Michael Bourque, CEO of LendingHome — Closing Deals, Opening Doors
Gabriela Ariana Campoverde sits with Michael Bourque, CEO of LendingHome. Since 2013, LendingHome has offered thousands of real estate investors fix-and-flip bridge loans and rental loans. Today, it is the only company focused on serving real estate investors across the entire lifecycle of a transaction. LendingHome leverages a purpose-built software platform that creates structured data that it uses to help its customers be successful. The company has aggregated over 900 million data points across more than 25,000 completed transactions to date.
In this episode we discuss:
- LendingHome’s award-winning loan origination platform: “We’re always proud to have our teams recognized for the capability they have and what we’ve built. The innovation at LendingHome is really focused on trying to help make sure our customers can continue to find success in working with us. Everything drives back from the customer. As we think about the platform we’ve built, the idea was to have a platform that could operate end-to-end, have an integrated full marketing stack, have your typical online funnels where customers could come in and be served in different ways and routed into different parts of the company, seamlessly and successfully, to automated or enhanced underwriting decisions and be served quickly. We built this end-to-end platform with that in mind, to give them a simple transparent experience, and one where it didn’t feel — like in a traditional mortgage sense — like a file was just being passed past the desk as it moved through the process, but rather, information was being acted on as soon as it was available. This really allowed us to give people a great experience, a transparent experience, and also a quick one. We’re really proud of that.”
- How LendingHome meets the needs of its users : “LendingHome has been around since 2013, and we’ve done over 35,000 transactions. Basically with every transaction we do, we get more data points that feed into our machine learning models that help predict things like the after-repair value of the home. We really use that to help our customers make good decisions. To date about 93% of all of our customers have a simple way to say they have made money. . . . In the industry, the average is about 75%. We think we’re bringing value in terms of a simple process. It’s all online. It’s very transparent, actually providing real value, not just kind of a fancy website where they can transact but one that also gives them real intelligence.”
- LendingHome’s culture: “At LendingHome, today, we have five core values: do better for customers daily, think like an owner, find a way to win, deliver high impact results, and win together with purpose. What we really stress in the company is these values. It’s the same expectation whether it’s your first day in the company, or you’ve been here three years, like me, or seven years, like some of our longest tenured employees. We aspire to be better at these values each and every day, and we make sure that you really make it into each conversation. As we’ve grown rapidly this year, in terms of adding headcount, one of my biggest concerns as the CEO is how do we make sure that we continue to fight for our culture, that we make sure that every new employee comes in and understands the importance. So, we’re really excited by — we’re thrilled to — have the people we have. I think it’s a rarity in just given a lot of different companies and work environments I’ve worked in, but we’ve got great people. They’re highly motivated. They work together with those values in mind, and it’s become a pretty powerful machine.”
- Michael’s career and transition into fintech and proptech: “I spent four years as the CFO of a public mortgage company called Ocwen and led that company through some tough times, facing the fallout of the financial crisis and rapid growth and regulatory scrutiny. Ultimately I was proud to see the company through the challenges that we had. As I was thinking about my next career move, it really was, in my mind, the desire to try to get closer to the technology industry. It’s one of those things where I feel like, if you’re not involved in tech, in some way, you’re kind of on the wrong side of history, just given how the evolution is taking place across the country, across every industry, and how we live and work. So for me, I felt like this was a little bit of a blind spot. I had the good fortune of meeting Matt Humphrey, who was one of LendingHome’s co-founders back in 2015 and built a good relationship with him over the years. Coming to LendingHome was an opportunity for me to learn but also to bring the skills that I built up over the years into a fast growing company.”
- And much more!
Michael Bourque
Michael Bourque is the CEO of LendingHome.
Before his position as CEO, Michael was COO and CFO of LendingHome. He was also CFO of Ocwen Financial Corporation and GE Distributed Power. He is a graduate of The Wharton School, where he earned his MBA and the College of Holy Cross, where he studied Mathematics.
About LendingHome
LendingHome allows you to close more deals and open more doors with its bridge loans and rental loan products as well as its property marketplace. LendingHome is becoming Kiavi. For additional information on LendingHome, please visit lendinghome.com | Twitter: twitter.com/lendinghome
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