Recently I had the opportunity to sit down and talk with Coronado’s very own, award-winning mortgage loan originator Kory Kavanewsky of CMG Mortgage, Inc. (I must say that I debated titling the article Coree Cornelius’ Conversation with Coronado’s Kory Kavanewsky, but that was way too much alliteration.)
Kavanewsky was born right here in Coronado, and raised here as well. Other than leaving for a year at a time on two separate occasions for work and school, Kavanewsky has lived in the Crown City his whole life. He graduated from Coronado High School in 1997, and then attended San Diego State University, where he majored in Hotel Business Management. He jokes, “If Coronado had a college then I probably would have gone to it.”
How did you get involved in the mortgage business? (Kavanewsky laughed when I asked this question, and said that people often ask him that. I explained that from my perspective the question was especially intriguing because I’ve never heard a little kid exclaim, “I want to be a mortgage loan officer when I grow up.” Most children don’t even know what mortgages are. Kavanewsky agreed.)
“I had a friend who was in the mortgage industry. He didn’t do exactly what I do, but he was involved in the mortgage business. This business has a lot to it. It’s complicated, and it’s not just you get a mortgage, and then you get a house. There’s so much more to the mortgage business that goes on behind the scenes in terms of servicing a mortgage, selling a mortgage, and securing and insuring a mortgage. He worked in the different side of the business, but similar. The stories that he would tell me about what his day was like: very hectic and chaotic, always a new challenge, a lot of math going on, helping people do something huge, a lot of pressure, very intense, very fast paced. Those are all things that I like, oddly enough. That sort of attracted me to it.”
“Additionally at the same time I had been working in hotels for five years or so, and while I loved so many things about it, I just didn’t see myself doing it long term, mainly because of the quality of life. A lot of people say, ‘You work a lot of hours in hotels. I can see why you wouldn’t want to do that.’ I work seventy-five hours a week, without any exaggeration, easy now. Most of my friends and family will say that I’m a workaholic and those sorts of things. I don’t think that that’s really true, but I do have a good balance. I wanted to improve my quality of life. Not necessarily work less, but just improve my quality of life, and the hotel business, you’re working Christmas. Someone’s got to work Christmas. You’ve got to be there at two o’clock in the morning when there’s something going on. You’re working when other people are not. When you’re young, that works, but I’ve always been someone that’s planning for the future, too much so even, and so at twenty-two, twenty-three it started to bother me. I was fine working those hours then, in fact I even liked it because it was fun, but I said to myself, ‘I don’t think I’m going to want to miss my kids’ whatever because there’s a big group in the hotel.’ (Interestingly enough he wasn’t married or a father yet.) That’s just how that life is. That was my reason for looking, and then hearing about this I just loved everything about it.”
“Believe it or not, there are quite a few similarities. Ultimately in the hotel business, it’s very similar. You’re challenged every day. There are always lots of problems. It’s very intense. You cannot mess up because if you do, the consequences are significant. You’re responsible for weddings, vacations, business trips, and things like that. When you don’t really think about it, you think, ‘Oh, it’s a hotel. Come on!’ It’s actually a pretty big deal, and you’re taking care of people and making sure that they’re happy. It’s hard to make people happy.”
Between 2002-2003 Kavanewsky’s career path officially shifted from the hotel industry to the mortgage industry. His friend got him an interview for an exclusive training program with Countrywide Home Loans. Out of 2,500 people who apply to the program each year, only about 25 are accepted. The year Kavanewsky applied, he was one of the lucky few who were selected. “Just getting the interview was a big deal,” he says.
It was during this intense six month training program that Kavanewsky learned all facets of the mortgage industry. Behind the scenes he learned about underwriting a loan, drawing the documents for a loan, shipping a loan, packaging a loan, and servicing a loan.
After six months, Kavanewsky said he came out of the training with an incredible foundation of mortgage knowledge and an abundance of job opportunities. “It was a very busy time,” he says, “and I had a lot of options. San Diego is where I wanted to be, and the options in San Diego were mostly in retail mortgage, which this is considered, where you’re consumer facing. I loved the idea of being in San Diego. Retail is a much slower pace than some other divisions, but I thought, ‘I’m pretty good with people, and I like to help people.’ If you look at my career, that’s what I do: I help people. I manage twenty people here, and I’m helping them all day long. I like helping people.”
Kavanewsky continues, “Countrywide Retail is where I landed, and it’s been pretty busy for me ever since then. I manage 23 between two offices now. My other office is in Scripps Ranch.” (It’s at this moment in the interview where it’s evident how humble Kavanewsky is because he fails to mention that he’s also just received a prestigious award for being ranked #200, in loan volume, of all loan originators in the country!)
