As one of the largest correspondent investors in the country, AmeriHome is focused on being a consistent, reliable partner to its clients. In the COVID-19 era, that means AmeriHome has spent even more time listening to what clients need and adapting their products and services to help clients navigate constantly changing lending conditions.
“We believe in being a true partner to our clients,” said John Hedlund, chief operating officer of AmeriHome. “Our success lies in our ability to consistently live up to our four founding commitments: consistently competitive pricing, a client-focused service model, product offerings that fit our clients’ needs, and a focus on building long-term, mutually beneficial relationships.”
The focus on long-term relationships is key. AmeriHome doesn’t try to win business on individual transactions, but by providing great service and technology that streamlines the process for their clients. AmeriHome’s loan purchase review process was built with scalability in mind — a critical factor with record origination volume this year — and the company monitors operational capacity on a daily basis.
“It’s no secret that every mortgage company in the industry is seeing historic amounts of business and is trying to balance that volume with the impact on employees and customers.
We constantly monitor technological innovation inside and outside of our industry, and we understand which components of the process are reliably automatable and which are not,” Hedlund said. “We use automation to drive our workflows to reduce the number of file touches and improve workflow efficiency, even if a process only takes seconds to complete. When you purchase 20,000 loans or more per month, every second matters!”
AmeriHome also wanted to keep a close connection with clients in a time when in-person events are impossible. The company set up virtual roundtables for clients to meet with their leadership team so that AmeriHome could understand what products clients are most interested in and where they had pain points. They also moved their client symposium to a virtual format.
What AmeriHome leaders learned in those meetings was vital for planning and execution, and even yielded a completely new charitable initiative. After learning about the ways its clients were helping their customers, AmeriHome launched the Clients in Communities program, where they make donations to their clients’ choice projects.
AmeriHome, like many in the industry, has continued to recruit and hire new employees across the company as it increases its capacity to purchase loans now and in the future. AmeriHome employees have been working from their homes since March 2020 and as a result of the company’s attention to disaster planning and business continuity practices, service level impacts were negligible for its client base, even in the dark days of March and April.
AmeriHome has continued to shore up its technology infrastructure to support the needs of the work-from-home environment, invested in its employees’ health and welfare by making sure their home office workspace needs were met, and developed specific training tools to ensure that it could effectively onboard new teammates in a remote environment.
“We have adjusted our product menu to suit our clients’ evolving needs, kept our pricing competitive, and most importantly, maintained our exceptional service,” Hedlund said. “AmeriHome’s commitments to clients and business partners have never missed a beat.”
