The NEXA Big Thing

In February, Kortas posted a screenshot of Casa’s email that announces the kickoff of UMortgage’s first quarter capital raising venture, saying, “This is funny. Why do you need to raise capital? Hard times? I’ll buy it to save the loan officers you are trying to screw over.”

Kortas claims to be a champion for brokers, who he believes are treated unjustly at times by higher-ups in the industry. Although he’s considered a hero in some people’s view, to others he’s a menace, a gossip, a man who’s willing to cut you off at the knees if it means staying ahead. One thing they could all agree on is, he’s enormously entertaining to watch.

“There are people who say that I’m as cutthroat as you can get,” Kortas said. “So I’m going to let the industry answer that.”

A Fighter’s Instinct

Despite how outspoken and fierce he is now, Kortas didn’t start off that way. Aggression wasn’t something he was born with; it was something that life brought out in him. In his early childhood Kortas was polite, kept to himself, and excelled at school.

“I didn’t have the most wonderful upbringing,” Kortas said. “I was a kid who would just take it for a long time and just deal with certain things that were going on in the home.”

But growing up in a broken home caused him to develop some rough edges. Between the ages of 14 and 16, he spent a lot of time in juvenile detention.

At 16, Kortas was in the custody of a foster mother with whom he never formed a close relationship. On his 18th birthday he was thrown out of the house — don’t call it a home — with nowhere to go.

“That was the first time I actually had to sleep in the streets,” Kortas said. “I was an 18-year-old boy that probably looked 15 walking into a homeless shelter. But that’s not the safest place for a kid, even as a male, because you had to go to an all-male homeless shelter. There was a situation that I had to … well, let’s just say I bailed out of that real quick and never went back.”

Instead, Kortas found a barn to sleep in and, with the owner’s permission, that ended up being his home for about a year. He shared a pen with a young calf being raised for slaughter with only a sleeping bag and a hay floor to keep him warm.

Homelessness taught him quite a few valuable lessons, though. For one, he developed an instinct about who he should trust and who he shouldn’t.

“I learned to hate people who say one thing and do another because on the streets you have to rely on, I guess, instincts and your judgment of people,” Kortas said. “Sometimes when you judge a person the wrong way, things go south.”

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Going The Distance

Kortas wasted no time in getting to work. While still residing in a barn, he began working two full-time jobs — a landscaper by day and gas attendant by night.

“I actually attest my work ethic today to the landscaping job,” Kortas said. “You’re talking about legitimately digging ditches and shoveling rock. Some people talk about that as a joke, but it was a reality for me.”

But the money from that job alone was not enough to sustain him. Another thing he learned was life on the streets is expensive. He didn’t have the materials to cook so he was always eating out at fast food places, ordering off the dollar menu. So, he began working as a gas station attendant when his landscaper shift ended.

Life’s circumstances had already led him to develop a strong work ethic, but what really lit the fire under him was getting his then-girlfriend pregnant when he was 19.

Stepping Into The Ring

With a baby boy on the way, Kortas scrambled to get his life in order. He needed a job that provided more earning potential and benefits for his son. However, after dropping out of high school three times and never attending college, his options were limited. For the next four years, Kortas worked as a bill collector, which he describes as his college education in sales.

Although some would claim being a bill collector doesn’t make one a salesman, Kortas begs to differ, saying, “Getting somebody to pay money for something they no longer have is the hardest sales job in the world.

“I was orchestrating settlements with big business people at a very young age,” Kortas said. “But it got me talking to executives constantly. And it got me talking to just business like-minded people, even though most of them were small businesses that failed.”

He would constantly refer deals to mortgage companies so his clients could refinance their mortgages and pay off their debts. This is what introduced Kortas to the mortgage industry, and after talking to some loan officers he became interested. When the agency he was working for changed the way it compensated its collectors, he was confident enough to make a career switch.

It wasn’t as simple as Kortas expected, though. He entered the mortgage industry in 1998, during an environment of rising rates, but he saw other people in the industry doing well and used that as motivation. He was determined to leave those days of pumping gas and digging ditches in the past.

“The first six months in the mortgage industry were absolutely brutal,” he said. “I was working commission-only in a new industry, and there was no training back then or licensing. It was, ‘Here kid. Here’s a desk and here’s a phone.’”

Luckily, a man by the name of Devon Sanders from North American Mortgage took Kortas under his wing and showed him how the business works, how to pre-qualify a purchaser, and how to read an application.

Kortas became experienced in originating subprime loans, getting financing for a customer with a 400 credit score by using referrals from his old bill collection friends.

“I was finally in a business where it didn’t matter where I came from or who I was … as long as I worked my butt off, I could make something of myself,” Kortas said.

After 9/11, rates plummeted, and Kortas reaped the benefits of a thriving industry. He opened his own branch under Nova Star Home Loans, which became one of the company’s top performers nationwide.

He needed to put in that work in order to provide for his growing family, and he was doing very well until his hubris got the best of him.

The Big Beatdown

Just as Mickey the trainer said in Rocky III, “The worst thing happened to you that could happen to any fighter. You got civilized.”

