Are you looking to expand your reverse mortgage business? If you are, private equity might be a resource that you should look into. According to PEHub in September, Emeryville, CA based Golden Gateway Financial closed $6M in Series A funding. The first series of funding was led by Menlo Ventures, which invests in different types of companies, the majority of them are tech related.
I encourage everyone to check out Golden Gateway’s web site and take a look at their reverse mortgage calculator. Their calculator compares different reverse mortgage products side by side and allows borrowers to slide tabs which let you change the amount of money you are looking to receive.
After choosing the product and how much money you would like to receive you end up on a page like the one below.
I’m sure some of you are saying, “Is all of this really necessary?”… maybe not but this is where our industry will end up going eventually. The typical calculator I see on 90% of reverse mortgage websites are “ok”, but in today’s world of technology there has got to be a better solution.
Another difference I’ve seen with Golden Gateway is that they do a large amount of advertising on the net. I see their ads on different search engines on a regular basis and I give them a lot of credit because I’ve yet to see any reverse mortgage lender make advertising on the web such a focus.
Golden Gateway isn’t the only company that has been backed by private equity. A couple weeks ago I wrote about the private equity company Rock Holdings, Inc. (parent company of Quicken Home Loans) getting into the reverse mortgage business by buying One Mortgage Network out of California. One Mortgage Network does a large amount of advertising on the web and have been very successful with it. So it should be no surprise that a company like Quicken who was one of the pioneers in the online mortgage world is looking to become a leader in the reverse mortgage online world.
Now I’m not saying everyone needs to jump on the online bandwagon when it comes to reverse mortgages. However, in the near future the Internet will be the primary source for information on reverse mortgages and companies will need to pay more attention to generating business through their websites. The sooner you get started on the web the better you will be at utilizing it as a source of business when the reverse mortgage Internet boom is upon us.
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Private Equity & Reverse Mortgages