In an industry where success is often measured by volume and margins, Goodcents Financial co-founder Peter Buchsbaum is asking a different question: what are loan officers actually being rewarded for?
“Do you think most loan officers are overpaid? Yes.”
With that, Buchsbaum cuts into one of the mortgage industry’s most sensitive debates — not just compensation, but the behaviors that drive it.
For Buchsbaum and his wife and business partner, Marie Buchsbaum, the issue isn’t how much loan officers earn. It’s whether the industry is incentivizing the right outcomes.
“If I want to walk into a real estate office and be the lowest rate around, I can make no money on a loan,” he said. “You do 10, 15 loans where you’re the lowest rate on the planet; eventually, they stop asking what the interest rate is.”
Too often, he argues, the business prioritizes volume, margins, and scale over something more fundamental: helping borrowers make sustainable financial decisions.
“It wasn’t about managing people,” he said. “It was about satisfying the needs of a client.”
That approach has shaped Goodcents Financial’s model. The team closed just under 100 loans in 2025, totaling more than $40 million in volume — all purchase transactions.
The firm is now targeting between 120 and 150 loans in 2026, with first-quarter production already running at more than double the same period last year.
The Moment That Defined The Mission
Years ago, after helping a borrower with blemished credit buy a home through a Federal Housing Administration (FHA) loan, Buchsbaum found himself stranded at Philadelphia International Airport around 4 a.m. after missing a connecting flight. As he dragged his luggage through the terminal, tired and irritated, he heard someone call out to him.
“Pete, Pete, the mortgage guy,” the man shouted.
It was the borrower — now working as a chef at the airport Marriott — who had once told Buchsbaum he needed help getting his family out of an unsafe neighborhood. Buchsbaum had pushed the loan through after persuading an executive at a lender to take a chance on the file.
“Dude, never missed a payment, buddy. Never,” the borrower told him.
For Buchsbaum, it was the kind of moment that explains why he has stayed in the business for decades, through market cycles, layoffs, consolidation, and now the rise of artificial intelligence. The mission, he says, was never just to close loans. It was to help people move to the next stage of their lives.
“That was cool,” Buchsbaum said. “That just defined everything I wanted to be.”
That philosophy also sits at the center of Goodcents Financial. Together, the pair has built a business around a deliberately old-school idea in an industry often obsessed with scale and automation: put people first, know the file cold, and avoid pushing borrowers further than they want to go.
A Business Built On Housing, Not Hype
Buchsbaum’s roots in housing run deep. His grandfather started a mortgage company in 1903, and his father launched a real estate business in the 1950s. Buchsbaum got his real estate license while still in high school and entered the business in 1974, later transitioning into mortgage lending after his father sold his company and he was abruptly out of a job.
LaPorte came to the industry differently. She entered the mortgage world “quite by accident” after working as a legal secretary in Florida and being recruited by a loan officer to become a processor. Over the years, she worked nearly every operational role in the business.
“I’ve been a processor, an opener, an underwriter, a closer, a post-closer, you name it, I did it,” she said.
That blend of frontline sales and back-end execution helped shape the couple’s approach. Buchsbaum said his wife taught him the mechanics of mortgage lending beyond origination, giving him a deeper understanding of processing, guidelines, and file structure than many loan officers ever develop.
“If I’m originating a loan and processing it, I know everything about that loan from jump,” he said.
That knowledge, the couple says, makes their files cleaner and their client relationships stronger. It also helps them focus on a question Buchsbaum believes many loan officers skip too quickly: not how much the borrower can technically qualify for, but how much they actually want to spend.
“My first conversations with customers are, listen, I’m not even interested in how much money you make at the beginning of the conversation,” he said. “My goal is to find out where you find that intersection between how much money you want to spend for down payment and settlement costs and what your payment can be?”
That borrower-centered approach is especially notable at a time when affordability remains strained and many first-time homebuyers feel locked out of the market. Buchsbaum argues the industry too often frames the conversation around maximum loan size instead of financial comfort.
“I would venture a guess that most people would qualify for what their comfort level is before they would qualify for what the loan officer thinks they should be doing,” he said.
Housing As Community Infrastructure
At the center of Buchsbaum’s thinking is a broader economic view: homeownership matters because it keeps communities moving.