Tell me about how you were recently named one of the top 200 loan originators in the country by Scotsman Guide.
“Scotsman Guide is a mortgage trade magazine, and they independently rank mortgage loan originators throughout the country, regardless of what companies they work for, by going to those companies, and asking for audited production numbers. What’s cool about that it is they’re totally independent; they don’t care who wins. It’s not like you can work for Scotsman Guide and originate loans. It’s not by voting.”
He continues, “No one knows Scotsman Guide outside of the mortgage industry, which is unfortunate because, to me, I’m very proud of it. To be ranked #200 out of what is probably 50,000+ people is pretty cool. There are probably some companies that don’t participate, but if you look at the Scotsman Guide, everyone is in there: all of the players from the big companies (Bank of America and Wells Fargo) and smaller companies like ours.”
“I was ranked number 200 even for dollar volume for 2015. Just to be ranked is good; I think they do top 400. They ranked me in 2012, 2013, 2014, and 2015. It’s been going up, and it’s been top dollar volume (loan amounts) each year. I’m very proud of that.”
Tell me about your unique company and team culture.
“CMG Mortgage, Inc. has about 1,200 employees based out of San Ramon, California, where our corporate office is, but we have branches in multiple states. We’re not just in California; we’re all over. We’re licensed all over the country, and are actively doing loans in all 50 states.”
“As far as my team, I run a branch here in Coronado that does their own loans and their own business. Our loan officers are all self-employed when you think about it. They generate their own business and see it through. I do the same.”
“As far as what makes us unique, our formula is pretty simple. We’re very available, and we’re very responsive. We do what we say we’re going to do. It’s funny because when you produce at a high level, you’ve got colleagues coming up to you saying, ‘Tell me your secrets. What are you doing? How can I do more?’ I think to myself, ‘What do I tell them? Here’s what you do: You go back to your office, and you do this and you do that, and it will happen. You just gotta do it!’ So much of it is back to basics. It sounds corny, but it’s caring.”
Kavanewsky continues, “We care to a degree that is somewhat scary. You’ve got people that don’t sleep, and I know they don’t sleep because I have people on my team who email me at 3:30 in the morning. I do the same thing. We’re just wired that way to care hugely, and we treat everything like it’s our own. Part of that comes from the passion of the business. Part of it also comes from working in a small town. If I’m doing a loan for someone I know, and I let him down, anywhere else in the world you’d call and say sorry, but it probably wouldn’t really haunt you.” Kavanewsky knows that the people he helps are people who are part of his community, and he takes his job seriously knowing that he wants the best for them. “The degree of separation in this town,” he explains, “is zero.”
“I want to please, and I want people to be happy, but there’s also this constant pressure to be one thousand percent. We don’t do things that we can’t do, and we don’t do things that we’re not good at even though we could probably get away with it. It’s just too risky for us because we’re here, we know a lot of people here, and a lot of my team members live here. We’ve got to do things right. We’re focused on doing things right, doing things well, and just doing those things. I have found that very simple formula is hard to find. It’s very respected. It’s funny when you talk to people, and they say, ‘Oh, you answered your phone. I’m so surprised you answered your phone.’ That’s my job.” Kavanewsky’s formula, while indeed basic, is what makes all of the difference for the people who trust him with their mortgages.
“Our edge is that we’re very nimble as a company and as a branch as well. Our size is such that we’re not massive. We don’t have layers and layers to go through. If someone calls us, and says, ‘We’re really in a jam, and need to close in 13 days,’ our answer is, ‘How quickly can you be here? We’re going to do it.’ We do it every month. We bail people out of jams, and we move very quickly. You earn a very good reputation that way. You earn additional business that way. You earn a lot of respect that way. More importantly, you make a difference for somebody. We’re very committed, we care, and the fact that we’re nimble really allows us to perform at a rate that is often times surprising to people.”
Overall, what do you like best about being a mortgage loan originator?
“I like a lot of things about it. I like the pace a lot. It sounds corny, but at the end of this process, everyone is really happy. Going through the mortgage process is not fun. It’s just not. I’m kind of weird in that I do enjoy it, but it’s very labor intensive for the client. After you [a client] go through this process, you come out, thinking, ‘Wow! I should’ve taken time off my job in order to accommodate all of this stuff I had to do.’ But then there’s this day at the end, when someone like me calls you, and says, ‘We’re done bugging you. You now own this house.’ I cannot tell you how often times that results in tears and screams. Just in the past month, I’ve had it three or four times. You feel like you’ve really done something. I hate to compare it to being a doctor or something like that, but people get so emotionally vested in this. I think it’s just a very big sense of accomplishment for a lot of people. Helping someone accomplish something so significant to them is cool.”
What’s the most challenging part about being a mortgage loan originator?
