When Brian Clark’s early days as a loan officer didn’t go as planned, he started asking better questions. Who manages locks? Who runs reporting? How does pricing work? Those questions eventually led him to products and pricing leadership. In this episode of CCM Talks, he shares why keeping every option open can create a real competitive advantage.

Welcome back to another episode of CCM Talks. So today we are joined by Brian Clark. He is the Director of Product and Pricing here at CCM. Can't wait to dig into this one. Brian, welcome to the show.

BRIAN CLARK: Thanks, buddy.

BRIAN COVEY: So you've been in product and pricing, which everybody loves that department because we have lots of questions for you, but 17 years now?

Yeah. So I started at CrossCountry in 2008. I was a loan officer out of the gate. Right? So, product and pricing, I started taking over in 2016. But yeah, I mean, obviously I've been here since I think I was employee number 20. Now we're up to almost 8,000, something like that. Right? So it's been interesting to watch the growth of the company. I think like I said, out of the original 20 employees, I think 13 of them are still here, which is pretty cool. But yeah, it's been an interesting ride, to say the least.

BRIAN COVEY: Yeah. I find it's really cool. You're an originator before and then moved into this. Tell me a little bit about did you decide to do that or was that an opportunity that came up? How did that happened?

Market driven mostly. Right? 2008, not the best year to get in this industry. But yeah, my joke is I think when, within that first year, my entire pipeline, which was about six loans, I think when the interest rates went from 5 to 8%, my whole pipeline blew up. Right? So, yeah, a year had gone by, I don't think I closed a single loan or maybe close a loan. I went to my branch manager, and I was like, hey, what can we figure out here? And then from there, I sort of transitioned. I just started to learn as much as I possibly could without just trying to, you know, hammer the phones.

So I figured out who wants a credit pool, who does all the credit pools? How do we lock loans? Who's doing that? Who's managing this? So after a while, I was I kind of owned the accounting within the branch. I was doing our payroll. I started getting into, like, reporting and analytics.

So 2016 comes around and Ron kind of goes, hey, I need someone to focus on product. Because at the time, Brett was, you know, basically rolling out all of our investors, but he also oversaw underwriting and secondary. So we didn't roll out many investors back then. So I took that on. And it was funny at the time, I told Ron, I'm like, well, I don't think that's going to be a full-time job, like, what else can I do? Yeah, and here we are now, we've probably rolled out 3,000 products and hundreds of investors later. Right? So it's been an interesting couple years.

Oh yeah. We love it. We love it. And I'm sure you want to give some advice back. I always think about this, what do you wish every LO knew about pricing strategy?

Yeah, obviously it's important. It's a part of the job. And we want everyone to be as educated as humanly possible. A lot of our originators subscribe to the MBS, you know, websites and newsletters, which is good. We want that, right? The more informed they are, the better it is for the originator and the sales and the consumers. Right?

So the biggest misconception I think we get is these guys will log in and they see the 5.0 coupon is up 25 basis points today. Right? But interest rates and coupons aren't necessarily the same thing. Right? Certain interest rates go in certain coupons and others don't. So a lot of times people log in and they see that big green number and they expect the rate sheets to be that much better that day. But whether or not realizing is they're looking at 7%, that does not go on the 5.0 coupon, right?

So I think that's the biggest thing. It's just they're there, see it, but just kind of like getting them to figure out the big picture, right? It's certain parts of the rate sheet might get it better by 25 basis points today. Some of them might not get better at all. And that all just depends on where the interest rates kind of slot. So I think that's probably the biggest thing we get. The most common.

BRIAN COVEY: Yeah. And I always try to study and stay up on that. But then I come ask the experts.

BRIAN CLARK: That’s what we’re there for.

BRIAN COVEY: What's the next innovation you see, Brian, that's coming out? That's got you excited?

Yeah. So there's a lot of big things we've been working on like across the company. But I think the most interesting thing, just because of the timing of it, Rapid Refi. I mean, what those guys have built is really impressive. Again, the timing of it is great. These interest rates are going to come down and we're going to be ready for it. There was a cool demo this morning. What's nice about too, is not only does it creates a file for you almost instantaneously, which saves you so much time and energy, but it finds the opportunities. It'll sit on your existing pipeline or your close loan pipeline and look and say, hey, the Covi file looks like it's going to, the interest rate is enough of a benefit. We should probably reach out to him.

But there was a cool demo this morning where I think we had a live time ticker of starting a refi with Rapid Refi, and then we had one doing it through Encompass. Rapid Refi that in a minute, 14 seconds, and the Encompass one was still going when the meeting ended. So that's a big one because I think in the timing of the market, that's going to make our loan officers’ job so much better.

BRIAN COVEY: Yeah, we're fired up about it.

BRIAN CLARK: Yeah.

BRIAN COVEY: I'm ready. I watch that demo and I go, wow, that's a game changer of identifying and then moving it through. How does technology play a role into your daily like decisions you make and strategy?

Sure. So for me, I'm a little bit of a data nerd. So I've worked on a lot of the tech stack, some of the Price Pro and product. I've worked on a lot of those types of things. But the other big thing where I find myself is, I built a lot of automations, mostly for reporting and analytics. And honestly, metrics, like I have metrics and dashboards on anything you can imagine. Right? So we'll have files get ran throughout the day for pricing color, for example. I get metrics on if we did a training on Price Pro last week, was there an impact? Did I see an uptick in usage? If not, the training might not have been a very good. Right? We need to do a training again and maybe we can tweak it.

