It’s a new way of doing business and West Capital Lending doesn’t want to miss a beat or a loan. That's why it’s teamed up with the 15-member team of loan officers at What’s A Mortgage, to be its lead generator.
Minh Nguyen, Jide Buckley, and Adam Encinas of What’s a Mortgage will use their social media followings to educate homeowners and consumers, then capture that client information via direct message (DM), according to West Capital Co-Founder Daniel Iskander.
“They collect these DMs and essentially it’s like a marketing source,” Iskander said in an interview with NMP. “Then they turn these DMs into leads and then they close loans.”
Iskander said when Nguyen was doing something similar for loanDepot it led to $70 million in closed production in just one month.
Nguyen is a loan officer with 239,000 followers, and his colleague Buckley has about 365,000 followers just on Instagram.
“The number two and the number four mortgage influencers in the country and their team of loan officers have joined West Capital Lending,” Iskander said.
West Capital Lending has been the top originator for Rocket Pro TPO for the last 29 consecutive months. The company just closed its 10,000th loan on Dec. 8 with Rocket Pro TPO, it does business with about 100 different lenders. In total, West Capital has inked about $3.78 billion worth of loans.
The mortgage influencers will be branding Rocket Pro TPO and West Capital Lending as part of the deal, which doesn’t necessarily come with a large dollar amount. Iskander said they onboarded them like they would any loan originator, since they are also licensed as LOs.
Adam Encinas, vice president at West Capital and president of What’s a Mortgage, manages the team of 15 loan officers who moved onto the platform.
It’s about “using education first and building trust through the content that we put out,” Encinas said.
He went on to add that Iskander has created a “powerhouse broker shop that is forward thinking (in) where it's going from a mission standpoint, but also a technology standpoint.”
“It’s almost like having retail technology with wholesale rates,” Encinas said, describing West Capital Lending.
Encinas said that coming from a direct lending space, there seemed to be a “lack of transparency from up top on margins and companies making changes and not understanding why they were doing the changes.” He said those margins just hurt the consumer.
“We are consumer-facing on social media, and you need to make sure you offer a product suite that can serve that consumer, and a lot of direct lenders cannot do that nor do they have transparency in their pricing,” Encinas said.
Rocket Pro TPO Executive Vice President Mike Fawaz said he could see something special was brewing between the two companies and it all came together at Originator Connect in late August.
“I’m just a middle person, and I want to promote every single broker and put them in a position to win,” Fawaz said.
Both companies are on track to have a really good year in 2024, he added.
