MARCH 2010 O
MICHIGAN MORTGAGE PROFESSIONAL MAGAZINE
O www.NationalMortgageProfessional.com
Bruce Lawner, Senior Vice President of Wholesale, Presidents First Mortgage Bankers
26
Each month, National Mortgage Professional Magazine will focus on one of the industry’s top players in our “Mortgage Professional of the Month” feature. Our readers are encouraged to contact us by e-mail at newsroom@nmpmediacorp.com for consideration in being featured in a future “Mortgage Professional of the Month” column. This month, we had a chance to chat with Bruce Lawner, senior vice president of the wholesale division for Melville, N.Y.-based Presidents First Mortgage Bankers. Presidents First opened its doors in March of 2008. Bruce works on a daily basis with quality mortgage brokers to expand the wholesale division. Under Bruce’s leadership, Presidents First has experienced steady growth over the past two years. Bruce draws upon his 20-plus-year career in the mortgage and housing finance industry to lead Presidents First Mortgage Bankers. He began his career with a Mineola, N.Y.-based mortgage broker in 1986 as a loan officer, taking applications and specializing in condominium and co-op conversions. In 1989, he began his long journey into the mortgage banking
world and joined Arbor National Mortgage in Westbury, N.Y. as a senior loan officer. Earning great achievements such as the company’s President’s Club for high volume of originations and closings with his tenure there. He remained with Arbor until the company was sold to Bank of America in 1993, when he then moved to a mortgage banker in Melville, N.Y. in his first of many management roles as sales manager, responsible for all recruiting and the training of sales staff for the company. Bruce helped grow the company by working with all members of the operations staff on improving turn-time and increasing quality customer service. It was there that he began learning all facets of the mortgage banking industry. In 1995, Bruce became vice president of operations for a Westbury, N.Y.-based mortgage banker, obtaining his Direct Endorsement (DE) from the U.S. Department of Housing & Urban Development (HUD), overseeing all members of the operational staff, including processors, closers, funders and secondary marketing representatives. In 1996, he furthered his career as a sales manager for Roslyn Heights, N.Y.based PMCC Mortgage Corporation, a publicly-traded company. Bruce managed the company’s retail sales production team and was instrumental in increasing originations to over $1 billion. He was later promoted to executive vice president of sales. In 1999, Bruce became vice president of sales for Sterling National Mortgage in Great Neck, N.Y., managing the company’s retail sales department and specializing in the growth of FHA and Alt-A originations. In 2002, Bruce was recruited by president and chief executive officer, Frederick Assini, to join Franklin First Financial Ltd. in Melville, N.Y. as vice president of branch banking. He super-
vised 25 of the company’s branches, overseeing more than 500 employees in the retail division. At that time, there was only one last challenge in his career that had to be met, so in 2006, he partnered up as coowner and chief operating officer of Garden City, N.Y.-based Mortgage Source LLC, a Federal Housing Administration (FHA) direct lender. In 2008, Bruce returned to Franklin First Financial d/b/a Presidents First Mortgage Bankers as senior vice president of the wholesale division. Presidents First is a multi-state, fullservice mortgage banker that prides itself on its dedication to providing its customers with mortgage products at aggressive rates and industry-best service levels. How did you first get involved in the mortgage business? After graduating from SUNY College at Old Westbury in 1986 with a bachelor’s degree in business administration, I started working in the family business, an import/export brokerage based out of John F. Kennedy Airport. After about a year-and-a-half of doing that, I realized that working for the family might not be the best future for me. One of my friends at that time had a mortgage broker company. He told me how he was taking a lot of mortgage apps, and asked if I was interested in helping out on the weekends, taking applications on-site at condominium conversion projects, and offered to pay me to do so. Seeing how easy it was and the fact that I was making money on the weekend, I started to inquire more and more about the mortgage business and decided to leave the family business in 1988 and enter into the world of mortgage and housing finance. Do you feel that when you first started in the mortgage industry, you
were working on deals that might not make sense? Yes and no. In the late1980s and early 1990s, I specialized in co-op and condo conversions, and there were bushels of them. Some of the lenders back then, such as Citi Corp., Columbia Federal Savings Bank, Dime and some of the others, had these phenomenal products for people already living in a condo or co-op complex. They were offering 100 percent financing with no money down. So, it was fairly easy if someone had good credit and employment to get them these mortgages. Banks didn’t even qualify their borrowers because there were many noincome check programs available. Even though I had my own apprehensions that the applicants qualified, they were ultimately the final decision-maker.
“Right now, it is more challenging than ever to stay in this business. Some people love challenges in their life and some people thrive on pressure, while others may simply fold.”
Were there any points in your career where you didn’t have the luxury of having a captured audience like you did with the co-op conversion market? Absolutely. When that particular product and market dried up, we had to develop other areas to specialize in or other niches to market to. And that’s what we did. There were many new investors coming into the market, and they all wanted to gain market share; hence the birth of Alt-A, stated-income, no doc, etc. The LTVs kept rising higher and higher. to a point of 105 percent. That made the originator’s job a “no brainer.”