Even without Two Harbors, UWM was already building a servicing operation hoping to keep borrowers happy and connected to their broker
Even before United Wholesale Mortgage (UWM) made its play to acquire Two Harbors Investment Corp. and its servicing book, the groundwork was being laid to build its own in-house servicing department.
So when the Two Harbors deal didn’t work out last week, the company had already planned for a servicing future regardless.
UWM's in-house servicing operation was already live when the company held its annual UWM Live event in mid-May, with new loans going directly into the platform and a large batch of existing loans set to be transferred on June 1.
Melinda Wilner (pictured top), chief operating officer of UWM, led the process to help build that servicing department. With years of origination experience, she knew exactly what she wanted the company’s servicing to be, based on years of frustrating experience with subservicers.
"Those companies are in business to make money," Wilner told Mortgage Professional America at UWM Live. "They do the minimum that you need to do. They keep their expenses as low as they possibly can so that they can have as much profit when it's done. And that's where just doing the minimum in any business, in any part of life, really is not the best.
“Customers would tell us, ‘The hold times are so long. I don’t want to deal with this.’ So it's very cool to be in full control of that entire thing and do it in the UWM way."
Building from scratch
Wilner came into the servicing build with an outsider's eyes. She spent 15 years running UWM's origination operation, and her read on the servicing world before UWM started building its own was not flattering.
The core problem is structural, she said. Subservicers are businesses built to maximize profit on a contracted margin. One conversation from her research phase stayed with her.
"One of them told me once: if your clients are too happy, you're spending too much money servicing," Wilner said. "That's so messed up.”
She has hired experienced servicing veterans to build the new operation. They have been at other servicers for 20 years, she said, and nobody had ever presented them with this kind of vision.
The bigger shift is in how UWM thinks about the borrower experience before anything goes wrong, Wilner said. The servicing industry has long been reactive, with borrowers opening confusing statements, feeling blindsided by escrow adjustments, and calling in angry.
"You want to get them before they get upset," she said. "You want to lay out expectations so they are not surprised, because that's what causes the upset. The ability to leverage text messages and videos and stuff like that is pretty amazing. How do you arm them with that information earlier in the process even? Hey, in X months from now, here's what you might see."
For brokers, the payoff is in what happens between transactions. She said if customers remain happy throughout the servicing process, they’re more likely to stay with UWM, and therefore their broker, when it’s time to make a move.
"Those customers remain happy through the process," Wilner said. "So when Mia calls them to say, ‘Hey, let's talk about a refinance,’ they're not thinking, ‘Oh, right, get me out of this place.’ The broker is not involved in servicing it, but the good from that will come back to them."
The woman behind the build
Wilner is one of the most senior women in the mortgage industry. Samantha Shelton, a broker from the Detroit suburbs, mentioned both Wilner and UWM chief marketing officer Sarah DeCiantis when asked about role models earlier this year. Wilner said she took a while to see herself that way.
"It's more recent in my path that I've tried to be a bigger part of that," she said. "Woman, man, child, adult — everybody needs somebody to hold them accountable, to help push them, somebody to look up to. Learning to bet on people and the things that I see in them that they might not even see themselves — that's what I try and focus on."
She traces the foundation of her work ethic to her father. He hauled cement in the Detroit area, waking at 3:30 a.m. and getting home around 7 p.m., six days a week.
"The difference between him and me is he hated it," she said. "He hated who he worked for. Which was then like, okay, one, how do you make sure that you love what you do? And two, how do you create that environment for others who work for you?"
She said he gave her something she has used every day since.
"He's the one that said, ‘You can do anything you want to do,’" Wilner said. "Anything you put your mind to, you'll be able to do it. So that, mixed with hard work, that was the recipe for success that I got from my dad."
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