. That was one of the first things I really wanted to communicate to everybody is that in order for us to have this conversation or any deeper conversation, you have to feel safe that you can be honest. That there’s no retribution that’s going to follow you because I can tell you right now, I’ve filled out surveys, working for other companies and I didn’t feel it was safe to be honest. So when I filled out the survey, yeah, they got some information from me, but was it the information that really could help change the company? No, because I was afraid to divulge that type of information.

Brian Woody White:
So one of the things that I’ve been working on internally at HomeBridge is really just getting everybody to understand who I am, how I work. I know a lot of people at HomeBridge, but a lot of people don’t know me, to get them to understand, it’s an environment where it’s safe to be honest. And if I have to have any kind of survey really asking really, really deep questions, if I anonymize that survey, everybody at HomeBridge clearly understands though that information doesn’t come back to HomeBridge. It goes to a third party company. That information is stripped. And all we see is the information that we need to see to help the company grow.

Sarah Wheeler:
Trust is key, right? If we’re going to change that.

Brian Woody White:
It’s a big deal. It’s a big deal. And in financial services where you have minorities working in the companies, they’re also living outside the company in their community. And because of what has happened in the past so many times, there is distrust with the minority community, especially with financial services. And that distrust also moves in because we’re still people and we don’t forget all that stuff. So, there’s a reason why some things happen.

Brian Woody White:
So when somebody takes a look and says, well, why do you think so many African Americans don’t have homes? And why do you think they’re struggling? And this and that and the other, it’s just not because of money. It’s because of other things that happen in the community that create that distrust, whether it be if you take a look at 2008 and subprime, and what happened and who got hurt by that, you take a look at Tuskegee, this, that, and the other it’s just a lot of distrust. When you’re sitting down with a loan officer and they’re saying, “Trust me, I’ll take care of you.” If you don’t trust the person that you’re sitting across from for other reasons, there’s going to be a problem. There’s a lot of training and discussion that has to happen in those situations.

Sarah Wheeler:
I think some of that discussion is very uncomfortable for people. They don’t know how to have that discussion and they don’t know maybe what that’s supposed to look like. How do you foster those kinds of discussions?

Brian Woody White:
Well, I think people also have to understand certain things that happen in communities. For example, talk about the African American community. So, for example, when I grew up, there was never a conversation at the dinner table or otherwise about anybody paying a mortgage. We lived in apartments, everybody lived in an apartment, nobody talked about refinancing, so I literally graduated high school and a mortgage was never discussed. I never even thought about what it was. When you think about, you have to begin to identify with the communities and you have to have these discussions inside the company so people understand what’s happening.

Brian Woody White:
So in the African American community, I can tell you, there is a lack of historical knowledge, which I just explained. Nobody had a conversation about how Uncle Joe bought three buildings and is renting them out. It wasn’t a conversation. Nobody talked about getting a mortgage. When you get to be my age, at least let’s say when I was 22, even though I had the money to go out and get a townhouse, it wasn’t even a thought for me because it’s not how I grew up. Nobody talked about it or anything like that.

Brian Woody White:
Then there’s just the lack of trust with the black community and understanding what happened and how we get built and treated incorrectly. And I remember seeing on Good Morning America, there was a video and it talked about a black woman called a place to get her house appraised. Very nice neighborhood. Her house was appraised. It came back a hundred thousand dollars less than everybody else in the neighborhood. She was married to a white guy. She invited another appraiser, but she got rid of all of her pictures and just left his pictures up. And the house was appraised a thousand dollars plus more.

Brian Woody White:
So it’s that kind of lack of trust across many services that you have to get back into education and getting people to understand, and you have to learn how to understand as a mortgage company as well. Then there’s a lack of understanding of the mortgage process in general. Like I said, I never had any conversations about a mortgage growing up. And then there’s just the general issue of racism and bias. So those four things are things that you have to talk about openly from a diversity and inclusion standpoint with employees, because the employees take this conversation back to the community. And then vice versa, you have to figure out where to go and how to have community conversations as well.

