It’s often been said that we live in a homeownership society. After all, how much of our economy is driven by homeownership and all that comes with it?
But how does that idea take hold for each of us? Is it simply a societal norm that is just a foregone conclusion or is it instilled in us in some other way?
Cheryl Travis-Johnson knows the true value of homeownership.
Travis-Johnson, now the chief operating officer and executive vice president of VRM Mortgage Services, learned the value of homeownership at an early age and has carried those lessons throughout her life.
“I am a Baby Boomer,” Travis-Johnson said of herself. “My dad was of the generation that for African-Americans being able to buy a home wherever you wanted was limited. He was big on homeownership. He thought you should own your own property. That was something that was very, very important to our family.”
Travis-Johnson’s father often told her and her siblings that they needed to own their own property.
“He bought a house in 1950 but he had to let someone else represent him on that purchase to be able to buy in that neighborhood,” she says. “Just being able to own a home, period, for an African-American was not an easy thing to do at that time.”
Travis-Johnson says that her father often told them, “You shouldn’t ride at the back of the bus. You should ride at the front. They died so you can do these things. Don’t take it for granted.”
Those lessons took hold in Travis-Johnson and became the driving force for her life and career as well.
“I saw what it meant to the older people in my family. I saw that pride in how they took care of their home. And that commitment. I saw what it meant to family and neighborhood stabilization as well,” she said.
“I grew up around all the same kids. Having that stability and seeing what that meant versus being in a transient neighborhood,” Travis-Johnson continued. “Homeownership is more then just owning a home. It’s a stabilization of a community.”
Travis-Johnson has seen the impact that homeownership has on families and communities throughout her career – from her time with First Interstate Bank in her hometown of Oakland, California, to her time leading the REO group at Freddie Mac, both before and during the crisis, to her time with VRM.
Her career in banking started in high school, when she was chosen to be her school’s “home savings and loan scholarship” recipient.
The six-month program introduced high school students to the banking industry, and Travis-Johnson found that she liked it a lot. Her interest in banking was driven in part by her mother, who was a banking officer. Despite being bitten by the banking bug, Travis-Johnson would take a four-year detour.
Travis-Johnson’s father gave her and her siblings a choice: start a company or go to college.
“He wanted to make sure that we took advantage of the opportunities that he didn’t have when he was a kid,” she said.
“He would say, ‘People made sacrifices to give you things like education, buying homes, saving money.’ “
While in college, Travis-Johnson was tempted by other careers outside of banking. She was a dual major, earning degrees in computer science and pre-law, with an emphasis in economics. Although hers was an unusual double major, Travis-Johnson saw the potential for a confluence of the two disciplines.
“When I was in college, computers were becoming more a part of our lives, and I understood the legal issues that may come from that,” she said. “And I understood that there would be very few attorneys that knew computers that well.”
Travis-Johnson saw the opportunity and moved to take advantage.
“If you made the sacrifices to learn them both very well, that would give me an edge, being an African-American woman trying to go into the industry on both the computer side and the legal side that wasn’t very welcoming,” she said.
Going to law school was still a consideration after college, even as she entered the management development program at First Interstate Bank. In the program, Travis-Johnson chose branch operations, and after spending a few years there, moved to the audit team and did branch auditing for two years.
Eventually, she moved to First Deposit Corporation, where she was able to put her computer science knowledge to good use.
First Deposit was offering the first credit card secured by a line of credit, and Travis-Johnson wrote a program to automate the decision process, to pre-qualify customers who were interested in the program.
“The program was written in Basic, and probably saved them $1 million in resources,” Travis-Johnson said.
Her intent through it all was still to go to law school, but her mind was changed after interacting with both banking executives and corporate attorneys throughout her early career.
“That was my vision, but in the end, my love of money drove me in a different direction,” she said with a laugh.
After spending time with another bank, she moved to Freddie Mac in 1998 and took over the REO group. It was her first “really big commitment” to REO asset management, where she managed the liquidation process.
For several years, things at Freddie Mac were normal, but then the company became a headline maker during the financial crisis.
For those inside Freddie Mac, though, the crisis didn’t have the kind of impact you might anticipate.
“It really didn’t impact the daily operations or how we ran our business,” she said. “I think a lot of people lose sight of that. It didn’t really have an operational effect. It was about how they were showing earnings.”
But, employees certainly weren’t immune to the effects of the crisis.
“It was hard having your most senior leader in the paper and possibly being arrested and those kinds of things,” she said. “That had a huge reputational impact.”
But in terms of business, Travis-Johnson says that the crisis had a positive impact on the people that worked at Freddie Mac.
“It actually had the reverse effect in that people really raised their game because we were so prideful in what we did and we knew were good at that,” she said. “It was not about how the companies were run. That’s why Fannie and Freddie are still here.”
The people in the REO department faced a monumental task, going from managing 3,000 REOs a month to managing 10,000 REOs a month.
“The REO department went from being a pimple on the elephant’s rear to being the elephant,” Travis-Johnson said.
Her time at Freddie Mac also had a profound impact on Travis-Johnson’s feelings about homeownership and shaped the next phase of her life, which involved moving from Freddie Mac to VRM.
“It made me appreciate the impact we had on communities, which is why I wanted to come work for VRM,” she said. “I wanted to be a part of that solution. I sat in this space and saw what happened to all these people that had been foreclosed on. And I wanted to see the house get matched up with another happy homeowner.
“Walking into an empty house and realizing that this was somebody’s home — it has an impact on you. If you have a heart, it really has an impact on you.
“It really shaped what I wanted my legacy to be, which is being part of the solution. We want to make sure this never happens to communities again. And that’s what I want to be a part of.”
And at VRM, that’s what she gets to do.
“I’ve been able to take ideas off the whiteboard and put them into action,” she said. “You can’t do that at a bigger company without going through 10 layers of management. Here, Keith [VRM CEO Keith Murray] gave me a whiteboard and said if you can dream it and make it happen, you can do it.”
The move to VRM was driven, in part, by her son, who was moving to California for college.
“My son was going off to California and I wanted to get back to California,” she said. “Now that my son was in college, and I’d done my part as a parent, I could now look at investing in me.”
And by investing in herself, Travis-Johnson means going to back to school to pursue a doctorate in business administration. She did some work on her doctorate and then took a break, until her son turned the tables on her.
“My son just completed his MBA and was going to go for his doctorate as well,” she said. “He wanted to take a break and I didn’t want him to. So he said, ‘well you took a break, so why can’t I?’ So I had to get back in so he would keep going. He made me go back in order to stay in.”
And now they go to school together, although she’s a little further along, with only a year and a half to go until she earns her doctorate.
But that doesn’t mean that they don’t see each other or work together, despite his doctoral pursuit being geared toward marketing instead of business administration.
“We do some of our residencies and research together,” she said. “And when you do your final paper, you want other doctors or doctoral students to partner with you. So I would benefit from his marketing knowledge and he would benefit from my business administration knowledge for our final projects.
“He’s actually smarter than me, but I’ll never admit that in front of him,” she said with a laugh.
She works her schedule at VRM around her school schedule, but she doesn’t ever let school take away from her goal of helping homeowners.
“Everyone needs to be philosophically aligned with that goal. And if they’re not, they can’t work on our team at VRM,” she said. “And I’m in a position to make that statement and stand behind it. And to me that matters,” she continued.
“Keith and I are both inner-city kids. We were both raised in inner cities in California. So we know what it’s like to see a neighborhood deteriorate and the impact it has on the people. We’ve lived it so we know what it’s like.”
And now she works to make sure it doesn’t ever happen again — making her father proud every step of the way.