Turning geography from constraint to advantage in mortgage lending

“Knowledge is power,” said Kurt W. Strandson, president of Pinnacle Mortgage Corporation. In a mortgage market reshaped by digital processes and tighter rules, that power now separates lenders that stay ahead from those that are exposed. 

For Pinnacle Mortgage Corporation, geography is no longer a constraint – it is a competitive advantage. The firm already holds licenses in 24 states and is targeting 33 by 2026 because, as Strandson put it, “post the Covid pandemic, the mortgage industry has gone pretty much completely digital.” That shift shattered the idea that borrowers needed to sit across a desk from their loan officer. Hybrid and remote closings became routine, staff and sales teams sat wherever talent could be found, and any broker locked into a narrow footprint was choosing to run with less reach than the market made possible. 

As Pinnacle hired people in new states, those careers and family moves became commercial infrastructure rather than background noise. Alumni networks, hometown ties and relocated spouses all turned into referral routes that would have been wasted in a strictly local model. “The farther we can reach, the more referral business we can obtain and grow partnerships and relationships,” Strandson said, arguing that smaller and mid-sized brokers tied to a handful of jurisdictions were effectively capping what their loan officers could originate – and how far a relationship could travel when a client’s life crossed a state line. 

Product breadth as a competitive weapon 

That reach was only worth having if the product shelf fit the terrain on the ground. The differences between regions are sharp enough that a one-size-fits-all playbook looks less like efficiency and more like negligence. City borrowers are pushed toward high-balance and jumbo loans because prices leave them no alternative, while rural and suburban borrowers often work with rural development loans, acreage limits and local quirks in land use and collateral. In that environment, a thin menu quickly turns into a hard stop. 

Pinnacle built against that risk by treating breadth as a strategic asset and by spreading its business across a wide network of counterparties. “We have over 88 different lending partners,” Strandson said – not to chase volume for its own sake, but to place non-QM loans in locations where many lenders refuse to lend and to find portfolio options that can handle higher‑than‑average acreage or unusual property features when conventional underwriting will not touch them. 

Their internal motto, “faster, cheaper, more options,” might look different in New England than it does in Florida, the Midwest or lower‑balance markets in Pennsylvania and Ohio. The underlying rule is constant: the product menu has to reflect local price points and risk profiles rather than forcing borrowers into whatever happens to be on a narrow shelf. That discipline becomes harder as the state count grows – and it pushes the firm toward a second front, where regulation and business model collide. 

Compliance as strategy, not box-ticking 

On that front, Strandson has little patience for lenders that treat compliance as a box‑ticking race to the minimum. He has served as legislative chairman for his state mortgage bankers and brokers association since 2007 and has watched too many firms avoid doing the work up front, then scramble when an exam lands and discover they are “a day late and a dollar short.” 

Pinnacle’s answer is to build systems that exceed the baseline – running quarterly training where the rules only demand annual or semi‑annual sessions and embedding the expectation that “our approach has always been: be stewards of our profession, learn, know and comply, and do it systematically,” Strandson said. For Pinnacle, regulatory pressure becomes another arena where knowledge can be turned into leverage. 

While regulation frames the risk, Pinnacle’s competitive edge shows up most clearly in the cases it salvages after other lenders have walked away. One file involved a self‑employed borrower whose application had been wedged into the wrong product, triggering a late‑stage denial that could easily have killed the transaction. With a broader shelf and more experience in matching borrowers to specialist loans, Pinnacle moved the case into a structure that actually fit the underlying income and risk profile – and closed it within weeks. “We do that all the time,” Strandson said, making clear that this was not an outlier but a recurring feature of how the business competes. 

Choosing partners without getting boxed in 

This is where Strandson believes loyalty to a single wholesale platform becomes more constraint than strength. He is careful not to attack the big names, stressing that “we’re UWM fans, they’re a great company, [they] do a lot of great things for wholesale.” But he is equally clear that not every borrower belongs inside one firm’s wheelhouse – and that brokers who restrict themselves to one outlet are shrinking their own problem‑solving capacity. 

Refusing to “try to make it their product” when a file falls outside a lender’s risk appetite is, in his view, as much about protecting those partnerships as it is about serving the borrower in front of him and protecting his own firm from mispriced risk. That approach depends on having credible alternatives ready to go, which brings him back to licensing strategy and how quickly loan officers can be deployed where their clients actually live and work. 

Shifts in licensing rules have already made that multi‑lender, multi‑state stance easier to execute. The move from separate state exams to a uniform national test, combined with transitional licensing that lets experienced loan officers expand into new states under the umbrella of an already compliant firm, “made sensible changes to have licensing, but didn’t create barriers to it,” Strandson said. That, in turn, allows operations like Pinnacle to align their geographic strategy with the way clients move, rather than forcing borrowers to restart their journey with a new lender every time their employer or their family pulls them across a border. 

That mix of reach, product depth and regulatory fluency now doubles as a recruiting pitch and a client proposition – particularly for borrowers whose careers do not respect state lines. Strandson cited the example of a client working for a national company in New Mexico who was relocated and needed the mortgage strategy to adapt without restarting from scratch. In that case, his team was able to “make that pivot seamlessly and accommodate their transaction,” a standard he wants to apply across the map as Pinnacle pushes toward its goal of being licensed in all 50 states.