Brian Woody White:
So that’s what it’s going to take. And this is a long game. This is not something that I can go have one conversation on Zoom and it’s going to fix it. This is a grassroots effort now. And that’s what it’s going to take for not only HomeBridge, but the federal government, the GSEs, and everybody to embrace to change the direction.

Sarah Wheeler:
Yeah. I saw that same show you were talking about with the appraiser and it just highlighted how much work there is to do. I mean, that’s crazy that that’s happening in 2020, 20 21, but it does. We know that now. And I think if anything, the last year taught people who weren’t paying attention before, or didn’t want to see it, whatever you want to say for whatever reason, didn’t know, didn’t want to know, that this is the way things really are, this the way they have been operating. And now more people know that, what are you going to do about it?

Brian Woody White:
And remember, the mortgage industry has to solve this particular formula because you can go, well, I can mention Housing Wire, you can go to most communications and what do you see? The biggest opportunity for the mortgage market is the collective of minority communities. That’s their biggest marketplace. So this issue has to be resolved. We have to figure out how to better work with the minority communities, because that basically might become the lifeline of our industry.

Sarah Wheeler:
Well the Urban Institute put out their annual report just yesterday or a report yesterday about this very thing and looking forward for the next 20 years, and it just confirms what they had said last year and the year before that white home ownership is going to go down and the share of minority home ownership, that’s the only part that’s growing in the next 20 years from their perspective.

Brian Woody White:
But you know what? This segues us backwards to the quagmire I talked about, right? Because at the end of the day, there are two things that we know about the mortgage process, right? If I could break down a mortgage in just two simple components, right? There is somebody like a Woody White who is minority, for example, but I’m A paper. I got great credit, and you probably can close my loan just like that. But then, here’s the affordable lending. So remember, we just talked about what the biggest market is. The fact of the matter is that market might be filled with a lot of essential workers, who knows what’s what’s in that market. I know I’m in that market, but at the same time, there are a number of loans that will take more work.

Brian Woody White:
So the quagmire that you have is you go out and become a loan officer. You didn’t become a loan officer not to make money, right? You have to feed your family too. So there were two loans on your desk. One loan is a $2 million house, someone with perfect credit. The other loan is a $310,000 house, somebody with credit that you’re going to have to do a little work with, you’re going to have to work with Fannie Freddie to figure out how to get them into the home, do more DTI. And what you’re going to make from that extra work is going to be less than you’re going to make from that A paper loan.

Brian Woody White:
So the quagmire is, how does every mortgage company or bank inspire loan officers to do both? That’s the quagmire, because at the end of the day, everybody is working hard every day to feed their families and the loan officer’s doing the same thing. And you have to figure out that quagmire if you want to increase affordable lending. I did see some of the things that Joe Biden is talking about in terms of increasing affordable lending, but still at the end of all of that, it’s still the loan officer.

Sarah Wheeler:
I so appreciate you bringing that up. We did a story about a month ago because of this high-volume environment that we’re at, then this is what you’re seeing. Like if to your point, unless you have another incentive, either your personal convictions about it, your morals, or there’s something from your company, why would you spend that time? And we actually had loan officers go on the record and say, I’m not doing the hard loans. Now, they didn’t say those hard loans are minority loans, but if you’re not doing the hard loans, because why should they? They’re like, well I’m going to spend all this time.

Sarah Wheeler:
And then our managing editor is in the process of buying a house and he’s in a competitive area. And he was like, why is this house still on the market? And the person was like, well, the two offers that came in before you that were under contract, there were both W2, and the lenders weren’t willing to do it. It’s like, this will come back to haunt you when there’s not all that volume, right?

Brian Woody White:
That’s right.

Sarah Wheeler:
But from your perspective, how do you incentivize people at that, at that very basic level, in the weeds, on the ground, boots on the ground level to do that?

