A Decade Building Tech for the Mortgage Industry

I spent a decade as a Chief Technology Officer (CTO) in the credit monitoring space. That means I built the tech underneath the mortgage industry. Lenders, brokers, and loan officers used our platform every day to pull data and make decisions.

We ran 7M+ monthly queries for 10,000 clients. A team of 12+ developers kept it running. From that seat, you learn who actually runs this industry. It is not who you think.

1. Relationships move the industry

Mortgage is a relationship business wearing a technology costume. Deals still close because someone trusts someone. The platforms matter. The data matters. But the phone call matters more.

The vendors who win are the ones loan officers actually like working with. Simple as that.

2. Data has to be instant or it is useless

A loan officer with a borrower on the phone does not have forty seconds. They barely have four. If the data is slow, they work around you. Then they stop calling.

We learned this the hard way. We migrated our database to SingleStore and took jobs that ran 24 to 48 hours down to 15 minutes. Speed was not a nice feature. Speed was the product.

3. The best operators answer their own phones

The brokers and lenders who impressed me most were not the biggest. They were the ones who picked up. A borrower has a question at 7 PM, somebody answers. A file has a problem, somebody owns it.

No ticket queue. No phone tree. A person.

What I do now

I run Eco Moving Utah, a moving tote rental company, and I am building Bin X, software for bin rental operators. Different industry. Same lessons.

Answer the phone. Make the data instant. Earn the relationship.

I put the ten mortgage people I would follow on LinkedIn in a post on my LinkedIn. These rules are why those ten made the list.

Trust but verify. That goes for data, and it goes for people too.