The big interview: A 30-year broker says this market is harder than 2008
A similar arrangement followed at Loan Simple, Hardin said, where he built out the lender’s executive staff and secondary operations from a much smaller base.
“I took them from 7 states to 35 states,” he said. “I think I got them up to around 250 LOs, from $200 million to about $3.3 billion, which was the top year that they had.”
By 2019, Hardin said the travel demands of that work no longer fit his family life, so he and his wife went back to running Able Financial directly as brokers. The timing worked in his favor for a few years, he said.
Then the rate spike in late 2022 gutted the refinance business that had carried his company through the pandemic years.
“Literally, we went from being a 65% purchase, and 35% refinance company to losing 35% to 40% of our business overnight,” he said. “We started losing LOs at a rate where, going into 2023, we lost 40 LOs that didn’t even renew. The next year, we lost 30. The next year, we lost 30 more.”