Brian Woody White:

Right, I mean, the bottom line is this is a rearchitect. I think it’s a, it might be a rearchitecting of comp, it might be a rearchitecting of many things. I’ve thought about this a lot. On one hand you’ve seen companies where, for example, you have reverse mortgages. Some companies have taken that entire function and created a separate company saying, you know what? This company will just do reverse mortgage. I don’t know if you do that and say, okay, you know what? We’re going to focus heavily on affordable lending and we’re going to create an affordable lending company and everybody who is inspired to work here will do that. It’s hard, because it’s something that has been going on for years. And now when you look again at the new market opportunity, it has to be fixed. And I think it’s a rearchitecting of how everybody looks at a loan and the opportunity to figure out how to resolve the problem. I wish I had a magic bullet, a magic answer for you, but I don’t. I think everyone is trying to figure out the sweet spot.

Sarah Wheeler:
Well one of the questions I have is in the industry in general, you have less bank locations, brick and mortar. And then of course this year, you can’t even get into the bank a lot of times. I was closing a loan and you had to make an appointment, you had to do all this stuff. Understandably. So as that goes, how then do you connect with the community that you’re trying to lend to when it’s online mostly? You know what I mean? Like, as opposed to like, hey, this is our bank, this is our location, we’re going to sponsor the local baseball team, soccer team, whatever, how do you connect with that community? And how do you educate that community?

Brian Woody White:
Yeah, I think right now we’re in special circumstances. And I think every month we learn something new about how to do banking during an international pandemic. I think things, obviously, if you look at the volume, technically, obviously things are doable, right? The volume is through the roof and people were closing loans. But I think when this is over with, like I said, it’s going to be a grassroots effort for us to really get back to the community banking, which I’m not sure big banks consider themselves community banks anymore, but I think every financial services company is going to realize, again, in order to work with this new marketplace, everybody’s going to be a community bank. That’s what it’s going to be. And that’s a grassroots effort. It looks different. And I think a new type of DNA is going to run through many financial services companies.

Sarah Wheeler:
Really great point and something that Joe Biden’s ascendant, the fact that he got elected president, now maybe people have to be paying attention more than they did. He hired somebody who formerly was in charge of the affirmatively furthering fair housing under Obama at HUD, I think to be the interim at HUD. All those things that maybe have been laying low a little bit in the last couple years, shouldn’t have been, but I think you’re going to have a different enforcement model and just a different, people are looking, people are going to be looking now.

Brian Woody White:
Right. And if you just took a look at a high level in terms of what Biden is talking about, he’s already starting with, he’s already published a number of components, a $15,000 tax credit for first time home buyers. There is a lot of things there that he’s talking about that will help, but we have to be realistic and remember that the minority community, whether it be at the COVID level or the savings impact level, was hit hard. So the question is, will the minority community recover from a financial standpoint to even take advantage of what Biden is about to do.

Brian Woody White:
So that’s to be said, but again, it’s going to be a grassroots effort. Even when we took a look at whatever was offered recently, in terms of the mortgage help and things like that, a lot of people in minority communities didn’t even know what it was, didn’t even know how to use it. So that grassroots piece is missing. It’s still missing. That’s why people just missed out because they didn’t know. So how we communicate to the community, it can’t all happen online. That’s nice. Maybe for millennials, but that’s not going to work across the board anymore.

Sarah Wheeler:
Yeah, I totally agree. So give us some insight. A lot of larger companies now have, like you, a Diversity and Inclusion Officer, they’ve really made it a priority, say you’re at a smaller company, say at a smaller lender or you’re an independent mortgage banker, what does that look like? What are some steps you can take just like from a high level, okay, what’s the low hanging fruit, what’s something I can do?

Brian Woody White:
Well, the first thing is when you start talking about diversity and inclusion and equity, that’s a personal conversation. Even though you’re talking at a high level, the people receiving the message, it’s a very personal conversation. And in order to have those kinds of conversations, everybody has to be comfortable, especially the executive, right? So that’s where the conversation really has to start. They have to be willing to say, “Hey, let’s have a meeting over here and talk about this. Let’s have a meeting over here and talk about that.”

