Rick Grant & Associates

Social Media. Need a quick look at the numbers? Check out this blog post and see why it’s important that you get a handle on this stuff.

And now we have another easy way to deliver podcast audio and video content directly to mobile phones. If you think iPods are great, the handheld phone/MP3 player/PDA/God-knows-what-else is going to be really great.

Get this podcasting stuff down. All of our content will come to us like this in the future.

Word on the street is that the mortgage business is in trouble. Serious trouble. Pack your stuff and move to high ground trouble, if you believe the story that came out today on USA Today.com.

“The mortgage industry plunged deeper into distress this week as two lenders said sagging home prices and higher interest rates are pushing many borrowers into delinquency…Shares of mortgage lenders fell across the board Thursday. Countrywide Financial and IndyMac Bancorp., the two biggest independent U.S. mortgage lenders, each fell more than 2%. Novastar Financial fell more than 11%, hitting a new 52-week low.”

Without getting into a long discussion on cycles and market trends and government agency intervention, let me just say that not every lender out there is buying it. America’s Broker Conduit (ABC), Melville, N.Y., for instance, is adding people at a fairly furious pace. H. Hilary Hamer was named the company’s new Senior Vice President of the Midwest Region earlier this month and last month the company hired Doug Hatch to be Branch Manager for the Las Vegas, Nevada branch. Hamer was previously with Well Fargo Home Mortgage as Senior Vice President, Central Division Manager, Institutional Lending. Hatch was a Vice President at Greenpoint Mortgage.

American Brokers Conduit (ABC) is the wholesale division of American Home Mortgage Investment Corporation, a publicly held Real Estate Investment Trust (NYSE: AHM). ABC operates nationwide and has built a business model based on a broker-centric strategy. At the end of Q3 2006 ABC was ranked as the 6th largest residential wholesale lender in the US with a market share of 3.88% according to National Mortgage News. The company works with 6,500 brokers through 33 wholesale branches in 21 states.

The company basically came out of nowhere to become a dominant player, which will not surprise you if you know CEO Don Henig. When he took over the management of the wholesale business in Q2 2002, American Brokers Conduit wasn’t even ranked in the top 100. Today, ABC produced just over half of the $15.5 billion in loan volume its parent company reported in 4Q06.

But can this business continue to grow when so many are scaling back operations, closing branches or going out of business?

I spoke to Lisa Schreiber, Executive Vice President for ABC about how she thinks that will happen.

“A lot of our competitors are still very focused on the transaction,” she said. “That’s important, but I think there are a lot of opportunities many are missing around partnering more closely with the broker.”

When I pointed out that many wholesale lenders are focused on the transaction because that’s where their brokers are focused, she agreed, but added that the lender has a responsibility that goes beyond that.

I have visited with Schreiber before and understand her company’s emphasis on broker training and how a lot of online real estate is devoted to it, but was impressed when she told me about the new initiative ABC launched to train its trainers.

“We’ve hired technology training specialists in each of our five regions,” she said. “They go out and help the Broker Relationship Managers (a special position inside ABC dedicated to supporting both the wholesale Account Executive and the broker) understand the technology we provide to brokers. Everyone inside is certified so they can, in turn, better train the brokers.”

Lots of lenders talk about providing training. Most mean brainwashing the brokers into thinking they are the only wholesale lender worth working with. When a lender takes its own medicine, on the other hand, is an indication that there might be a reason to make such a claim.

Only time will tell whether this strategy will take ABC through to the other side of the cycle. I’m not betting against them, and I’m not taking down this post. So we’ll look back and see in 2009.

Portellus Inc., Irvine, Calif., has hired Craig Anderson and Holt Crowder as business development mangers for its national outside sales team. Crowder was senior sales executive for Mortgage Cadence, Greenwood Village, Colo., and Anderson was vice president of East Coast sales for Beanstalk Networks/OpenClose Mortgage Technology Group, West Palm Beach, Fla.

In their roles at Portellus, both Anderson and Crowder will be responsible for nurturing new business opportunities for Portellus’ Enterprise Rules Management (ERM), Web-based Loan Origination System (LOS), and point-of-sale portal solutions.

Normally, marketing staff additions don’t interest me much, but I have written a lot about both Mortgage Cadence and Beanstalk/OpenClose. Both are strong firms with solid technology offerings. Portellus, by comparison, is a relative newcomer to the space. I have not seen a recent demo of its software.

Sometimes, salespeople move around because they just like to move around. Portellus has been aggressive in its promotional efforts over the past year and was smart to put Joe Bowerbank in charge of that. They may have just decided to throw some money at this problem and hired some experienced execs.

Or there might be something going on over there.

I’ve got to hand it to Brad Inman and his Inman News company. These guys really get out and try new things.

They were the first trade publication to host a group blog and featured some of the top thinkers in the industry. It faded away as these folks got busy, lack of effective moderation failed to keep the thinkers on track and, presumably, the link between writing and reward stretched thin, but for a while it was a very good read.

Inman still hosts its blog, though these days it’s mostly written by Inman reporters. Still, I often find it very interesting and have pointed to it in my own blogs more than once.

Now, Inman is trying something new. Well, new for us anyway. Wiki pages have been around for some time, with Wikipedia being the best known example. The basic idea is that you give a bunch of folks the ability to edit the Web page and a much better (or informative or interesting or even weird) page will result. Inman’s new wiki page is online now and I can’t wait to see how it develops.

New Media demands innovation from those who hope to benefit from the advantages it offers. Inman, as you probably know, offers its own industry innovation awards every year. This is another perfect example of the company taking its own medicine. Well done!

This is the era of plug and play. SOA, industry data and messaging standards, the open source movement facilitated by a practically free global network and a general reluctance to get locked into multi-million dollar proprietary platforms has all conspired to create an environment where technology players just naturally gravitate toward partnership. But that, in and of itself, is not enough to justify an 86% growth in Dynatek Plug-In partners?

Dynatek offers the MORvision loan origination system. I spoke to founder Jack Luhtanen for a recent Mortgage Banking article. It’s hard to argue with the fact that his company was utilizing a Services Oriented Architecture long before it was cool. Plug-In partners are all the service providers that lenders work with who have taken the time to integrate their software with MORvision.

The Livonia, Mich.-based company made the announcement earlier this month, reporting that its Plug-Ins and Partners increased from 110 to 125. Plug-In transactions also grew by 241,724, bringing the company’s two-year adjusted growth to 86%.

Dynatek added 15 new Plug-Ins in 2006. This represents 13.64% growth in the number of partners, brings the company’s grand total up to 125 Plug-Ins in 17 categories, and triples the number of choices available to MORvision customers since 2004.