I've got metrics on which products are performing, which ones are underperforming. If I think a product should be performing better, it's time for a spotlight and maybe, an ad hoc training. Right? So it's, it's definitely part of the game, but we, we try to keep an eye on all the, all the gauges.

BRIAN COVEY: I love you guys. You do a great job. So I got ask for, you know, we've all had those kind of errors that happened and all that. Is there been anything that's rolled out like a lesson you've learned from maybe a rollout that didn't go so well?

Sure. So I go back to 2016 actually. So when we took over products, it was myself and Anthony Vigliucci who’s our price manager. He was my first hire, so a two man team, and we roll out all these products. Right? And that first year, I mean we killed it. I think we rolled out like 17 or 18 investors in one year. It was actually right when we got into the state of New York. So the guys from New York came, and New York's its own animal, so you got to have the New York investors.

So we do all this work, we create these SOPs, we get it all rolled up. And a lot of them, you look back at that first year and they didn't use any of it. And that was frustrating. And it was just like, I did all this work like, what are we doing? But what I learned then, and I've it's I've seen it time and time again, a lot of the time it's not necessarily using the products. It's one just saying you have it so that you can offer it. It's a door opener and we want to open every door humanly … we never want to say that we can't do a loan. That's kind of our motto.

But I've also realized to a lot of those investors that we were all out that we never used, I find us two years later tapping into that resource because, it's obviously not that you forgot you had it, but maybe the market shifted and that little bank or that credit union stepped up, and we just kill it when we have it and we're the only one who does. So I think that's that's the biggest thing I've learned is don't get stressed out over usage because sometimes it's not the numbers.

BRIAN COVEY: Yeah, I love that mentality of we're going to find some way to make this loan work.

BRIAN CLARK: Yeah.

BRIAN COVEY: And it's awesome. What's your biggest prediction for the next 12 months? What's Brian say to the future?

I hate these. Chaos, more chaos. No, I think we all agree. I think rates are going to come down. So we're just going to continue to see volume pick up. We're going to do more loans. I think we've put ourselves in a really good position with the tools that we've built, the marketing that we have, the products that we have and the technology that we have. I think we're primed and ready to take off. So I just think over the next year we're going to continue to see some more growth. And I think we're going to continue to like fill that gap as being the number one retail mortgage company.

BRIAN COVEY: Yeah, number one's a good spot to be. What's got you excited next year, project maybe that you're leading or you're proud of the team that's going to have us ready next year when all that does come?

Yeah. So the two big things that I think I've worked, and that we continue to work on, because they're always a work in progress, you can't just roll something and be done with it. Right? It's Price Pro, which is we've effectively taken what you do in the product and pricing engine, and we've rebuilt it from scratch within LO One and Cube. Right?

So while me and you are having this conversation, I could have my hand or the table extending a lock, right? So, I could be at my kid's baseball game locking a loan because I think the market's going to move or I'm out in the golf course and I need to get an updated loan for CTC. I can do all that thing from my phone. And it's not just the phone or being on the desktop, it's just so much faster. Where I think that's a huge one.

The other one is probably Product Finder. So product finder, we rolled out two years ago, we're about to make some pretty serious enhancements to that as well. But it's effectively it sits on your pipeline and it keeps an eye on if an originator locks it a loan with where we think there might be a more advantageous product out there. So we'll kind of within ten minutes you're going to get an email says, hey, was there any reason you didn't lock it with this program? Because it looks like it qualifies? In about a year, a little over a year, we've converted 1,500 loans, saved $3 million in pricing and 500 grand in down payment assistance just on Product Guardian. And that's going to continue to get better because we're just going to keep adding different variables to keep an eye on.

BRIAN COVEY: Yeah, I love it. Well, last question, as you think about pricing and all that at CCM, you've been in the role for 17 years, you had all these different things. I'm loving the journey there. Somebody is listening to that and kind of learning about CCM, what makes our group different in product and pricing?

I really believe everyone says this, but I we’re a leader. I mean, I talk to people from every company in the country. Right? What we have from a product offering, I’ve even talked about our securitization and our non-QM products. We have our jumbo investors, and anyone could ever use. Like I said earlier, there is never a loan that can come in here that we cannot do. And the biggest thing that motivates us, and it's a chip on your shoulder, if we find out we said no to a loan and one of our competitors did it, it pisses us off. So that makes us hungry and we don't want it to happen. We try to stay ahead of it.

So I think that's the biggest difference between us and anyone else. If a loan is doable, we want to do it. Whether it's having no agency overlays. If Fannie, Freddie or Ginnie will buy the loan, then why should I put overlays on it? So if you got a low FICO Score or whatever it might be like, we want it like we can do those loans. And that's okay.

And you add on to that that we're servicing so much. Our servicing book is going to be close to $200 billion pretty soon. We're retaining almost 90% of our products. I mean that's huge. That's going to give our loan officers just so many opportunities because they're not going to have to handle and deal with the consumer direct channels all over the country calling their borrowers because we own it. Right? So that's a huge, huge thing for our teams.

BRIAN COVEY: I love it and it's been awesome. I appreciate you guys. You help us out quite a bit every day.

BRIAN CLARK: You're welcome.

You guys, it's been another CCM Talks with Brian Clark. You can see why we're winning in product and pricing. And if this is excited you and you want to know more, reach out to us and find out what it be like working at CrossCountry Mortgage.