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Name: Patrick Boyaggi
Title: Co-founder and CEO, Rate Gravity
Age: 37
Industry experience: 8 years
As the head of residential lending at Leader Bank from 2010 to 2015, Patrick Boyaggi was responsible for close to 30,000 transactions worth over $11 million. Naturally, when it came time to purchase his own home, the Bates College alumni used his insider knowledge to get his family excellent terms on their mortgage. During this process, Boyaggi realized there was an opportunity to get every lender the same knowledge and tools he had at his disposal. This discovery led Boyaggi to team up with another Leader Bank alumni, Mike Tassone, and found Rate Gravity, a mortgage service with on-demand personal mortgage experts committed to securing home loans from certified local lenders that offer discounted interest rates.
Rate Gravity conducts soft credit inquiries on borrowers and then matches them with lenders the company has carefully vetted and believes show a deep commitment to transparency and customer service. Since launching in 2016, RateGravity has worked with hundreds of customers who have saved an average of $30,000 over the life of their loan.
“We built technology that allows us to collect consumers’ information in the most efficient and least invasive manner possible,” Boyaggi told Banker & Tradesman. “And with that information, we’re able to determine if a customer is going to qualify for financing and then we’re able to find them the right match based on their profile.”
Q: How has the company done since it launched in 2016?
A: We’ve worked with thousands of customers. We’ve originated hundreds of millions of dollars in home loans and by all accounts, our market share is growing in a shrinking market. We have developed an exclusive network of lenders that we’ve vetted and put together. It’s comprised of community banks and credit unions and includes mortgage companies as well. So, it’s not that any lender can come onto the platform, but it’s lenders that we feel have an intense focus on customer service and are willing to be honest and transparent partners with us.
This is not a lead generation site. The idea here is that we’re going to have vetted partners that are helping us solve for virtually every loan scenario, give us the confidence that a loan is certainly going to close if it matches with them and that they will provide a high level of customer service because that gives us credibility with our customers as well.
Q: You talk about how you can provide tools to consumers that were once exclusively for people who worked at banks and loan originators. What are these tools and how are you able to provide them to customers?
A: The tools that we give customers allows them to be independent and unbiased in their decision making. So as an example, when it comes time for you to see your rates, we are going to present all of the options to you in a truly transparent manner and you’re going to see all the closing costs. You’re going to see all the terms of the loan and you’re going to be able to compare those offerings on an apples-to-apples comparison. Now, you’re going to have a sense of what the market rate is and you’re going to see which ones are winners and which ones are reserves.
And we’re going to do a good job of making sure that the ones that we present to you are people that can meet the objective of your loan transaction. So, if it’s somebody that needs a very short commitment and a very quick close, unless we’re certain that that lender has the capacity to meet those obligations, we’re not going to present that option to you. We’ve also used technology to help in the preapproval process; we built a tool that allows consumers to update their preapproval letters on demand once we have determined the constraints around what they can qualify for. If they need to update their preapproval letter to match an offer, they can do that within the app and that’s a very powerful tool.
We’ve also created an affordability analysis for people. We’re going to tell you exactly how much you can afford. You’re allowed to run various scenarios and you’re not beholden to working with any single lender at that time. You haven’t committed to anybody, so it gives you that optionality and by presenting this information to consumers in that manner, we’ve been able to build a strong trust and then get a lot of referrals from our customers and from our real estate agents who refer their customers to us as well.
Q: Rate Gravity obviously has a good relationship with its customers, but how can you help community banks, credit unions and other mortgage lenders?
A: It’s a great question and it’s one of the huge benefits of our business quite frankly. It’s cliché when people say this, but it really is sort of a win-win-win. The consumer is getting the access to an independent and unbiased advisor that can help them navigate this very opaque industry and very uncertain transaction because it’s a big financial transaction, likely the biggest one of their life. And they do it once every six years.
These lenders we partner with are some of the finest institutions in the country. They are wonderful at processing loans. They’re wonderful at underwriting loans and have great products out there. They just have a challenging time building awareness and they have a challenging time acquiring customers, particularly Millennials who are accustomed to going online. We give these lenders a platform to get access to customers that they are otherwise not getting access to. This is not some lead generation site that is facilitating a bunch of really bad deals for them. These are fully vetted, fully qualified customers that match perfectly to their credit profiles and the pull through rate. The customers that we successfully match to our lenders are substantially higher than industry averages.
The pull-through for a traditional loan originator is somewhere between 70 and 75 percent. For us, it’s nearly 95 percent. Nearly every single preapproval letter that we’ve issued has translated into a closed loan. We provide lenders with access to the highest quality originator. Our customers find these lenders that they otherwise would have no clue even existed. And when they are on our platform, they are part of a fintech operation that really appeals to today’s home buyer.
Five Things that Millennials Look for from Financial Institutions:
- Transparency: knowing how the institution is making its money and what its incentives are.
- Choice: not one-size-fits-all solutions. Instead, the ability to choose between multiple options.
- Consensus: working with institutions that their peers have used and approve of.
- Flexibility: not in-person meetings or even phone calls, but web chats and easy email communication instead.
- Empowerment: feeling empowered with information during their customer experience.
