But at Princeton Mortgage, Weidel has zeroed-in on the benefits through the “Princeton Promise,” a buyer-led system of writing loans that’s built on radical transparency, streamlined communication, and the belief that trust should drive the borrower experience — even when that means the company risks losing $1,000 on every client. 

Makings Of A Mortgage Disruptor

Weidel was prepped to take on housing as well as anyone could hope to be: his father was a real estate broker, he studied economics at Cornell, and he worked in investment banking at Goldman Sachs's real estate financing division.

The same year he took the helm at Princeton, though — 2018 — the housing market was experiencing massive turbulence: high home price inflation coupled with stagnant wages and multiple foreclosure crises in major cities across the country meant the future of housing was anyone’s guess. 

“We got going at Princeton Mortgage in 2018, which was the first hard year that the mortgage industry had really seen in a while. And as a newer entrant to the marketplace, you've got to have something that's differentiated in order to get market share. Because there's already a lot of really good mortgage companies doing a good job,” he says. “We did training, we tied bonuses to it, we did ‘how to communicate’ lessons — it didn't work.”

Then Weidel got a hold of Jim Collins’s Harvard Business Review article, “Turning Goals Into Results: The Power of Catalytic Mechanisms.” A catalytic mechanism, as defined by Collins, is a system meant to be clear, practical, and effective — usually by giving the common workers more control, making everyone more responsible for outcomes, and placing people in the right roles.

To break it down further, Collins gives an example of Granite Rock, a concrete company based in Watsonville, Calif., whose owners — Bruce and Steve Woolpert — set out to achieve 100% customer satisfaction and came up with the idea of “short pay.”

Collins notes, “Let me be clear about short pay. It is not a refund policy. Customers do not need to return the product. They do not need to call and complain. They have complete discretionary power to decide whether and how much to pay based on their satisfaction level.”

Weidel, armed with the catalytic mechanisms concept, asked the question: “How do you create an environment where everybody is aligned towards the goal?” 

The answer: “We said, ‘Let's flip the power dynamic. Instead of operations managers and everybody telling people how to behave and what to do, let's put the borrower in charge.’”

Thus, The Princeton Promise was born. Much like Granite Rock’s short pay concept, the Princeton Promise guarantees that, if, at any point during the mortgage process, a client feels inconvenienced or dissatisfied, they can “press the button” and receive $1,000. No fine print. No qualifying clauses. No strings anywhere. Importantly, also, no cost to the loan officer or branch. The payout comes directly from Princeton Mortgage.

“In the beginning, it almost killed us,” says Weidel. “It was about a 20% hit rate in the first 90 days.” In those first three months, one out of every five of Weidel’s clients was collecting $1K. 

To put that in perspective: Based on data collected through the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA), Princeton Mortgage closed 788 loans in 2018. At a 20% hit rate, Weidel would have paid out $39K in the first 90 days. If Weidel and his company continued on that trend, they were at risk to lose over $155K in the first year alone. They needed to figure out why the borrowers were unhappy and fix the problem — fast — or burn through their cash and be forced to pull the plug.

They stuck it out. Not for any logical reason, Weidel jokes, but because of his “doggedness.”

“I'm a big believer in pain plus reflection plus determination equals growth,” he says. “Every time we had a Princeton Promise claim, we did a deep dive. Not to blame anyone, but to find the root cause in the system.”

Upon analysis of the Princeton Promises funneling in, Weidel found that often, the root cause was not a problem with the employee or the programs. What happened, typically, was a convenient and too-good-to-be-true promise made to the borrower that couldn’t be kept.

“So, for example, ‘I'm going to get the appraisal in today and I'll send it to you before the end of the day.’”

It may sound helpful and proactive, but it's not grounded in reality.

“We don't actually control when the appraisal comes in,” Weidel explains. “So things outside of our control, the appraiser gets a flat tire, his kid gets sick, the homeowner is not there for the appraisal and whatever. The loan officer doesn't proactively call and tell the borrower it's going to be delayed.”

The lack of proactiveness on the part of the loan officer, then, breaks the borrower’s trust — not because something went wrong, necessarily, but because no one bothered to say it might. “All they needed to do instead was say, ‘Hey, dear borrower, I'm expecting to get your appraisal in today. If anything happens and I don't get it in, I'll give you an update by the end of the day.’” 

