Lessons from past cycles help broker negotiate the present

In that respect, Antonelli is something of a unicorn. Nearly to a person, profile subjects for MPA generally convey how they stumbled into the mortgage industry after having worked in other sectors. For Antonelli, the mortgage industry is all he’s known: “I’ve not had any experience in the workplace other than mortgages and specifically mortgage brokerage,” he said. “I was fortunate enough I had people I knew in the mortgage business, and they helped get me started. I was fortunate enough to convince realtors to send me some business, and it kind of steamrolled from there.”

What caused the housing crisis of 2008?

Which isn’t to say the road wasn’t daunting. An abundance of subprime mortgages sold as securities would soon lead to the Great Recession, with heads rolling along the way. It was witnessing the collapse of former mortgage giant Countrywide Financial – which became emblematic of the entire financial scandal – that convinced him to venture out on his own.

“I was with two different mortgage brokerage companies,” he said. “But getting started in 2005, you’re talking about [the] subprime market. By 2007, a lot of those guys started getting out of the business because a lot of the guidelines got crunched, and in 2009 a lot of people just couldn’t handle the business anymore and there was not business to be had. When you see companies like Countrywide going under, instead of jumping to another company. I just decided to start my own thing and dictate my own fate.”

Did the Great Recession affect everyone?

To untold millions of people, the Great Recession was no picnic. Yet for Antonelli, the road was surprisingly smooth.

“It actually ended up being a lot easier than you would think,” he said. “When you’re in a referral business, even if business goes down 50%, if you double the amount of real estate agents or referral sources you have, your business stays sideway – even through ’08, ’09 and 2010. Part of that is just hard work. During all these changes, a lot of people got out of the business, so now all of a sudden there was another market I could capture, other realtors I could bring [into] the fold. So really it was staying true and consistent with my methodology and building off that.”