Brian Woody White:
So for me, whatever company you’re in, you have to start that conversation at the top and see how it goes. Everything that I mentioned in terms of the pillars, that could be done at any time. You could examine your recruiting. You can try to get into more of the details. You can berate your recruiters if they’re not doing what they should do, which is the right thing. You can do those things today. But at the end of the day, if you realize that most of your recruiters, for example, don’t care about diversity and they don’t really care about what you’re talking about, in order for you to make that type of change, you’re going to have to have support.

Brian Woody White:

You have to start with management at some level, even if you’re the smartest person and you can figure out all these things to do it, won’t go anywhere. Because remember, if you have a bunch of recruiters that are horrible and you just want to get rid of them, you can’t just get rid of them. Some of those recruiters are probably friends or people that they’ve been doing business with for 20 years. And all of a sudden you’re saying, “These guys are no good. They’re not giving us diverse clients.” So you have to have that management conversation first. But I think everything else, if everybody’s open to the conversation, they’ll fall into place if everybody is truly feels it’s safe to be honest in the conversation.

Sarah Wheeler:
I do think too, there just has to, we all swim in the ocean, right? The ocean that we swim in affects us. And I feel like this is also what happened with me too, where all of a sudden in a very public way, it wasn’t okay to say those jokes or do those things or be that kind of jerk person. And people saw even if from their own heart, it wasn’t in there. They saw, hey, that’s not going to fly anymore. And even if I’m that person, I better change, or I better figure out a different thing because it’s just not acceptable anymore. And I think that this year has been a building factor for this for the African American community that this is not acceptable anymore, and you’re going to be held to count here. And so, like any cultural change, you’re going to have to either get on, or get off.

Brian Woody White:
Right, and I think the difference with Black Lives Matter and in this particular respect is that from a MeToo standpoint, that was really driven talking about treatment in the workplace, treating women a certain way. Whereas when you lead with a conversation and you say Black Lives Matter, the bigger issue in Black Lives Matter is not murdering people on the street. And it doesn’t exactly translate into business the way everybody wants it to. It helps drive a conversation, it doesn’t necessarily translate for all businesses the same way.

Brian Woody White:
So, I think you have to be willing to at least start the conversation and continue forward from a business standpoint, because I’ve had conversations out there where some companies are, you mentioned Black Lives Matter, they don’t even want to have the conversation because they think it’s a conversation about what’s happening between blacks and the police, and what does that have to do with business? And I’ve even had some people ask me, “Why are black people so against the police?” And having answered that question a thousand times, it gets confusing in business.

Sarah Wheeler:
That’s a great point. I mean, it is a harder translation for your point because all of the MeToo was about workplace discrimination. I mean, it started there. And so, I think that is a thing. If people are looking, what are some resources that you’ve found that have helped you or did you just have to start from scratch or did you find like, oh, the MBA has this great, I know they have a DNI initiative. I know other companies do, are you starting from scratch or were you building on what they’d already done?

Brian Woody White:

Mostly from scratch, but I was already familiar with the MBA. So, I immediately joined MBA. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of NAMBA, but I’m a member of NAMBA as well. I was already kind of in the mix, but I’m obviously much more focused right now. And I do a lot of webinars and I’ll read and today there is no shortage of information that’s for sure. So, if I want to be up 24 hours a day, seven days a week absorbing info, that’s what I’ll do.

Sarah Wheeler:
Well, we really appreciate your time coming on and just hearing from all the different facets of your career, right? From coming from that and then to make the switch and really making a difference there. Affordable housing is one of our main focuses of reporting this year. And as we do that, we’d love to talk to you again, but thank you so much for coming on.

Brian Woody White:
Oh, absolutely. Anytime, anytime.

Sarah Wheeler:

Been a blast. All right, thanks Woody.

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Lower mortgage rates attracting more homebuyers 

An often misguided premise I see on social media is that lower mortgage rates are doing nothing for housing demand. That’s ok — very few people are looking at the data without an agenda. However, the point of this tracker is to show you evidence that lower rates have already changed housing data. So, let’s […]

3d rendering of a row of luxury townhouses along a street

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