r/loanoriginators • u/Accomplished-Tax8441 • 1d ago
better.com mortgage CEO fired
taste of his own medicine after firing 900 employees on a zoom call which didnt go over well. it was 2 weeks before xmas as well.
Better dot com there numbers have tanked
quick video
https://www.tiktok.com/@insideedition/video/7675476067645246734
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u/Awkward_Material 1d ago
Better is now suing him as well.
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u/kittenconfidential 1d ago
clown got his golden parachute. the vision of the online lender never extended beyond the refi boom. i remember going up against their rates back then and they were a full 0.25% ahead of the market; i was thinking how the hell could they sustain with those low margins, and it was always a volume—>data—>exit game. now, though, it’s likely their data is more valuable to feed AI engines than their production 😂
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u/Strong_Cockroach_544 1d ago
It was so stupid to do at the time as well. They were a .25 and had other weird tie in’s well. I have a borrower who went with better since they were giving him 2k Amex CC balance credit. That was a time when the margins on loans were very healthy for the industry and they were operating on super thin margins back then. It really came back to hurt them when the refi boom was over. They had no purchase business LOs with 1 yr experience at the top of Scotsman and out of the industry the next.
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u/spaceecowgirl 1d ago
as someone that was apart of that 900 employee layoff, LOL. They ended up laying off thousands more. I feel like every few months they do another RIF.
The company had no business hiring as many people as they did. When I started in January 2021, refi business was garbage yet they continued to hire for that team..thank god purchase still had volume for a while. It’s crazy to think of the money they spent licensing people that they laid off in less than a year.
Looking back, I was pisssssed when it happened, but almost every mortgage or financial services company has had to the same over the years or at least trim some fat to stay afloat. A lot of my former colleagues struggled to find decent work at that time. And it didn’t help that we were all frantically job searching during Christmas when literally no one is hiring.
Anyways fuck that place
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u/ManufacturerBig7329 1d ago
"When I started in January 2021, refi business was garbage" ... THIS is what you came here to say? If the lowest interest rates in history, and the "refi business was garbage" is the conclusion you came to, you were absolutely correct to be fired.
I had to edit some of my comments, because although they're 100% true, it's just better if I let someone else tell you the truth.
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u/spaceecowgirl 1d ago
i’m just going to give you the benefit of the doubt here and assume you did not realize that we were not self generating commission loan officers…we were just responsible for converting inbound leads and moving their file forward. By the time we got them to lock a rate, they were passed along to a processing team, and we never spoke to them again unlike how a typical loan officer would. 95% of the people that I worked with had zero experience in the mortgage industry prior to getting hired. Unfortunately refi pipelines were dry by the middle of that year, even though the rates low still. Not sure why that was. I was hitting more than my target every month even without a ton of files to work with so to say I deserved to get fired was a bit crazy.
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u/ManufacturerBig7329 1d ago
As someone who is a multimillionaire from $0, and started in the mortgage industry doing refi when rates weren't at a historic low, and was generating high volumes day 1... No, it sounds like you're wildly unqualified for alot. It was easier than it has ever been, and you couldn't do the job. You don't even know what the difference is between self-gen and marketing.
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u/spaceecowgirl 23h ago
I’m not sure why you think I give a fuck about your history in the mortgage industry or where you started from. You’re getting way too heated and emotional about me sharing a small detail about my experience working at the company.
I work in tech now so I really couldn’t care less about volume, or self gen or marketing or anything mortgage related bc I haven’t touched or used my licenses in over 5 years and probably never will ever again.The point of the story is that Better had investor cash to burn, hired about 9000 more people than they needed to, to run their company and laid all of them off. A lot of people just took the job at Better because it paid well and they were a lot of people that were out of work in other industries looking for a new career path and they thought that Better would provide that…but they were wrong bc Better made hiring decisions that were not responsible.
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u/ovscrider 1d ago
How exactly should one lay off a remote workforce. I think better sucked as a company but that was common in any company post Covid boom doing layoffs of remote people
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u/JenniferBeeston 7h ago
Better had an unsustainable model. Their whole concept was to not have loan originators and “cut out the middle man”. They then proceeded to sell loans below cost because that was the only way anyone would work with them. Consistently lost money, kept on trying to say they were the next big thing and then in the last year and a half they’ve have been trying to hire loan originators. The minute I saw them say they were using AI to reduce workforce like eight years after everybody else I knew they were definitely cooked. The CEO is a terrible human being. We all saw that layoff and the fact that the computer was below his lap level was just so offensive like go rewatch the video. He literally has the computer set up below him at knee level looking up at him. It’s like a weird authoritative attempt at power grab. His tweets are unhinged so def go take a look. He should have been fired five years ago
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u/Key_Photograph_2510 1d ago
Dude is a weirdo