Bay Equity Home Loans has announced that Valencia, Calif.-based TriStar Home Loans has joined its team of retail branches. TriStar Home Loans was co-founded by Hady Breidy in June 2000. The company currently has five employees in addition to eight loan officers and occupies a 5,500-sq. ft. space. TriStar states that approximately 70 percent of their monthly volume funded as purchase transactions.
Bay Equity was founded in June 2007 by three brothers, Brett, Jon and Casey McGovern, and funded its first loan 11 months later. To date, the firm has funded more than 7,500 loans totaling more than $3 billion. The company is headquartered in the heart of San Francisco’s Financial District.
“Because of all the regulatory changes impacting mortgage brokers, we began to consider becoming mortgage bankers about two years ago,” said Breidy, CEO of TriStar Home Loans, whose company does an annual volume of approximately $125 million. “We spoke with a couple of lenders and those discussions, which seemed very promising, ended very disappointing. Since we had done business with Bay Equity on the wholesale side for quite some time, the [McGovern] brothers asked if we would visit them and check out the retail side of their business. They showed us what they do, shared with us their operations and their business model. We discovered that they had a great deal of integrity and that they deliver on their promises, and they’re young, energetic, and hungry to grow.”
The McGoverns built Bay Equity on a combination of innovation and agility with just the right amount of aggressiveness. Being a direct lender did not make them unique; a focus on technological innovation and premier customer service did. Consequently, Bay Equity quickly fashioned a reputation as a skilled team of trustworthy professionals—a team that has grown to more than 185 employees.
“The guys at TriStar Home Loans–Hady Breidy, Curt Kravitz and Jim Doty–are extremely well established in their market and do consistent high volume business in a segment of the market that they have been successful in for a long time,” said Brett McGovern, president of Bay Equity Home Loans. “They have been sending wholesale loans to us for some time, so when they decided to consider segueing from the mortgage broker side of the business to the banking side, we were on their short list. The more we talked the more we realized we were a good fit for each other. By joining the Bay Equity team, they can focus on what they do best and turn a lot of the administrative responsibility over to us.”