In just a few years, by utilizing the “buyer first” method, Princeton Mortgage reduced the rate of borrowers collecting the $1K from 20% down to 0.5%. As their approval ratings soared, so did their results: they increased their production volume by 631%, which earned them a spot on the 2021 Inc. 5000 List of Fastest-Growing Private Companies in America. They were 502nd overall — 8th in mortgage companies.

The same year, Princeton Mortgage scored a Net Promoter Score (NPS) of 89, ranking them in the top 1% of lenders for customer satisfaction. (NPS, a metric created by Bain & Company partner Fred Reichheld, is a measure of how likely customers are to recommend a company’s services, scored on a scale from -100 to 100.) By contrast, the average NPS for a mortgage company is 16. 

When you flip the power dynamic from lender to borrower, build a culture of total accountability, and tie company success to borrower satisfaction, there’s bound to be change — in results, obviously, but also clarity. For Princeton Mortgage and Weidel, that change happened fast.

Under Princeton’s new direction it quickly became clear that many loan officers would flourish. But not if they weren’t willing to confront their blind spots. 

“Obviously the Princeton Promise is something that I can market. It's a great conversation to have with people,” says Ken Jordan, the branch manager at Princeton’s Ewing location. “When I talk about the Princeton Promise with some of my borrowers, one of the questions I ask frequently is, ‘Have you been through the mortgage process before? And what was your experience?’” Jordan says he’s only been “promised” one time. “If I'm talking to someone who says, ‘Last time I went through this, it was a nightmare and every step of the way I was getting asked for more stuff and they lost my pay.’ Then I'm going, ‘Let me explain to you what the Princeton Promise is and how it works.’”

Jordan started at Princeton in August of 2022 after more than two decades working in the mortgage industry. He says that after years being employed by companies with “layers of management,” the Princeton model attracted him because it allowed for more personal autonomy. 

“As a loan officer, as a branch manager, you're much more empowered to make business decisions and you don't have to go through layers and layers of people to get approval,” he says. “There's a lot of really good tools out there and there's a lot of things that we pay for that help us be better at our jobs. But if you're not reflecting on and looking back on the things that you're spending your money on, then it becomes waste. So I think that this model kind of helps to shine a light on where it's wasteful.”

What makes the Princeton model efficient, he explains, is that it builds reflection into the system, like a feedback loop. By analyzing what caused a borrower to ‘hit the button,’ problems are fixed before they become patterns. That means there’s no need to create new layers of oversight or approvals just to cover mistakes.

He does note, however, that the Princeton model is not for all loan officers. 

“I had one originator say to me, ‘If I wanted to run a P&L [profit and loss], I'd go be a branch manager.’ He didn't want to hear anything about it because there's some people that, whether it's distrust, or they just don't want to worry about it,” says Jordan, “[the attitude is] tell me what my commission is and I'll ask you when I need help with a price concession. And that's the extent of the amount of work they want to put into their business.”

Weidel asserts that the attitude Jordan describes, the “head in the sand” type, is a product of an industry where critical thinking has been discouraged, or rather, not cultivated, for too long. 

“If you look at the industry dynamics, what the industry created to some extent was a lot of sheep,” he says. “That's very comforting for a lot of people — I don't have to worry about it.” 

He traces that behavior back to late ’70s Carter-era mortgage financing, when interest rates began a decades-long downward trend — a pattern that largely held until the 2008 financial crisis. “For roughly 30 years, interest rates just trended down and they'd go up a little bit and then come down, you have a refinance boom. They'd go up a little bit and then come down and have a refinance boom.”

In that kind of forgiving environment, Weidel explains, mediocrity could still make money. “You could just do what everybody else did. So you didn't have to have a unique strategy. The average strategy was good enough.”

Both Weidel and Jordan acknowledge that for many LOs, average is still good enough, at least for now. But at Princeton, they’re not building for the easy years — they’re preparing for the hard ones, like the current market. Even though 2024 was a tough year for housing, Weidel and his team pulled through. With 28 producing loan officers, Modex shows that Princeton Mortgage closed 687 loans. 

