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Broker on 28 years – and why nothing compares to the Great Recession

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Perseverance pays off

Told they didn’t hire anybody without experience, Phippen went back four more times before finally being allowed to learn at the brokerage shop, NVR Mortgage. Phippen recalled the unwillingness the broker had in training him. “I taught myself everything,” he said. After a stint there, he joined two small brokerages.

His finding the mortgage industry came at a time when he had quit his job for an exporter after learning the proprietor was engaged in unsavory business practices, he said. Before that job, Phippen had worked in cell phone sales. “I actually got my degree in Mandarin from the University of Utah because I thought I was going to be in into international business. But I liked the mortgage industry so much. After school, I was, like, ‘I’m going to stay in this industry’. I liked it.”

Today, he owns Infinity Mortgage, which opened in 1999 in a career that was sparked 28 years ago. He posted $30 million in volume across 60 units last year, and $52 million across 140 units in 2021.

“Size-wise, it’s me and five other loan officers and one processor.” That lean-and-mean approach is key to his success – a holdover from the Great Recession. “After going though the crash and basically grinding down to hardly anything, a lot of people think this could happen again. If it does, I want to make sure I can act quickly if it does. We didn’t have to do a lot of adjusting.”

He acknowledged having had a rough go of it last year amid inflation and mercurial mortgage rates. “We knew rates would go up at some point,” he said. “We didn’t know they’d go up 4% in one year. That was a little dramatic.”

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