Rate’s Jesse Allen on targeting and expanding reverse mortgages

The reverse mortgage division of Rate — formerly known as Guaranteed Rate — recently announced the hiring of reverse industry veteran Jesse Allen as the president for Rate’s reverse lending division as the company heads into 2025.

In a wide-ranging interview with HousingWire‘s Reverse Mortgage Daily (RMD), Allen first explored the state of the business today and how Rate aims to make an impact going forward. Allen also offered some additional details on the approach he plans to take at the company. He explained what it’s like stepping into a reverse leadership position at a well-known forward mortgage lender and how Rate aims to best serve its older clients through a range of product offerings.

Bolstering reverse at a major forward lender

When asked about what it’s like to bolster a reverse mortgage division inside a company that has a large forward mortgage segment, Allen said that it’s too early to fully assess the question, but he is confident in the prospects.

“With the diversity of the companies, products and the roles I’ve had, I may have a unique position to impact things,” Allen said. “I’ll use the MISMO working group as an example — we have this working group, and I think it all boils down to communication and aligning semantics.”

The Mortgage Industry Standards Maintenance Organization (MISMO)’s dedicated reverse mortgage development workgroup is targeting January 2025 as the release window for a series of uniform technology standards. These will ideally allow for the somewhat siloed reverse mortgage industry to more easily collaborate with others in the mortgage finance ecosystem.

Jesse Allen

Allen sees some of his own duties in a similar way. He wants to help ease the company’s involvement in the reverse space while also signaling to current employees how they can better understand — and potentially incorporate — reverse products into their own offerings.

“When you think about coming into a different company that happens to be traditional mortgage, they understand how to serve clients with a broad suite of products that serve different client needs,” he said. “I also think people understand some of the challenges faced by the senior demographic in retirement, and the role that this demographic has in mortgage and real estate today.”

That role is an active one, Allen said. Because of that, more people in the industry have a better understanding of seniors’ unique challenges, which could necessitate more products designed for them. Naturally, this includes reverse mortgages, he explained.

Establishing common ground is the first order of business, Allen said. The second step is to understand the landscape of existing equity release product offerings. He credits the work the company has already done to incorporate the reverse product into these conversations. The test will be in building it out further, he said.

“It’s building on that foundation, and then with reverse, it’s about bridging the semantics,” he said. “How do we bridge the semantics and just put it into mortgage banking language to help people understand what we are? I think we can bridge that gap.”

Specialization and reverse

Allen has experience at other companies that tended to take a broader view of lending to cohorts of older clients. When asked if a similar approach would continue at Rate, he said specialization and focus will be on assessing clients’ needs to find the appropriate product.

“We have this very comprehensive program with a vast product suite specifically designed to suit different client needs,” he said. “I think this is, in my mind, exactly aligned with that. We will have specialists — whether they’re on the phone, in a direct-to-consumer channel, or on an internal concierge team or out in the field.

“Regardless of sales distribution channel, we’ll have specialists that are really focused in on product, but they’re focused on that client segment.”

Client specialists and product specialists help to better identify needs that clients have, and a multi-product solution set is well aligned with where Rate operates today, Allen explained.

“This is about deepening the expertise around a particular product that can fit right into that suite of mortgage banking products to meet a unique need,” he said.

In addition to Allen, Rate also recently hired industry professional Greg Pahel as the division’s executive vice president of consumer direct reverse mortgage lending. When asked what their collaboration will be like, Allen lauded Pahel’s expertise on the consumer-direct channel and how to build it out further.

“Greg’s job is to go in there and bring that consumer-direct expertise and product capability to the consumer-direct side, to be able to serve more of the clients that are already in the ecosystem or comfortable working over the phone from a sales channel point of view,” Allen said. “And then we have to add the local experts in the field, which I will oversee, so Greg and I will be attached at the hip, making sure that all of the aggregate work we do builds on what’s working and the new things we bring to the table.”

These efforts could be center on product expertise, marketing materials, sales strategies and more, Allen said.

“He and I will make sure that we are going after this in a multi-sales channel approach, so that we can get back to how we engage with the the most number of potential clients in the most effective way — and that’s multi-channel by definition,” he said.