Blue Collar Angel

On The Air

When she landed in the mortgage business in 2005, Conley worked for a consumer-direct company that purchased trigger leads. Nowadays she wouldn’t even dream of using that strategy.

“I wanted a different perspective. I wanted to have a different voice. I wanted to have a different message. And so I started doing different things,” she explains. “I think the key to consumer direct marketing is that you have to tell stories.”

Conley has taken to reaching potential borrowers over the airwaves. This marks the sixth year of “From A House to a Home with Jen and Mark” — her Monday show on 94 Country WKKJ FM, which she co-hosts with broker Mark Cenci of ERA Martin & Associates. She does radio spots the rest of the week.

“Jen and I came together to help each other market and really educate the general public on the industry from a real estate perspective and a mortgage perspective,” says Cenci, who has been an agent more than 28 years.

He values and respects Conley’s “proactive approach” to securing loans. “It’s about building relationships,” Cenci says. “Jen and her company are hardworking people and they will go out of their way at all times, beyond what most lenders are willing to do.”

No ‘Nos’

To put it simply, Conley’s team doesn’t have a ‘No’ file when it comes to approving home loans.

“We have a ‘not right now’ file, but we’re going to give you a plan and we’re going to get you into that plan and get you into a home,” she says.

Southern Ohio was hit hard by the opioid epidemic, with aptly-nicknamed “pill mills” rocking a region anchored by a largely lower- to middle-income, blue collar workforce. Many residents of Portsmouth and area towns are now in recovery and leaning on their community to lift them up.

“We do outreach to try to help people that have been through recovery because there’s a stigma here,” Conley says.

One of her two sons is a recovery counselor at a local facility. Mother and son are collaborating on a program to teach patient-clients who have achieved sobriety how to rebuild their credit.

“I’ve had more than one second chance in my life,” Conley says. “We focus on helping those people as much as we can.”

Like many Americans, she and her husband were both laid off and went through bankruptcy and foreclosure following the 2008 financial crisis. As a loan originator, Conley was ashamed of this for a long time, but eventually came to the realization that her story could resonate with people.

“I did all the wrong things, and I came back from it,” she says. “People trust me more now because I told the truth. Talk about the hard stuff. Talk about the things that no one wants to talk about. Because when you do that, you stand out.”

Instead of the high-brow, low-risk borrowers that present easy-peasy, Conley’s team works hard to help everyday folks and families achieve their picket fence dreams.

“Those are the people who I talk to because that’s what America is to me,” she says. “It’s not the Kardashians. It’s the people going to work every day making our furniture and our paper, driving trucks to bring us our food. My husband has worked either in a factory or some kind of plant our entire marriage. That’s the majority of our people here, and I think that’s the majority of the people across the country. We’re just like you and we want to help.”

A Strong Team

November will mark Conley’s 18th year in mortgages — the only industry that has kept her attention.

“I love what I do. I think I’ve stayed in this for so long because nothing is the same,” she says. “It changes every single day, sometimes multiple times a day. I never get bored.”

One unique thing Conley did at Hometown was require in-person transactions. An office rule stated that people must walk in to fill out a loan application versus doing it online or over the phone. It may surprise some, but this old-school standard was championed by the mostly 20- and 30-somethings who worked for Conley.

Conley says, “Every younger generation always gets a bad rap, right? It’s like, oh … they’re lazy, they’re this, they’re that. I can give you a list as long as my arm of people 50 years old that are lazy. That has nothing to do with how old they are. It’s who they are, how they were raised, and what they were taught."

She said most of her Hometown team was 33 and under. "They work so hard, but here’s the difference. They’re way more efficient than we were. When I transitioned to the majority of the staff being young, our process got better, our quality got better,” Conley said.

Her older son runs the team’s processing operations and his childhood friend Katie Ward is the loan officer assistant and the team’s main contact for borrowers and Realtors.

“Jen is easily the greatest boss I’ve ever had,” Katie Ward, her former loan officer assistant at Hometown, says. “She’s created something really special. The environment we work in is so relaxed and I think that’s really important because the mortgage industry is already stressful enough. Having a place where we can come and work and lean on each other, it really changes things.”

Ward financed her own home through Hometown Lenders before she was even hired.

“A lot of people think they’re going to be stuck renting forever,” she says. “It’s really exciting to let people know you can own a home. We never say no. It might take some work but we are in it for the long haul.”

A Disruptor

Conley is no stranger to breaking the mold.

“I’ve always been a disruptor my entire life. Ask any teacher I had, I was a disruptor,” she says. “And I feel like I’ve also done that in mortgage. The norm is to say, let’s get this perfect file. And I’m like, you know what? I don’t want you to be perfect. I wanna help you get into a home.”

She and her team take pride in the fact that they have no secrets, hidden fees, or surprises.

“We literally go over the loan estimate line by line, and we tell them where every single penny is going,” Conley says. “I do not want to go to [the grocery store] and have to go down a different aisle because I’m ashamed of what I did to you. I can’t live my life like that. When I see people in the store, I’m like, how’s the house? How’s the kids? I’m happy to see people and I don’t shy away from that because we are so transparent.”

Hometown Lenders, which is based in Alabama, embraced Conley’s personality and professional values when she worked there.

“Hometown [let] me be me and [didn't] say, you’re too much, you’re too loud, you’re too opinionated. You need to sit down, you need to be quiet. They [said], you know what? We’re going to put you on the stage ‘cause you’re awesome. That’s hard to find for women in this business.”

(Editor's note: This story has been updated to reflect Jen Conley's new employment as of September 2023 as regional vice president of Home Loans by Jen, a DBA of Gold Star Financial Mortgage Corp. Her employment changed after this issue was originally published.)