Net Branch Expanding

ComUnity Lending plans to add up to 70 employees
By COCO SALAZAR
8/17/2005

A California net branch company is adding jobs and opening a new service center in the San Francisco Bay area, which it anticipates will service around $50 million in monthly production.

ComUnity Lending will expand wholesale production staff with the opening of a new service center.

The Morgan Hill, Calif.-based lender announced it is opening a facility in Novato that will enhance the service provided to area mortgage brokers and serve as a training facility for 50 to 70 new employees.

"We wanted to provide brokers in this important region with the best possible service and access to our products," said the new center's manager Debbie Moore in the announcement. "This will be a valuable facility for our brokers, and for the company as well as we use it to train individuals who will work with brokers across the country."

The new hires will be trained to become "mortgage masters," who each provide one-stop service for everything from underwriting, drawing documents, and funding the loan to shipping the loan to the corporate office, Moore told MortgageDaily.com.

ComUnity will phase hiring throughout the course of one year by recruiting 10 to 12 "mortgage masters" at a time as the center will have capacity for 16 people, of which four or five will be core employees who support production and train the new hires, according to company spokesman Corky Watts.

The net branch company anticipates the Bay area facility will have loan production of $40 million to $60 million per month, the spokesman added.

Some of the trained employees will be placed throughout ComUnity's 45 existing mortgage master sites nationwide, which serve both the wholesale and retail channels. Others will possibly be placed at additional mortgage master sites that may be created upon company growth or at new partnerships or channels, such as the correspondent-broker channel ComUnity is working on, Watts said.

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