How Reverse Mortgage Pros Will Seek To Connect With Clients In 2025

The reverse mortgage industry has long sought to streamline and maximize its ongoing efforts to connect with prospective borrowers. After a challenging year for the mortgage industry broadly and the reverse mortgage business specifically, companies are aiming to assess the best ways to accomplish these ongoing goals.

Several reverse mortgage industry professionals who spoke with RMD in the closing days of 2024 described how some of these efforts could manifest themselves in 2025. This could happen through the hiring of experienced salespeople, expanding their Rolodexes of referral partnerships, and introducing or emphasizing high-performance products beyond the traditional Home Equity Conversion Mortgage (HECM).

Self-sourcing LOs

Peter Sciandra, executive vice president of reverse lending secondary marketing at Fairway Independent Mortgage Corp., said that connecting with borrowers in a substantive way begins with the salesperson they first come into contact with.

“We’re always looking for new salespeople,” Sciandra said. “Good loan officers are what will help our business grow in a big way, and we try to support our loan officers in a way that they can generate their own business and not become reliant on leads.”

When these leads dry up, he added, business dries up. That’s why providing targeted assistance makes a big difference, along with a hope to broaden the types of professionals that the reverse industry can forge relationships with.

“We try to help our loan officers self-source, meaning constant outreach to real estate agents, builders, developers, financial advisers and other senior-related business entities that are sources of additional business,” Sciandra said.

Marketing tactics

Another big opportunity for the industry can come from refreshing its marketing efforts. Jonathan Scarpati, senior vice president of wholesale production at Finance of America, said that certain swings being made by industry can help, and FOA is focused on connecting with potential prospects.

“There is opportunity to grow on the marketing front,” he said. “We see a lot of companies out there trying different things, which is exactly what we need, but it can still be a challenge. Finding that right recipe to attract the customer is probably the key to the future success of the industry.”

Sciandra added that the industry remains highly focused on improving the perception of the reverse mortgage product at large. This is something he believes can be accomplished on a couple different fronts — by expanding connections to relevant industries while simplifying the way the product is explained to people. Part of that can come from the products that are positioned for specific people, including the HECM for Purchase (H4P).

“Less than 5% of reverse mortgages are done as purchases. From an industry perspective, that’s exactly the opposite of what happens on the forward side of the business,” Sciandra said. “There’s no good reason for that other than a lack of knowledge among real estate agents, builders and those who want to buy a property.

“They’re just not aware that reverse mortgages can be used for purchases. So, we need to do more in terms of promoting what reverse mortgages can be used for.”

Modernized outreach

For Shannon Robinson, who leads the reverse mortgage division at New American Funding (NAF), it’s also important to broaden the kinds of platforms that the industry communicates on to meet more potential clients where they are. But there are also so many clients in the company’s existing servicing portfolio, she said, that renewed outreach there could present an opportunity for the division.

“We’ve had such opportunity with our servicing portfolio, and this is something that we will be introducing in 2025: how we continue to educate,” she said. “If you’re an adult child and have a parent or maybe a grandparent enter this phase of life, [find a way to] start having those early conversations. I truly believe it’s the education piece that we have to continue to thrive in and to build awareness around these products.”

In 2024, NAF rolled out a campaign called “Old Wives,” which aims to emphasize how a reverse mortgage can have positive lifestyle impacts on what is commonly the largest cohort of single borrowers in the industry — women. This trend continued in 2024, according to data from the Federal Housing Administration (FHA)’s annual report to Congress.

Building upon that initial work is something the company will aim to achieve in 2025, Robinson said.