“We like to say long obedience in the same direction,” Weidel notes, referencing the kind of sustained discipline he believes the next chapter of mortgage lending will require. “What if we’re entering a period of global deleveraging? What if the strategies that worked for the last 30 years just don’t work anymore?”

Weidel sees the present market volatility — things like interest rates and tech and affordability — not as threats, necessarily, but as a proving ground for a better kind of operator. 

“One of the things we like to do a couple times a year as a group is ask: given all the information we have today, if we were starting from scratch, what would we do?” Weidel says. “You get to some pretty interesting things with that.”

One place that question leads to? Fintech. 

Tech Trouble

In the past, Weidel has spoken candidly about what he sees as the fundamental issue with mortgage technology. Sure, there’s no shortage of developments — Better’s “Betsy” assistant, UWM’s flashy partnership with Google, or Angel AI’s new “Angel Twin,” built to mimic the loan officer’s decision-making process — but for all the hype, Weidel remains skeptical.

“For the last 10 or 15 years, there's been more and more and more mortgage technology,” he says. “And every mortgage technology vendor promises they're going to decrease the cost and streamline operations. We've seen the opposite of that.”

Despite the influx of software tools and digital platforms designed to alleviate cost burden, the cost per funded loan has gone up, not down — and productivity has declined. For example, in 2023, data from the Mortgage Banker’s Association’s (MBA) IMB Loans Closed Per Production Employee Per Month showed that production was down to about 1.4 loans per employee, a 12.5% decrease from 2018’s 1.6. On top of that, Freddie Mac’s 2024 Cost to Originate study shows a 35% increase in origination costs over three years, up $3,000 per loan. 

“So just as an outsider’s view on the absolute reality of it,” Weidel says flatly, “it didn’t work.”

Weidel attributes this failure to the complacency of a boom-era industry that never had to get lean. “The mortgage industry got bloated and inefficient and fat,” he says. “And we weren't forced to really improve.”

In contrast, he points to other sectors — manufacturing, automotive, shipping — that were pressured by difficult market cycles into becoming dramatically more efficient. Mortgage, until recently, avoided that reckoning. Even after the 2008 financial crisis, much of the industry was bailed out or consolidated — avoiding the kind of lean, systemic overhaul seen in other sectors. 

“We're in a period where scarcity breeds resourcefulness,” Weidel says. “And you're seeing particularly among the small to midsize lenders — the ones that can move faster — they're adapting to this marketplace much more quickly than the legacy players. The big companies are like cruise ships trying to turn around.”

But Weidel isn’t a total Luddite when it comes to tech.

“Technology can be helpful,” he says, “but it’s not the cure-all. The real solution is thinking deeply about how we operate as an organization. How do we streamline workflows? How do we remove friction in the day-to-day?”

Sometimes, that’s technology. But more often, he says, it’s plain old organizational discipline: asking better questions and challenging old ideas. That’s what the Princeton Promise forces them to do — because every time a borrower hits the button, it becomes a prompt to rethink how the system works.

Weidel recalls the rise of platforms like Blend, SimpleNexus, and MortgageHippo — all of which promised end-to-end digital solutions but failed to deliver them. “At the end of the day, they're a website with a drop box,” he says. “They didn’t cut costs. They didn’t improve anything. And in some cases, they actually hurt loan officers.” 

How did those platforms hurt LOs? Many of them began outsourcing the client relationship. “They were like, ‘You want to apply for a mortgage? Here’s my link.’ Instead of saying, ‘Let me get to know you. What are your needs? What are you really looking for?’”

Weidel is quick to point out that none of this works in a vacuum. If the rest of the industry doesn’t evolve — if regulation remains tangled, if culture stays top-heavy, if tech continues to oversell and underdeliver — then borrowers will keep bearing the cost of bad systems.

“We should be able to ask: What are we doing that actually helps people? What have we layered on over the years that’s just weight?” he says. “It’s not about tearing things down. It’s about clearing space for common sense.”

That’s why he’s promising more reflection and more accountability, and making it happen at Princeton. When they say the borrower calls the shots, they mean it.