“Combined with our capital, it will make us one of the best-capitalized players in the marketplace,” Garg told MPA in an interview via Zoom. “It will allow us to continue to double down on ‘one day mortgage’ which has become our flagship product, greater access to capital and something we’re really excited about being able to now have the capital to market and distribute to consumers out there.”
An extension of corporate culture
He posited the public listing as an extension of a company mission: “We continue to believe that our mission of using technology to make homeownership cheaper, faster, easier will be furthered by the fact that we’re a public company and have greater access to capital. We’ll be in a position to grow coming out of what we expect to be a better mortgage market tomorrow.”
Better.com was not immune to changed mortgage landscape
Garg knows something about terrible mortgage markets. Three weeks from the Christmas holidays in December 2021, he laid off about 900 workers via a Zoom video call – earning widespread backlash due to the impersonal manner in which employees were let go. In the first quarter of this year, the company posted a net loss of $89.9 million – a staggering sum, but still lower than the $327.7 million in the first quarter of 2022.
Despite such past hardships, the mood was celebratory during the Zoom-aided interview with MPA. Garg has pinned his hopes on the “one day mortgage” product rolled out in January. “It allows the consumer to come inline, get pre-approved, lock their rate, upload a few documents and within the space of 24 hours get a binding commitment letter to fund their mortgage from Better, which we believe is an industry first and is substantially faster than the average 45 days through traditional process.”
Company officials ticked off other benefits resulting from its public status, including:
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