Journeyman

Down in the darkness, time ceased to have meaning.

Minutes became hours… hours, days. The space where Thuan Nguyen found himself — a tiny, cramped underground cell in a Vietnamese prison — was singularly designed for psychological torment: no light, no food, no water. He could barely move.

His only crime? Trying to leave his homeland in search of a better life. And for that, Nguyen, only 14 years old, had been placed in solitary confinement. How could he not feel utterly powerless and abandoned by the world, on the brink of breaking? His father had left years ago; his mother believed he was dead; and his older brother was confined in another part of the prison.

Suffering in solitude, Nguyen knew that whatever choice he made now would define him and the path he would follow. Would he get out of this godforsaken cell and somehow find a way to the West, or give up and languish here, lost and alone? Would he push through the pain, or succumb to the silence and admit defeat? Would he pursue the promise of a bright future in America, or would all of his dreams die here in the dark?

From the depths of despair, Nguyen made his choice.

Fleeing Vietnam

Thuan Nguyen, now age 52, was born in a small province of the former South Vietnam. The war had ended just one year earlier, and the country was unified under a Communist regime, leading hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese refugees to flee the country every year.

Photos in the below timeline are for illustration purposes only.

1976

The country not only suffered from post-war damages, but food shortages and widespread poverty due to Western sanctions that were imposed shortly thereafter. “It was a third-world country,” Nguyen said. “And my family was very poor as well.”

1986

At 10 years old, Nguyen was given hope of escaping when his father emigrated to the U.S. with a plan to sponsor visas for the rest of the family. But that hope faded as one, two, three years passed and no visas arrived. As more refugees fled the country each year, Asian and Western countries began to close their borders.

1988

Feeling powerless and struggling with his father’s absence, Nguyen recalls how “nobody would teach me anything. Basically, I was on the street all day doing whatever I wanted to do.”

1991

“It took too long for my dad to sponsor us,” Nguyen said. “So, when I was fourteen, my brother and I tried to escape Vietnam by boat.”

Their journey was characterized by “many days without adequate food and water,” in a small, pontoon-sized boat overloaded with upwards of 40 people. Nguyen and his brother made multiple attempts to flee this way, and, “We were caught a few times,” he confesses. But it was their most successful attempt that had been the most devastating.

Nguyen and his brother managed to cross the South China Sea into Thailand. “We were so happy thinking that the Thailand government will take us in and allow us to be refugees [and] to be transferred to the U.S.,” Nguyen said. “But they changed the policy. So they pulled us into international waters, took away our compass, and we lost direction.” Eventually, they ended up back in Vietnam.

The punishment for an attempted escape, even for young boys, was three months in jail. And for three months, Nguyen said, “My mother thought that we were dead.”

After being apprehended by Vietnamese forces a few times already, Nguyen and his brother knew what to expect in jail. But this time, they were separated, and 14-year-old Nguyen was led to a different kind of cell.

“One time [the jail] ran out of room, so they put me in solitary confinement,” Nguyen said, which was a common punishment for prisoners of war (POWs) in Vietnam. “There’s no light; it’s a little hole… I was in there for a week.”

“I will never forget those times,” Nguyen continued, “because you have nothing to do but look at the walls around you. It gave me a lot of motivation to change my life.”

1992

Ten years later, using a U.S. sponsorship from his father, Nguyen and his family had all finally made it to America. Reflecting on the surreal moment when Los Angeles skyscrapers poked into view, he says, “I saw the high rise buildings, the highways, the freeway, and — the cars! We never [rode] in a car when we were in Vietnam. The fancy restaurants or any fancy dinner, I’d never ever consider it. Only street food; that’s all we had in Vietnam.”

Nguyen hardly spoke English and had no formal education when he first stepped onto U.S. soil. This meant — even in the land of opportunity — employment options were limited. Still, Nguyen was eager to make money however he could, and began working two full-time jobs, one of which tied him to an assembly line for 12+ hours per day earning $4.25 per hour.

Solitary Defiance

“I counted every dollar [and] cent that I could earn and save,” Nguyen said, “Back then, I was thinking that my dream was to make $8 or $9 an hour.”

However, had he earned more, Nguyen says he might not have been motivated to pursue a formal education. In 1993, he attended Orange Coast Community College (OCC) in Costa Mesa, Calif., to study business — and tried to teach himself to speak English. “At 20 years old, learning another language is not easy,” he acknowledges.

After earning his Associate’s Degree, Nguyen was elated to find that he was accepted into the University of California’s Berkeley School of Business, which he knew to be “a famous public university in the U.S.” Here, too, Nguyen’s hard work paid off: of two people in his graduating class who received highest honors in their major, Nguyen was one.