“One of the most challenging parts about just being here is that you’re always on. I do a lot of work here in this town. I’ve been here my whole life. To a certain degree, you feel like you may be judged. I have zero margin for error, which I think keeps me on. If you say, ‘Mistakes happen,’ and that’s your attitude, then I think mistakes do happen a little more frequently.”
He adds, “The biggest challenge is dealing with the constant, ever-changing regulatory requirements. We’re way past 2008 at this point, which is when the meltdown occurred, and even to this day, still every month there are new things being added because we’re going to make this business as bullet-proof as we can, to the point where the pendulum has totally gone the other way. Keeping up with all of the new regulations, you almost feel as if you’re attorney because the laws are changing all the time and you’re having to study them.”
Any mortgage advice for residents of Coronado?
“Yes. A lot of people think they’ll find the perfect house, and then they’ll get a mortgage. My advice is to get screened up front, approved or pre-approved up front. Luckily it doesn’t happen in my office, but I hear and I witness a lot of cases that go bad or go sideways when they shouldn’t have and they didn’t need to, but for some reason something wasn’t done right. It usually comes down to, there wasn’t enough effort put in upfront.”
“Sometimes people think, ‘Oh, I bought a house last time, and it was no big deal.’ Last time was 2005, and everyone with a heartbeat got a mortgage in 2005. Just getting pre-approved up front, even when you think or know that there couldn’t be a single thing wrong with your situation, and you couldn’t be any better of a borrower, is still something you should absolutely do.”
Kavanewsky explains how he and his team try to give buyers an edge. “What we do, that’s relatively unique, is we fully approve loans up front. You’ve heard the term pre-approved. Pre-approved is like when someone says, ‘Don’t worry. You should be fine.’ That’s kind of what a pre-approval is. Someone checks it out, and gives you a, ‘It should be fine.’ But there are a lot of things that aren’t checked when you’re getting pre-approved. Nine times out of ten a pre-approval works, but there are so many things that are checked today that even when you’re pre-approved, things can go wrong. I can give you countless examples.”
“What we do is we fully approve clients when we have time, meaning when clients come to us first before they even find a house yet. We will fully approve them for an amount up front. It’s more work on our part; there’s more of an expense on our part. There’s no commitment or expense on the buyer’s behalf; they just have to do a little bit more of the homework upfront. What that allows us to do is number one tell them for sure that they’re good because they’ve gone through everything. It also allows us to go to a seller, and say, ‘Slow down for a second. I know you have a bunch of pre-approval letters. Have you ever had a deal go bad? Here’s my deal. Please read it, and understand that we have done a full check here. It’s not pre-approved; it’s fully approved. In short of there being a problem with the house itself, this buyer’s mortgage is done and good to go.”
“We do it [fully approving] because we don’t want to be associated with anything that doesn’t go right. The more you do up front, the safer you are as the buyer and the safer the seller is too. We also do it so we can give the buyer an advantage, and we talk to the buyer and the realtor about this, telling them, ‘This is an advantage you have over other buyers.’ Other lenders don’t want to do this, and go through all of this work up front, where the buyer may come to you and say in maybe three weeks, ‘I just don’t think home ownership is for us after all. Thank you so much for trying.’ That happens to us, but we like to think it’s always the right time to do the right thing so we do it anyway. There’s a cost that comes with it, but there’s a revenue stream that comes with it too so it all works out. That to me is something very unique that other banks aren’t willing to do. We do that [fully approving] routinely here.”
It’s evident that Kavanewsky’s expertise in the mortgage industry is paying off for him in terms of professional success and, more importantly, personal satisfaction with his career. Buying a home is usually the biggest expense a person will ever make, and Kavanewsky takes his role in being a mortgage lender very seriously, knowing that his clients’ happiness and financial security are in his hands. Kavanewsky is passionate about making his clients’ dreams of home ownership a reality, whether they choose to settle here in Coronado or anywhere else in the country. Because CMG Mortgage, Inc. is licensed in all 50 states, Kavanewsky and his team can help clients with their home purchases and refinances here in the San Diego area, but can also help clients who are moving out of state purchase their dream homes outside of California as well.
CMG Mortgage, Inc.’s ability to lend in every state is especially advantageous for Coronado’s military community, including those who may already own homes in past duty stations, those who wish to purchase homes in future duty stations, or those who are finally ready to find their forever homes after retiring from the military. “We help people all over the place,” he says. “Most of my business is tied to Coronado,” he explains, adding, “but it’s not all in Coronado by any means. We’re happy to help people anywhere.” If home is where your story begins, then Kory Kavanewsky and his team are the champions of chapter one.
Additional Information:
To see the complete list of the Scotsman Guide Top Originators 2015, click here.
