EvOlvE OR dIE!

Chapter 5

eolve ov R DIe!

BBy oBBy Bryant

It was a crisp cool day in October 2007. During this time, the real estate
industry began to drastically deteriorate. Banks were imploding by the
day, people throughout the United States were losing their jobs in record
numbers, foreclosures around the country were aberrant, and everybody
knew somebody that was being evicted from their home because they
could no longer afford to pay their mortgage. The climate of my profes-
sion was something like a horror movie without a heroic ending. It was
as though someone had turned off the lights to my lucrative business
and walked away with no intentions of returning things back to normal.
Little did I know, in 2007, we were in the infancy of a recession.

Months earlier, I owned a thriving Mortgage Brokerage Company. At
that time, most banks had very competitive loan products that allowed
Mortgage Brokers like myself to shop the best deal and place most po-
tential homebuyers in a program that required little or no money down.
Dozens of lenders competed for our business. Once the lenders began
to implode, shopping for the best deals and programs started to become
a daunting task. Lenders began losing more money due to foreclosures
than they were loaning out for new mortgages. This fact alone resulted
in a credit crunch. In other words, it increasingly became more and more
difficult to obtain a mortgage.

Due to the mortgage debacle, I regrettably decided to close my Mort-
gage Brokerage Business. Countrywide Home Loans had been court-
ing me for a while to join their team. They saw how small Mortgage