Laura W. Dorfman
Title: Senior Vice President, Senior Residential Lender, Needham Bank
Age: 53
Experience: 25-plus years
Laura Dorfman has been making mortgages in the Greater Boston area for more than 25 years. She began her career at Lexington Savings Bank and gathered her fair share of big bank experience before moving back into a community bank environment. In May 2012, she joined Needham Bank and was tasked with growing the bank’s residential lending department. Clearly, she’s done something right, since the bank just posted a 33 percent increase across residential and commercial lending. When the Newton native isn’t making mortgages, she’s relaxing at home with her husband and three pugs.
Q: Tell me about your residential lending, year over year?
A: For the past year, we’ve had a 25 percent increase in loan growth, so that means new loans, but also we haven’t had a lot of loans pay off. The whole balance sheet has increased by 25 percent. Really, that’s a testament to hiring loan officers. When I got here, there were no outside loan officers. There were only two men who sat and took calls that came into the bank. We now have six people who are out and about looking for business. They’re looking for referral sources, like Realtors and attorneys and builders, and that’s been a big driver of the increase.
Q: Have you rolled out any new products to help drum up business?
A: The bank always had a first-time homebuyer program. What I did was bring on some other alternatives; through MassHousing, for example. They have a first-time homebuyer program where you can make a really small down payment, but then we would go and sell the loan to them and they would take care of the customer after that.
I think what gives us a little boost is, unlike mortgage companies, we have our own loan portfolio, so we can put some specialty loan programs out in the market – we can keep them in our portfolio versus having to sell them off and fit someone else’s criteria. The first-time homebuyer program that we keep here will let somebody put 10 percent down with no private mortgage insurance, and it’s a fixed rate. That’s a niche. A lot of banks have a first-time homebuyer program, but it may or may not be a fixed rate and it may or may not allow for that small of a down payment.
We don’t want to say no. we want to be able to say, here’s your options. We can’t give everybody a loan, but the more products you have, the more people you can service.
Q: Has Needham Bank seen success with any particular type of buyer?
A: In this immediate area, what we see is people buying high-end homes. We see some first-time homebuyers, but they’re buying expensive homes. As we start to branch out, which we want to do, we’re going to start to see more first-time homebuyers, more people buying at lower levels, which is fine because we want diversity, but right around Needham, Wellesley, Weston, we’re just seeing a lot of very good loans, but big loans.
There are not a lot of condominiums around here, though we’re happy to do them. As we branch out, the type of properties we do loans on will become more diversified, but we’re lucky to be right where we are.
We also do a lot of construction lending, including owner-occupied … . That’s a huge niche for Needham Bank. We put [our signs] up at all of our construction sites and we get a lot of business that way. People say “We see your signs everywhere, so we called you.” It’s interesting. It’s an inexpensive way to market, but it works. The bank does a lot of construction lending in both areas [residential and commercial], and that’s probably its specialty and what it’s most known for.
We have developments in south Boston, we finance a lot of property in Dorchester, some rental properties, we do construction loans in [Jamaica Plain], a lot in Needham, Westwood, Medfield, some in Lexington, Arlington. We used to be much closer to home, but we’re starting to branch out much more.
Dorfman’s Top Five Authors:
- Malcolm Gladwell
- Thomas Friedman
- Nido Qubein
- Elin Hilderbrand
- Kristin Hannah