Thuan Nguyen pictured in 2023, the year he reinvented Loan Factory, following severe rate hikes in 2022 that dried out the once-booming refinance market. At the time, more than 90% of Loan Factory’s business came from refinance loans. By the end of 2023, 84% of the business came from purchase loans.

Thuan Nguyen pictured in 2023, the year he reinvented Loan Factory, following severe rate hikes in 2022 that dried out the once-booming refinance market. At the time, more than 90% of Loan Factory’s business came from refinance loans. By the end of 2023, 84% of the business came from purchase loans.

He came into the workforce as the “Dot Com” era was in full swing, and “nerds” like him were becoming wealthy seemingly overnight. “I look around all my friends who work for a technology company, and they have stock options. They became millionaires.”

This motivated Nguyen to return to school for a Masters in Information Management and Systems (MIMS) degree. Yet, by the time he finished the program, the Dot-Com bubble had burst, so he worked for Morgan Stanley as a data analyst. A high-paying job (albeit “pretty boring”) that he stayed with for six years, he learned that “in a corporate environment, it’s hard to climb the ladder.”

Once again, Nguyen felt stuck — until he bought his first house in San Jose, Calif., and saw that his mortgage broker made about $4,000 from that one purchase. “I saw that people could change their life,” Nguyen said. ”And I always wanted to own my own business.”

The Outsider

All of the competing mega-brokerage owners had years of experience in the mortgage or real estate industry, including many who achieved “top originator” status in their company or region, before opening up their own broker shop.

In 2006, Nguyen founded Loan Factory, Inc., without any mortgage lending experience or knowhow. A mirror of his childhood experience, “nobody helped me,” Nguyen says.

With no mentors to guide him, Nguyen learned the business by asking his account executives (AEs) what to do — “a very difficult way to learn” he says. “I called the AE up and said, ‘Hey, I have a loan, what should I do?’ There was no system, no process, no one to teach me if I have a problem, and no one answered me. I had to call the AE to ask questions.”

Without a customer base or the tactics for generating leads, however, Loan Factory couldn’t sustain itself. Nguyen kept it open as a side business for the next three years while working for a big tech startup, Guidewire Software, in Silicon Valley. Lacking the expertise of a top originator and the social skills to communicate well, Nguyen’s strategy revolved around working hard to get his client the lowest rate.

“I fight for them,” he says. “I give them a super low rate, and they are surprised that I work so hard for them. I made very little money, but I did not care. My goal is not to make a lot of money. My goal is to make sure my clients will be happy with me.”

Two years later, Nguyen’s work ethic began to pay off as word-of-mouth customer referrals started to increase business.

In 2010, while working from home with no overhead, Nguyen estimates that he netted about $28,000 per month. That encouraged him to hire a full-time processor in 2010, increasing his production further. In 2011, he bought an office building and began hiring full-time staff with the goal of tripling his income.

As a Vietnamese mortgage broker in the U.S., Nguyen doesn’t fit the profile of a typical loan officer, nor does he fit the cultural expectations of his own community. At first, Nguyen’s family, including his parents, wife, and even his wife’s family did not approve of his decision to start up a mortgage company.

“In our culture, we still want to be doctors, lawyers, or engineers with a stable income that everyone respects,” Nguyen explains. “As a real estate agent or broker, it's very unpredictable and hard and everyone is aware of that.”

However, he did fit into an Vietnamese enclave located in the heart of San Jose, Calif., known as Little Saigon. Many refugees who fled Vietnam after the Fall of Saigon established communities throughout Southern California in Orange, Santa Clara, and Los Angeles counties. San Jose, however, holds the largest number of Vietnamese residents of any city outside Vietnam. And Nguyen couldn’t help but notice, no Vietnamese-owned brokerage or mortgage lender operated in the city.

In the land of opportunity, Nguyen had hit the jackpot.

Prior to Loan Factory’s growth during the 2020 refinance boom, nearly all of Loan Factory’s clients were Vietnamese, as was his staff. But, his 20 LOs did not have the same reputation as Nguyen, who had become an expert originator at that point. “They know the guidelines [and] I work hard for them. So they trust me only,” he said, which buried him in more work.

At the time, Nguyen was using the Calyx Point LOS system, which offered no way for Nguyen to manage his pipeline. Using an index card, Nguyen explained that he’d write down the client’s name, loan status, and any notes, then pin it onto a giant board in his office, moving clients through the process via his physical pipeline.

Before Thuan Nguyen mastered the use of artificial intelligence, he relied on sticky notes to manage his pipeline of loans. The photo shows a small piece of the paper trail that was posted on his office whiteboard in 2013.

