We’re bringing reverse mortgages to a symposium celebrating women in finance

Richelle Hopkins from Mutuality of Omaha Mortgage has been a reverse mortgage lending professional for 20 years and moved to Arizona in 2006. In 2020, a colleague approached her about starting a Phoenix-based chapter of Women in insurance and financial services (WIFS), an association of financial services professionals that aims to “recruit, develop and advance women in underrepresented professions,” according to the WIFS National website.

At a recent WIFS Phoenix event, Hopkins was able to present a discussion about reverse mortgages to the attendees and sat down with HousingWire‘s Reverse Mortgage Daily (RMD) to share details about the experience.

WIFS Phoenix, an event in the field of housing construction

Hopkins’ involvement with the organization’s Phoenix chapter included leadership positions, including president. One element of WIFS she highlights is that despite her involvement in an industry that often suffers from reputational problems, Hopkins says other WIFS members have both embraced and supported her.

“It’s very endearing to me that I’ve been embraced, especially when I’m normally the outsider,” she said. “To have that embrace within WIFS, where they recognize that I am truly a person who specializes in a financial product intended to help borrowers achieve their overall financial goals, it is gratifying to see how very supportive they are been.”

Hopkins and her colleague Sue Karaja were instrumental in developing the Phoenix chapter, and Hopkins herself was eventually elevated to the role of president at Karaja’s urging as her own term came up. At that point, as she prepared to take over leadership of the chapter, she was told that hosting a reverse mortgage-related event would be on the table.

Instead, she focused on serving her year as president, but when her own term came around, Hopkins said the time was right to dive into some kind of reverse programming. But Hopkins saw an opportunity to do something bigger, while bringing reverse mortgages into the conversation.

“I told them I didn’t want it to just be a reverse mortgage,” she said. “There are so many more conversations about home equity. I want to choose housing wealth as a theme and highlight the members and how their financial or insurance products can serve this wealth builder that provides housing.”

Building the event

To make the vision a reality, the organization needed event sponsors. Hopkins took it upon herself to appeal to organizations to provide sponsorship money, and instead of going to larger companies, she wanted to focus her efforts on companies involved with the program materials.

The event consisted of three segments: ‘creating’, ‘leveraging’ and ‘securing’ wealth through home equity. The reverse mortgage material would be loaded into the “securing” segment, Hopkins explained.

By combining the search for speakers with sponsorship and getting speakers themselves to help sponsor the event, Hopkins and WIFS Phoenix found a way to expand the list of speakers and secure the necessary sponsorship funds to make the event possible. to organize.

The event, which took place on August 22, featured an array of twelve speakers and sponsors, including Mutual of Omaha and Fairway Independent Mortgage Corp. Because tickets sold out about a week before the date, the programming came together. Over a three-hour period, each of the three sections was covered, including the “securing your wealth” segment, where Hopkins was able to discuss the Home Equity Conversion Mortgage (HECM) program.

“I was able to highlight HECMs and reverse mortgages,” she said. “I took on that segment with a broker appointed by SRES. Before my presentation, she talked about buyer demographics. My business thrived through HECM for Purchase in the Phoenix market, and I embraced that version of the HECM years ago,” she explained.

Echoing what other lenders have said about the ever-expanding purchasing opportunities offered by HECM, Hopkins could speak with authority as these loans make up the majority of its pipeline.

“My pipeline is probably about 75% purchasing right now, so I’ve built great relationships with brokers here in the Phoenix metro market. This SRES agent was one of them,” she said. “She was able to talk about the buyer demographics and how they are the largest demographic of buyers out there, which could lead to leveraging the housing equity.”

Response to Reverse Mortgages

Hopkins said she was pleased with the response attendees received in learning more about reverse mortgages.

“I had two conversations in the lobby,” she said. “There was a lady my age, and she said to me, ‘Look, my mom has all this equity. What can we do with this?’ So it started raising questions like, “Hey, let’s have coffee.”

Each speaker only had about 10 minutes on stage, so Hopkins had to make the most of what she wanted to say, in keeping with the themes of the event.

“I started my piece on leverage by really addressing a very basic Google definition of leverage: it’s taking one thing and trading it for something bigger or something new,” she said. “Then I took them to the retirement side and described how they built all this wealth in the house. That money is underground. I asked, ‘How are you going to use this for something new or better when you retire?’”

The impact was felt quickly, she said. Attendees asked if this could be an annual event, which she said could be possible if a future board wanted to pursue it. But she also gathered from several conversations that attendees had an “a-ha” moment about reverse mortgages.

“It wasn’t necessarily a B2B audience; they were not business-to-business professionals. We had customers, and we had others who invited their adult children, because housing equity covers such a wide demographic, from first-time homebuyers to retirees,” she said.

When asked if there would be a reverse mortgage presence in a future event, Hopkins said there would “absolutely” be the case.

“My thought is that there can always be content around the topic of home equity, ensuring that we are all aware of what the previous year looked like, what will happen in the future, what to expect and reverse mortgage strategies. she said. “There are so many ways to help people achieve their retirement goals with this – working with divorce attorneys, home builders, real estate agents, financial advisors and insurance agents. There are so many different ways I could take the HECM, the reverse mortgage, and explore all those conversations.