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Special Reports
Reverse Mortgages
More Originators Offering Reverses
Taking a look at one of the new players
By Brad Finkelstein
The potential for growth in the reverse mortgage lending market has succeeded
in increasing the number of loan originators offering services to senior citizens.
Among the newer players in this market is Golden Gateway Financial here. The company's
chief executive, Eric Bachman, said the company started about a year and a half ago, although it only has been
dealing with consumers since November 2007. "We spent our first year building our technology, integrating
with the various lenders and getting our licensure set up," he said.
In fact, Mr. Bachman described Golden Gateway as "the first super broker"
in the reverse mortgage space. It has relationships with all of the major reverse mortgage lenders. "What
someone gets out of coming to our website is an apples-to-apples comparison of all of the products available to
them. So instead of going to Wells Fargo, BoA and the other various reverse mortgage lenders and either talking
with someone, or if they can find a calculator on each site, putting in their information each time, we go out
and hit each of those lenders with the consumer's information one time, pull back all of the loans relevant to
the consumer and then rank them in best-to-worst order based on how much they can get upfront, how much they can
get on a monthly basis or the interest rate," he said.
Unlike similar sites that consumers go to looking for forward mortgages, Golden
Gateway is not a lead generation site and it doesn't share any information with a lender until the consumer decides
to move forward on getting a reverse mortgage.
He admits to be pleasantly surprised by the response the site has received in
its brief existence. By January, it was already the most heavily traveled reverse mortgage website, according to
Compete.com, which measures Web traffic.
Education is one of the main thrusts of the website. Mr. Bachman called Golden
Gateway "educationally biased. We tell people when it is not the right time for them to do a reverse mortgage."
For those that are going forward with the process, the site provides tools for
them to determine which product best meets their needs, he said.
Mr. Bachman, while he has a financial services background with 20 years experience,
does not have any mortgage experience. "The way I got to it is I was looking at seniors and aging baby boomers
as a demographic group and trying to understand their financial needs," he said, pointing out this group is
demographically different than groups that went before or have come into existence since them.
In addition, the boomer generation is a large group "and I felt really understanding
how to service them would be very, very important."
As he did the research, he became more entranced by the group's characteristics,
including being well traveled and educated.
This group also bought homes at an unprecedented rate, Mr. Bachman said, but on
the other hand they have not been savers. "It became pretty obvious that this was a group that was going to
need to do some new and unusual things," he said.
The company is Web and phone based and that is where it gets practically all of
its applications.
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