Before Thuan Nguyen mastered the use of artificial intelligence, he relied on sticky notes to manage his pipeline of loans. The photo shows a small piece of the paper trail that was posted on his office whiteboard in 2013.

Pipeline to Prosperity

It was a time-consuming, unsustainable process that stunted his company’s growth, so Nguyen reached out to his friend from Guidewire, a software engineer in Silicon Valley.

“I asked him, ‘How about you write me some little software to help me manage my pipeline? You’re tracking the status, that’s all. It’s more like Excel, but it’s a software [system],’” Nguyen said. The first iteration was as a loan origination software (LOS) system, then they added a customer relationship management (CRM) system and a point of sales solution (POS) system.

They eventually configured the software to be a compliance tool, a marketing tool, and an accounting tool. “It’s like an all-in-one platform… With our software, the loan officer or broker doesn’t have to use any other software,” Nguyen said. “The customers love it.”

This automated framework, built into an all-in-one platform called MOSO, sped up the origination process and made it much easier for his loan officers to handle files from open to close by themselves. Anytime Nguyen had to overcome a problem with a loan, he’d build the solution into the MOSO system, which aided other LOs running into the same issue.

“The software is a depository of all the knowledge that we have,” Nguyen says.

“It's like cutting my arms and my legs. So I decided that instead of letting people go, I should try my best to bring in more business.”
Thuan Nguyen

Thuan Nguyen, on the far right, pictured with his software team in 2016.

Bust And Boom

It was fortunate that Loan Factory had MOSO in place before the tidal wave of refinances hit with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and historically-low interest rates. In 2020, the company’s dollar volume surged 300%. The following year, Nguyen became the first mortgage broker to break the $2 billion mark.

Borrowers kept refinancing their mortgages and, thanks to the MOSO system, loan officers kept processing those applications at a record pace. Loan Factory was a well-oiled refinancing machine, which comprised more than 90% of its business from 2019 to mid-2022. Yet, the sudden interest rate spike in late 2022 put Loan Factory’s gains in perspective.

“After running the business for so long, I was so confident,” Nguyen says. “Before the rate went up so much, I was thinking that I was invincible.” The tide began to turn once the Federal Reserve raised interest rates in late 2022, sending mortgage professionals across the industry into a panic, including the nation’s top producer.

“It was so stable [and] I had so many clients. I built a great company with a great name,” Nguyen reflects, “but then when interest rates jumped so high and so fast, the team turned upside down. I was in shock, to be honest with you. For many months, I was nervous.”

Changing market conditions forced many lenders to transition from mostly processing refinance applications to drumming up more purchase business, but Loan Factory’s transition has been a bit more complicated. The company’s entire production model was run through a system built to process refinance mortgages efficiently, rather than originate purchase mortgages.

Investing in MOSO development as loan volume was plummeting was inopportune, Nguyen admits. “But at this point,” he explains, “we were under intense pressure to continue to build software because we are losing money already. And now we have to spend money on building up software, which is expensive.” Like most of the industry, Nguyen couldn’t afford to keep so many staff members while losing an estimated $150,000 per month.

Cutting staff was the only viable option. “It’s not easy. It's like cutting my arms and my legs,” he says. “I decided that instead of letting people go, I should try my best to bring in more business.” Except, Nguyen had never worked with real estate agents before, and already lacked confidence in his ability to form relationships.

Thuan Nguyen taking a stroll with his three kids and his wife, Huong . When asked if he’d encourage his kids to work in the mortgage industry, Nguyen said “My oldest daughter, [standing to his right] I hope she will help me.” As Loan Factory continues to broaden its horizons, Nguyen said “And I hope she will be better than me, because she’s fluent in three languages: Vietnamese, English, and Spanish.”

So, he recruited loan officers who did have those relationships, soliciting them with Loan Factory’s advanced technology and low rates. The approach was incredibly effective: In 2023, Loan Factory closed less than half the dollar volume it closed in 2021 and 2020; in 2024, however, the company was back above the $1 billion threshold in 12-month dollar volume, nearing 5,000 loans funded. “It’s a great partnership,” Nguyen said. “They’re bringing the clients and I take care of everything else. When they work with Loan Factory, they get to use everything that I built for many years.”

The end result of Nguyen’s adaptive approach? He has rapidly scaled his company to more than 1,500 loan officers, per the NMLS — making it the second-largest mortgage brokerage in the country. A testament to his tenacity, and a remarkable reality beyond even the wildest dreams of the boy he once was: alone, in a cell, seeking light in the darkness.