Ramon Walker Has A Few Thoughts …

Walker claims the purpose behind creating the group back in November 2023 was to create a soundboarding opportunity to compare and contrast industry giants Rocket Mortgage and United Wholesale Mortgage (UWM). The group’s About section even reads “With there being so much groupthink, controversy, and control of the narrative around the two largest wholesale lenders in America, we decided to create a safe place where honest and uninfluenced conversations can take place.”

Walker said he wants the group to be “a pure environment, unlike the Association of Independent Mortgage Experts (AIME)’s Brokers Are Better group.”

Watch it on The Interest: Ramon Walker: Unfiltered

Contentious Claims And Conversation

The group’s page quickly became a focal point for contentious industry debates, eventually evolving into a battleground where the two companies were openly challenged, and their business practices scrutinized. Other companies and people got dragged into the discourse.

Reactions have been mixed. “Don’t get it twisted, this is not a comparison group. It’s attacking to the benefit of Rocket,” argues Mike Kortas, CEO of NEXA Mortgage, a company that has faced open criticism in the group. “This is his way of staying relevant.”

Kortas, who also is keen to air his own industry grievances on social media, claims his multiple requests to join the Facebook group were denied by Walker. Kortas says that back when Walker faced allegations from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) that he violated the Fair Credit Reporting Act and other laws by purposely posting nonpublic (and negative) personal information about disgruntled customers on Yelp, he encouraged NEXA loan officers, known as NEXAns, to defend Walker. “I like him as a person, I just don’t understand his desire to burn friendships and supporters,” Kortas commented. “Losing friendships with winners in a business doesn’t make sense, you should be sticking with those friendships.”

Walker assuaged Kortas’ sentiment. “I don’t let anyone that has a following or close ties to UWM’s EPO situation in the group,” Walker said. “Kortas has good company; there are many, many people who are not in the group.”

Education And Early Starts

Walker’s defender personality stems from his childhood. The oldest of six children, he grew up in what he described as “an economically depressed area in Oakland … a lot of challenges, a lot of crime.”

Walker had a two-parent household; his mom worked as a stay-at-home mother, and his father worked odd jobs while dealing with ongoing substance abuse. Walker’s grandparents, who were real estate investors, strongly encouraged education. “They would tell me ‘You’re going to have to be extra smart and compete extra hard.’ They told us that the one thing that no one can ever take from you no matter what, is your education. Education was really big. My grandfather who promoted education, he didn’t get higher than a sixth-grade education because he had to start working to help family,” Walker explained.

Because of how rooted education became as a value in the Walker family’s life, the Walker children didn’t attend local schools. “I went up to the schools in the hills. They weren’t private schools. They were still public schools, but just the better-graded schools,” he said. “That part, I think, was good and very important to the overall structure of my being raised. I’ve been able to see a lot of different environments and elements, and really understand different perspectives of people.”

He graduated from California State University, Chico, in 2001 with a degree in business administration and management information systems. In addition to starting a job as a tech analyst, he also obtained a broker’s license. “My grandmother was in real estate, so I was exposed to the real estate industry. In California, You can’t do this anymore, but back when I graduated from college in California, under the Department of Real Estate, you could get a broker’s license if you had a college degree [and passed] the test,” he explained.

Walker says that in 2009, he’d had enough of the tech corporate world. After dabbling in real estate and working for a couple of financial groups, he opened a mortgage brokerage called Mount Diablo Lending, which operates as a DBA of Mortgage Solutions FCS Inc. “I used some of the crossover skills from the IT side and went online. I didn’t have a big sphere of influence, and I didn’t have a lot of family members buying homes and all that thing,” Walker said. “I knew to be successful, I needed to work with the perfect stranger. So that was one thing I established as one of my fundamental lines to be successful: the perfect stranger is my clientele base.”

The first lender that he worked with, Provident Funding, fired him. “My pull-through rate was bad,” the Bay Area native admits. “But I give a lot of credit to Provident Funding for making me successful in my early years because of the fact they are so stringent.”

Eventually, Walker started brokering loans to UWM.

Accusations

Walker started sending loans to UWM after they noticed his name appearing on Scotsman Guide rankings. “At first I said no because my other lenders’ pricing was much better, but eventually they agreed to match pricing,” Walker explained.

The relationship between Walker and UWM was “appreciative.” After a while, Walker said that he noticed the tone started to change. “I had some frustrations with UWM … they had gotten more aggressive towards analyzing my overall book of business and asking why am I not sending a certain percentage to them,” he said. “Their tone changed to almost that I owed them. It put a sour taste in my mouth when they started talking about me needing to send them 65% of my business.”

