Rocket Pro TPO’s Austin Niemiec on strengthening broker partnerships in 2022

This week, HousingWire’s Editor-in-Chief Sarah Wheeler interviews Austin Niemiec, executive vice president of Rocket Pro TPO. In this sponsored episode, Niemiec discusses the importance of strengthening broker partnerships in 2022.

Here is a small preview of the interview, which has been lightly edited for length and clarity:

Sarah Wheeler: Real estate, mortgage and fintech companies are converging like never before. First, where does Rocket fit? Second, who do you think is going to be the first to get to a truly end-to-end digital home-buying transaction/experience?

Austin Niemiec: That’s a very good question. And you’re right, mortgage companies are trying to understand how to get into title and real estate, while real estate companies are trying to get into mortgage. This is because margins are expected to get tight in all of those aspects. If you have a model line business, when you’re big, like a lot of these companies out there, you can be in trouble pretty quickly. We figured this out a long time ago, and that’s the beautiful thing about Rocket. We said we’ll do just one thing, and that’s it because it’s very tough to be resilient. Some of our competitors try to beat us up about the fact we have a lot of businesses. However, I think it’s our biggest advantage for the broker community as we have the largest retail mortgage company in America and we’re well capitalized. Additionally, for a very long time, we’ve had the largest title companies in America. We also have auto, personal and buisnes loans, and so on. Because of this diversification, we’re able to stand strong, just like we did during COVID, and as things get tough here in the future, we’re gonna stand strong for the broker community.

The Housing News podcast explores the most important topics happening in mortgage, real estate, and fintech. Each week a new mortgage or real estate executive joins the show to add perspective to the top stories crossing HousingWire’s news desk. Hosted by Sarah Wheeler and produced by Alcynna Lloyd.