“I actually honestly believe that the world … is a bottom-up world,” he said. “For any community to grow, prosper, all starts with housing.”
His argument is straightforward. If an entry-level buyer cannot purchase a first home, then the move-up buyer cannot sell, and the chain stalls. In his view, mortgage lending is not just a transaction business but a form of community infrastructure.
“If you can move that guy from the bottom up a notch, it allows the next guy that was moving up a notch to move up because he sold his house,” Buchsbaum said. “It starts at the bottom.”
That framing helps explain why he has long favored purchase business over refinance volume. He does refinances, he said, but he does not “chase the refi.” In his mind, purchases do more to create mobility for families and momentum for neighborhoods.
“The purchase business made tons of sense,” he said — a philosophy that appears to align with the thinking behind the name Goodcents Financial. “Community building — it just made sense.”
It also explains his discomfort with some of the industry’s more aggressive lending eras. Buchsbaum said he avoided no-ratio and low-documentation lending even during the 2000s, when many loan officers stretched guidelines or ignored them altogether.
“I wanted to be in a world where you qualified for a mortgage, got a house,” he said. “If you didn’t qualify, really, to me, I didn’t think it helped anything by getting people into homes that they couldn’t afford to have.”
A Marriage And A Mortgage Shop
The duo’s story is also, unmistakably, a partnership story.
Their interview is full of the kind of easy banter that only comes from years of working — and living — together. Peter jokes that Marie is the boss. Marie jokes that she lets “a lot of things slide.” He calls himself her “unpaid employee.” She calls out his stubbornness. Beneath the humor is a serious point: the business works because they share the same values.
“I think we are both truly on the same page about each other the way we are about life,” Peter said. “It’s not a competition.”
Marie said their shared industry background helps them understand each other’s pressures in a way many couples cannot.
“We understand each other,” she said. “We know the same people. We go to the same functions.”
Peter also said he deliberately wanted the company structured as a woman-owned business, in part as a reaction to what he saw as years of women being undervalued in mortgage operations.
“I think that this business has never been particularly nice to women,” he said. “I don’t think it pays them well. I don’t think it’s really good to them.”
So when the pair started the company, he pushed for Marie to get licensed and for the business to be built around her ownership.
“Let’s put every loan in your name and let’s do everything in you and you can even own the company,” he said.
That decision reflects more than branding. It underscores how much of the company’s operating DNA comes from Marie’s background in processing and underwriting, where success is determined not by pitch but by precision.
Old-School Judgment In A Digital Age
Even as he praised tools like Rocket Pro for helping navigate complex scenarios, Buchsbaum said technology works best when paired with human judgment.
He said AI both excites and frightens him, especially when consumers assume digital convenience automatically serves their best interests.
“The customer thinks AI is easy without thinking in terms of who AI is representing,” he said. “What was AI built for?”
That skepticism is part generational and part philosophical. Buchsbaum still prints documents, keeps paper files, and double-checks answers through spreadsheets. But his concern is less about the technology itself than about whether it can handle nuance.
He pointed to a recent case involving a divorcing borrower with no current qualifying income but anticipated child support and an ex-husband willing to help ensure their children had a stable home. A conversation with Rocket Pro’s support team helped structure a workable solution, he said — one he doubts an online intake portal would have readily surfaced.
“I don’t know that I could have typed that into AI and gotten an answer,” he said. “To me, that conversation was vital for that person.”
That tension — between efficiency and judgment, speed and service — will likely define a growing share of the mortgage industry’s next chapter. For Buchsbaum, the answer is not to reject technology, but to use it without losing sight of the borrower.
The Borrower, Not The Loan
The Buchsbaums’ business philosophy can be summed up less as a sales strategy than as a worldview.
They believe a mortgage should fit the borrower’s life, not stretch it. They believe purchase lending matters because communities depend on mobility. They believe operational knowledge matters as much as salesmanship. And they believe relationships, not just rates, still define the best of the business.
Late in the interview, Buchsbaum recalled reading reviews from past clients and calling some of them just to say thank you. Their words, he said, confirmed that he had become the kind of mortgage professional he once hoped to be.
“You have now literally allowed me to understand that I became the guy I wanted to be.”
