Today’s HousingWire Daily features a roundtable discussion from HousingWire’s Lunch & Learn series that looks at “Unpacking the lender’s vital role in increasing minority homeownership.” The conversation tackles the challenges and opportunities that lenders and communities face while working to increase minority homeownership and equity in housing and lending.

The discussion is hosted by iEmergent CEO Laird Nossuli and features several real estate professionals, including iEmergent COO Bernard Nossuli, Homeownership Council of America President Gabe Del Rio, and National Association of Minority Mortgage Bankers of America (NAMMBA) Founder and President Tony Thompson. It also includes Jill Frondorf, SVP, Director of Operations at Fifth Third Bank and Robert Hironimus, Affordable Lending Sales Manager at Fulton Mortgage.

Here’s a short preview of the discussion, which has been lightly edited for concision and clarity:

Laird Nossuli: Let’s say a lender realizes how important minority borrowers are their future, what’s next? I’m going to start with Bernard on this one, since really, this is where your work with lenders often begins. So what do you see being some of the biggest challenges that lenders face right out of the gate mainly on account of how those markets are comprised?

Bernard Nossuli: I think there are basically two main challenges. One is that markets are unique in the sense of their competition and the size of the opportunities in each market. And also, markets are dynamic, always changing. So what we do at iEmergent is to make sure to provide data about those changing markets. We have found that it’s very critical to have a process that enables lenders to transform data into insight, but then transform insight into action, which is really the key. It’s a five step process. So it’s quantify, compare, prioritize, focus, and act. 

Quantify is just making sure that you establish the size of the pie of that market. Then for compare, you make sure that lenders compare their performance against the market and against their peers. Third, prioritize, is making sure that once they’ve looked at the gamut of markets available to them, is to see which one is the best fit, and then leveraging where they can best leverage their resources. Focus is when they can finally set reasonable goals based on the opportunity in those markets and build strategies around those. And then finally, act is executing against those strategies. So quantify, compare, prioritize, focus and act. It’s an iterative process that you don’t just do one and done you’re not just done after one iteration. You do it throughout the year, but you have a baseline that you can always go back to.

HousingWire Daily examines the most compelling articles reported across HW Media. Each afternoon, we provide our listeners with a deeper look into the stories coming across our newsrooms that are helping Move Markets Forward. Hosted by the HW team and produced by Alcynna Lloyd and Elissa Branch. If you have a pitch or an inquiry relating to podcasts, you can reach our team at [email protected].