Richelle Hopkins of Mutual of Omaha Mortgage has been a reverse mortgage professional for 20 years, moving to Arizona in 2006. In 2020, a colleague approached her about establishing a Phoenix-based chapter of Women in Insurance and Financial Services (WIFS), an association of financial services professionals who aim to “attract, develop and advance women in an underrepresented profession,” according to the WIFS National website.

At a recent WIFS Phoenix event, Hopkins was able to bring a discussion about reverse mortgages to attendees and sat down with HousingWire’s Reverse Mortgage Daily (RMD) to share details about the experience.

WIFS Phoenix, a housing wealth event

Hopkins’ involvement in the organization’s Phoenix chapter has involved leadership positions, including president. One element of WIFS that she highlights is that despite her involvement in an industry that often has reputational challenges, Hopkins says that other WIFS members have both embraced and supported her.

“It’s been very endearing to my heart that I’ve been embraced, especially when I might typically be the outsider,” she said. “To have that embrace within WIFS where they recognize that I truly am a person that specializes in a financial product aims to help borrowers meet their overall financial goals out there, it’s been gratifying to see how very supportive they’ve been.”

Hopkins and her colleague Sue Karaja were instrumental in the development of the Phoenix chapter, and Hopkins herself was eventually elevated to the role of its president upon urging from Karaja when her own term was coming up. At that point when she was preparing to take the reins of the chapter, she was advised that holding a reverse mortgage-related event would be on the table.

She was instead focused on serving her year as president, but when her own term came up, Hopkins said that the time was right to dive into some kind of reverse programming. But Hopkins saw an opportunity to do something larger, while including reverse mortgages in the conversation.

“I told them that I didn’t want this to be just about reverse mortgage,” she said. “There are so many more conversations about housing wealth out there, I want to choose housing wealth as the theme and showcase members and how their financial or insurance products can service this wealth-builder that is housing.”

Building the event

To pull off the vision, the organization needed event sponsors. Hopkins took it upon herself to appeal to organizations to provide sponsorship money, and instead of going to larger firms she instead wanted to focus her efforts on firms vested in the program material.

The event had three segments: “creating,” “leveraging” and “securing” wealth through home equity. The reverse mortgage material would be loaded into the “securing” segment, Hopkins explained.

By pairing the pursuit of speakers with sponsorships and getting speakers themselves to help sponsor the event, Hopkins and WIFS Phoenix had found a way to build out the roster of speakers and secure the necessary sponsorship dollars to hold the event.

The event, which took place on Aug. 22, lined up a series of 12 speakers and sponsors including Mutual of Omaha and Fairway Independent Mortgage Corp. With tickets selling out roughly one week prior to the date, the programming came together. Over a three-hour period, each of the three sections was covered including the “securing your wealth” segment, where Hopkins was able to discuss the Home Equity Conversion Mortgage (HECM) program.

“I was able to highlight HECMs and reverse mortgages,” she said. “I took on that segment with an SRES-designated real estate agent. Prior to my presentation, she spoke about the buyer demographic. My business has thrived off HECM for Purchase in the Phoenix market, and I embraced that version of the HECM years ago,” she explained.

Echoing some of what other lenders have said about the increasingly-emerging opportunity presented by HECM for Purchase, Hopkins was able to speak with authority since those loans make up a majority of her pipeline.

“My pipeline right now is probably about 75% purchase, so I have created amazing relationships with real estate agents out here in the Phoenix metro market. This SRES agent was one of them,” she said. “She was able to talk about the buyer demographic and how they are the largest demographic of buyers out there, which would segue into leveraging housing wealth.”

Response to reverse mortgages

Hopkins said she was gratified about the response that the attendees had to learning more about reverse mortgages.

“I had two conversations right out in the lobby,” she said. “There was a lady about my age, and she’s told me, ‘Look, my mom has all this home equity. What can we do with this?’ So it started to spark questions like, ‘Hey, let’s have coffee.’”

Each speaker only had roughly 10 minutes of time on the stage, so Hopkins had to make the most of what she wanted to say in alignment with the event’s themes.

“I kicked off my leveraging piece by really going into a very basic Google definition of leveraging — it’s taking one thing and exchanging it for something greater or something new,” she said. “I then took them to the retirement side, describing how they’ve built up all this wealth in the home. That money is underground. I asked, ‘how are you going to leverage this for something new or better in retirement?’”

The impact was felt quickly, she said. Attendees asked if this could be an annual occurrence, which she indicated could be possible if a future board wants to pursue it. But she also took away from multiple conversations that attendees had an “a-ha” moment about reverse mortgages.

“It wasn’t necessarily a B2B audience; it wasn’t business-to-business professionals. There were clients, and we had others who invited their adult children in, because housing wealth covers such a large demographic, from first-time homebuyers to retirees,” she said.

When asked if there would be a reverse mortgage presence at a future event, Hopkins said that would “absolutely” be the case.

“My thought is that there can always be content around the theme of housing wealth, bringing us all up to speed on what the previous year has looked like, what’s coming up in the future, what to expect, and the strategies for reverse mortgages,” she said. “There are so many ways to help people achieve their retirement goals with this — partnering with divorce attorneys, home builders, real estate agents, financial advisors, and insurance agents. There are so many different ways that I could take the HECM, the reverse mortgage, and explore any of those conversations.”