As he was building his origination business, Walker became acquainted with Thuan Nguyen of Loan Factory. Both were consistently listed as top producers and both lived in the Bay Area. Nguyen, one of Rocket’s top producers, asked Walker how things were going as a UWM broker. Walker expressed his dissatisfaction with his experience. “My relationship with UWM at that time, if you look at it from the perspective of loan volume being sent, I wasn’t sending them a lot of deals … because of my nature of being more consumer-centric, I never have blind loyalty,” he explained. “Listen, it’s the man that makes the organization. It’s not the organization that makes the man. I think there’s too much draw in believing that the makeup of who individuals are [is] netted to a particular group or company.”

Nguyen helped arrange a meeting between Walker and Rocket executives Mike Fawaz and Chris Behrns.

“When Ramon asked, I told him the truth that I was happy with Rocket and told him about all the benefits,” Nguyen said. “He told me he wasn’t happy with UWM, but was worried Rocket wouldn’t want to work with him,” due to an incident between AIME’s Anthony Casa and Rocket’s Austin Niemiec, in which Walker had shared some social media posts favoring Casa over Niemec.

By the end of October, Walker began seriously considering aligning himself with Rocket.

Before Walker sent Rocket a loan, he created the Facebook page as “a pool marketing strategy” to compare and contrast UWM offerings with Rocket.

Then, Allen Beydoun — UWM’s Executive Vice President — called and asked about the intent of the group. Beydoun accused Walker of perpetuating hate speech. In the first week of 2024, Walker received a cease and desist order from the Mat Ishbia-led company. In addition to asking him to take down the Facebook group, attorneys for UWM stated that Walker owes more than $124,000 in EPOs on 12 different transactions dating back to 2020. Walker was given only a week to make that payment.

UWM declines to comment on the cease and desist or about Beydoun’s phone calls.

Walker commented that Rocket never expressed opposition to his Facebook group.

Debunking The Past

Walker knows that his presence as a vocal broker makes him subject to frequent attention and questioning. He’s been accused of recruiting other LOs in the Facebook group, being in cahoots with hedge fund organization Hunterbrook Media, and roped into the 2020 Anthony Casa and Austin Niemiec drama by association. Walker, who was slated to have a chapter in Kyle Draper and Brian Vieaux’s book “Rethink Everything You Know About Being A ‘Next Gen’ Loan Officer” ended up being cut out of the book.

Said Draper, “There were some things happening in the broker community that were being spearheaded [by] a Facebook group he runs. We hated to do it, but we just didn’t want to risk taking that heat.”

Shane O’Dell, who has sent Walker loans for about 5 years, called Walker a “straight shooter” who runs “a hell of a business.” O’Dell admits he isn’t a member of the Facebook group. “I commend Ramon for taking on a difficult subject,” he said. “[The page] was absolutely needed, [as] a board to get pros and cons out on. He took a personal risk to do this, and made the hard decision at a personal cost knowing there would be repercussions.”

And repercussions have piled up. Kortas has his own opinions about the group and Walker’s reputation. “He’s actively recruiting NEXA loan officers … Ramon’s intentions [with the group] is to ‘benefit’ Rocket-based brokers,” he said. “My perspective of Ramon is that he always has tried to be a leader. He hides behind the group. I don’t hide behind anything. The group gives him the attention that he craves. And his cronies, Angry Andy [Harris] and Evan Wade, want to attack the big guys.”

Walker asserts that he doesn’t use his group to recruit. “Kortas has a good company, but the majority of NEXA LOs don’t fit my business model,” he added.

Keeping His Head Up

Despite the backlash, Walker speaks confidently and almost unbothered about the group and the mortgage industry as a whole. “I know what the mortgage industry did for me as a whole, and it completely changed my life. It changed where I live. It changed the school my kids go to,” Walker said. “The probability, statistically, to make it from where I did to be one of the top originators in the country, that’s a wide range. People should be inspired by that. You can do it. Anybody could do it. A lot of it is timing and luck and some consistency in there. Listen, my college GPA was 2.8 … if you really want to put in that effort, you can get out there and do it. That’s really what I want people to see or believe when they hear my story.”

Walker admits that not a lot of time outside of work is completely business-free. He’s been married for 12 years and has two children, ages 10 and eight. “My free time now is my kid’s sports. That’s where I get enjoyment,” Walker jokes. “I go to a lot of Warrior games, I’m a Warrior season ticket holder. I used to golf but don’t as much anymore now that my kids are older. We live a pretty simple life.”

When Walker gets overwhelmed, he likes to recall a quote from David Stevens, the late former Federal Housing Administration director and Mortgage Bankers Association president. “He said something like, mortgage volume is owned by no one. It’s simply borrowed for periods of time,” Walker elaborated. “This industry, it’s way bigger than any of us, and nobody owns it. The only person or the only entity that you’re really reporting to in this industry is the industry itself.”