“Those are the years that I look at and say that I was unfocused,” Kortas said. “I forgot where I’d come from. Just like everybody else, I was out partying like crazy, making more money than I should have been making in my 20s. Whenever I didn’t have my son, I was in Vegas … then, of course, the financial crisis hit, and I realized that I couldn’t just step outside and pick money off the trees anymore.”

Kortas made most of his money doing refinances, but once the financial crisis hit in 2008, the fun was over. Businesses were shutting down, and Kortas felt completely defeated.

For years, his brothers-in-law would ask him to start a landscaping business with them, but those memories of performing hard labor under brutal heat led him to say no every time. This time he had no choice but to take them up on their offer.

“I ended up having to kind of cut them out, because I grew that company so fast,” Kortas said. “I [used] my knowledge from the mortgage industry. I took this company to seven states and 13 metropolitan cities … within two years. So I grew this landscape company at this rapid rate.”

Kortas hated it, though. People looked down on him for being a landscaper while he was used to being treated like a mortgage professional. While building his landscaping company, he kept dabbling in mortgages, hoping that at some point the industry would turn around.

Up From The Mat

By 2010 he couldn’t take it anymore and decided to sell the landscape company, which funded his way back into mortgages. He got his licensing and was determined not to lose focus this time. However, it was the start of a very unhealthy work-life balance.

Kortas worked 18 to 20 hour days six days a week with Saturday being his “crash day” to catch up on sleep. During that time he didn’t see his family for weeks or months on end.

Eventually, Kortas began averaging 24 loans a month as an individual loan officer with no support. He was the first loan officer to be ranked in Scottsman’s Guide with zero team members. That recognition gave him the confidence to leave his employer, Nova Home Loans, and start his own broker shop.

“I came up with this concept of why don’t we all go and open our own company and pull all of our business together, so that we can each benefit through larger pipelines,” Kortas said. “They all thought it was great at first.”

In the end, though, none of the other loan originators wanted to leave. They were too comfortable and decidedly satisfied with the money they were already making. They didn’t want to follow Kortas down an unknown path.

Kortas, on the other hand, was miserable. Although the money was piling up, his work-life balance was wreaking havoc on his health and family time. So he left his job along with the 72 loans in his pipeline that amounted to six figures and followed his dream. n

Straight To The Top

“I don’t think it was a hard shift to open up a business because by this point, I’d already failed at business a few times,” Kortas said. “My wife was like, ‘Oh, great, here we go again. You and your serial entrepreneurship.’”

But Kortas was unrelenting and knew he couldn’t let this opportunity pass. The entire business would be focused 100% on the staff and the loan officers, and thus NEXA Mortgage was created in Arizona.

Originally, Kortas thought he would go with the banking model, but found that brokering was much more beneficial to loan officers.

As the owner of NEXA Mortgage, Kortas receives residual income, and he decided his loan officers should as well. That’s why he set up lifelong residual income programs for his sales team so they could also reap the benefits of their hard work.

“You have an opportunity to make more money at NEXA Mortgage than any other mortgage company in the country,” Kortas said. “We believe in a few core things, though. We like to be the best at just one thing. We have just the best interest rates, and just from that alone you can grow a company very quickly. We believe we must provide loan officers the absolute best opportunity in that category, so we focus on that heavily.”

It wasn’t before long that other big players in the industry began recognizing Kortas. Networking is the name of the game in this industry and, as a talker, Kortas was able to do so easily. Of course, the Association of Independent Mortgage Experts (AIME) was able to help him forge an even closer connection with UWM CEO Mat Ishbia and UMortgage’s Casa.

Facing Betrayals

Though some people see themselves as “big dogs” in this industry, Kortas says he doesn’t. He merely sees himself as an advocate for loan officers, and says it bothers him to no end when he sees them being deceived or lied to by higher-ups in the industry. As previously mentioned, transparency and honesty are key to earning his respect.

Kortas firmly believes Casa, former chairman of AIME, was using the association as a big database to recruit loan officers. Although Kortas said there is nothing illegal about that, he thinks the members of the association should be aware of it.

Deceit and lack of transparency go against Kortas’s core principles. He didn’t stand for it when he was a homeless teenager, and he won’t stand for it today.

“It bothers me when I see companies or people, like Anthony Casa, who has been deceiving people for years,” Kortas said. “And look, I followed his doctrine. I was one of his soldiers. But I realized there were these side door arrangements and I don’t like them. And I’m like, ‘That’s not what you told everybody, right?’ He himself said no broker should recruit from another broker. He was the one who regulated that with an iron fist.”

Casa did not respond to any of Kortas’s claims.

In September 2022, Kortas announced that he’d be leaving AIME due to a lack of transparency and claims over online bullying from other members. Though, Kortas admits he isn’t shy when it comes to firing back on social media, and claims it’s only to defend his company and its loan officers.

“Maybe I’m cutthroat, but you absolutely know what my intentions are in doing it,” Kortas said. “The one thing you’ll never question is what my intentions are and the transparency that I have on that.”