Jeff Bell of Uplift talks leadership coaching and tech to ready for the refi wave

In the latest episode of the Power House podcast, HousingWire CEO Clayton Collins sits down for a conversation with Uplist President Jeff Bell to explore coaching, loan monitoring, recapture strategies and more.

These questions and responses have been lightly edited for length and clarity. 

Clayton Collins: Give us a glimpse into how you’ve developed as a leader in this industry.

Jeff Bell: I used to work for Keith Tibbles and Ernie Gehre back at Cobalt Mortgage. I was close to $7 million a month, and Ernie told me to get a business coach. That brought a lot of structure and focus in the broad business, life planning, family stuff and everything.

It really gave me a road map. If you lay it out properly when you’re sitting there, having a road map really makes it simple to make a decision on what you’re doing business wise, like marketing, who you’re doing business with, how much time you’re spending in business versus with family, etc.

Collins: Why did you start a technology company? Why start Uplift?

Bell: So, I have this mortgage company that I’m phasing out of right now. About two years ago, when the market turned from refinances to purchases, I started getting these calls from agents saying, ‘Hey, can you give me some listing flyers for my properties?’

The market changes 50 basis points on Monday, and now I have to redo it again for the next week. So, I built Uplift for the mortgage company, and we essentially automated the full loan review process. You can do thousands of loan reviews every month, and a full analysis determines if there’s an opportunity to refinance. If it’s there, it builds the presentation and sends it to me as the loan officer. 

Collins: With tech and AI, there’s some big MSR portfolios out there. Servicers are willing to go pretty far to make sure they recapture. How do you see this potential mini wave playing out? 

Bell: If I was really focusing as an originator on capturing refinances in the upcoming potential refinance market, you’re going to have to look at comp. There needs to be some pre-planning right now for mortgage companies and originators to get together and decide what they’re willing to give up.

To close the episode, Bell explains the benefit that Uplift’s loan monitoring product brings to servicers.

Collins: Coming back to Uplift and its new loan monitoring product, this sounds like an integration-heavy tool. How does that all come to fruition?

Bell: So, I have an enterprise integration with different pricing engines. That pricing engine opens up the port, and we’re automatically connected to every LO’s pricing for that company. I’ve never had an IT person from a company touch my product. There’s no integration.

You would upload, we give you a CSV template, and you can upload 50,000 loans to us. We map them to all the loan officers within that database, and they’re being monitored the next day. Loan officers get a notice that Clayton might be able to refinance.You hit a button and the whole thing’s done in one minute.