By Peter Bell
As an organizer of conferences for reverse mortgage professionals, we are continually looking to expand the product’s horizon.
At NRMLA’s Annual Meeting last October in Boston, we presented both a session featuring financial planners explaining their point of view to loan originators and a special post-conference session for financial planners who wanted to learn more about reverse mortgages.
At our Eastern Regional in New York in March, we presented both a session featuring security traders explaining their perspective to loan originators as well as a special post-conference seminar on Ginnie Mae’s HECM Mortgage Backed Securities for investors.
At our Western Regional in Irvine in May, we presented a panel of financial planners discussing the growing interest in using reverse mortgages as a retirement funding tool in the wake of three recent academic research reports that were widely covered by national press.
Over the course of these three conferences, our members had the privilege of meeting and hearing from John Salter of Texas Tech, Anthony Webb of Boston College and San Francisco attorney and researcher Barry Sacks, each of whom co-authored one of the research reports mentioned above.
None of these sessions would have occurred or been appropriate just five years ago, before Ginnie Mae launched its HMBS program in 2007, before the recession hit in 2008, and before HUD created the HECM Saver in 2010. Each of these developments created a new audience eager to learn about and perhaps become more involved with reverse mortgages.
On another panel in Irvine, one that focused on successful techniques for selling both the HECM Saver and the HECM for Purchase (designed for home buying), Eric Hiatt of Security One Lending pointed out that the latter has created a new audience of realtors and builders, while Jim Cory of Legacy Reverse Mortgage suggested that the former product gets an even better reception from estate planners than financial planners. These are two additional audiences we will now make it our business to corral (perhaps at our upcoming Annual Meeting in San Antonio, where there are a lot of corrals).
I view all of this interest from new audiences as a tribute to the versatility of reverse mortgages as well as to the foresight of those in government and within our industry who made adjustments to the product that created additional usages.
What was once thought of as a tool to help seniors age in their family homes or pay for uninsured medical expenses, has continued to emerge-- into a means of expense support while waiting for diminished investments to regain at least some of their previous value; as a means to delay tapping into Social Security benefits that grow by 8 per cent per year between 62 and 70 ½; as a way to pay for long term care insurance; as funding to maintain an aging home at livable standards, or to purchase a new, possibly more affordable or more manageable home.
Reverse mortgages are living organisms, continually evolving. There are bound to continue to be new products, new uses, new audiences. Sometimes amidst the day-to-day burden of conducting business, we may forget that we are still in an early chapter of a story that continues to be written.
