Terry Schmidt says Guild is seeing more interest in reverse mortgages

Guild Mortgage CEO Terry Schmidt said during a third-quarter earnings call on Wednesday that Guild’s reverse mortgage division continues to contribute to companywide strategies, and that additional interest in reverse has been observed.

Guild’s current reverse lending division, built off its 2023 acquisition of Cherry Creek Mortgage, has expanded its reverse mortgage activities this year. The California-based lender recently introduced a revised branding effort, the “Flex Payment Mortgage“ suite, that is designed to broaden the appeal of its reverse offerings to more potential partners.

When asked during the earnings call about what the company sees in the home equity lending space, Schmidt said that the opportunities in reverse stand out.

“We have a pretty broad product base, and the reverse, we’re seeing that tick up in recent months, so it’s going in the right direction,” she said. “Our second (lien) programs have been really successful, so those (homeowners) that have equity, we’ve got an option there if rates do stay at an elevated level.”

Schmidt added that Guild is “really focused” on first-time homebuyers and the “homebuyer of the future,” emphasizing the importance of local presence in communities to capture a share of the market.

“We think there’s a lot more opportunity and we’re going to keep focusing on that as well,” she said.

In the past, Schmidt has characterized the company’s involvement in the reverse channel as a key contributor to Guild’s “customer-for-life” strategy. It wants options available to first-time buyers as well as age-appropriate offerings for a person’s later years. These include products for tapping home equity and reverse mortgages that are accessible to homeowners 62 and older through the Home Equity Conversion Mortgage (HECM) program.

“With Cherry Creek, [our interest] was reverse,” Schmidt said earlier this year at The Gathering by HousingWire. “Now, we have a good reverse mortgage division at Guild, and they do really great recruiting there, so we’re learning a lot.”

The reverse channel, she said, provides a chance for Guild to serve more clients for a longer period of time.

“There’s a big portion of those customers that are getting to that age where [a reverse mortgage] may be their next type of transaction,” she said. “The aging and demographics [provide] great opportunity. It’s a great product to have, so we see it as a growing niche.”

Jim Cory, managing director of Guild’s reverse division, previously told HousingWire’s Reverse Mortgage Daily (RMD) that the company’s overall investment in reverse is evident inside the division itself.

“The company’s made a huge investment in reverse,” Cory said in September. “We service most of our own loans on the traditional side as well as the reverse side. ‘Customer for life’ is something Guild talks about a lot, even before this reverse division was added, and this is a perfect pairing [to earn the business] of a customer for life.”

The inclusion of reverse is essential to this business strategy, he added.

“I always like to say that you can’t really present ‘customer for life’ if you don’t have a reverse mortgage offering,” Cory explained. “So, our division fits in perfectly with that. And our marketing team is world-class and does all kinds of amazing stuff, and we’re just starting to tap into that with reverse mortgages.”