ORLANDO – Marilyn Sperling, CEO of the $1 billion Greylock Federal Credit Union, told attendees at the 2015 NACUSO Conference that building strong relationships across all parts of the mortgage loan process is key to increasing market share of purchase money mortgages.
The NACUSO meeting took place from April 13-16 at the Disney Yacht Club resort in Orlando, Florida.
Sperling reported that the Pittsfield, Mass.-based credit union has a unique field of membership. The 71,000-member credit union is a low–income credit union with its field of membership hemmed in on three sides by bordering states. The closest, larger population centers are an hour away in all directions, and the very large population center of the Boston metropolitan area is three hours away.
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"That means we have a field of membership that tends to be local, insular and to some extent parochial," Sperling said. "It also means that our work is local. Greylock makes a point of using local appraisers and attorneys in our mortgages. It is not too much to say that if we outsourced our mortgage processing, we have people in our community who would not be able to remain in the business."
She also observed that Greylock is a $1 billion credit union with a low income designation.
"That should tell you something about our field of membership as well," she said.
Sperling emphasized the importance of this by noting that the credit union's largest mortgage competitor, a roughly $6 billion bank, had outsourced its mortgage processing to Boston and shrunk the pool of attorneys it used on mortgage-related work to three or four. Now, almost all of the other attorneys who have been shut out of the bank's mortgage business are sending business to Greylock.
"No attorney is going to send a client to a financial institution where he or she can't be part of the process," she observed.
According to the Government of Massachusetts, Sperling reported, Greylock had a 25% market share in both purchase money mortgages and refinances. NCUA data showed Greylock originated 882 loans for more than $102 million in 2014.
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