Reverse Mortgage Sales Commission

• Pay against Loan originations
• Pay against Loan referrals
• Pay differently by Loan providers
• Pay differently by Loan products
• Pay differently by brokers
• Pay weekly, bi-weekly, monthly and other time periods
• Tier rate commission calculations
• Split commissions with the agency or between brokers
• Provide clear commission statements

Community Lender is a full service mortgage company located in Meridian, Idaho. The company offers many different lending programs to meet the variety of needs of its customers. The recent housing boom, due to the lowest interest rates seen in the United States in the last 45 years, has caused many mortgage companies like Community Lender to expand rapidly. With larger volume, additional employees, and compensation calculation changes due to this rapidly changing industry, commissions paid to brokers have become harder to track, calculate and communicate.

Dennis Loosli, the founder of Community Lender, has nine loan officers that are paid weekly commissions using different payout rates and methods. Leads generated through company advertising are paid at different rates than external leads; different loan types are paid at different rates. Different rates are paid for products from different loan providers. Additional commission kicks in if goals are achieved for the month; managers are paid with different rates for direct reports sales (rollups) and for their own sales.

QCommission's flexibility easily accommodated all of Community Lender's calculation needs. It is easy for Community Lender to enter the loan closings, calculate and make the payouts every week. Not only does consistent calculation insure accurate payouts, now Dennis has commission reports he can give to his brokers providing actual details for what the payments entail. His people were used to getting "bits of paper with chicken scratch hand-written notes, they're very happy to have these reports".

During the setup of QCommission and discussion of plan calculations, Dennis discovered inconsistencies in the way he had been paying his reps. ROI was achieved instantly upon this discovery. Reps had been over-paid for internal lead generated loans. "I'm just tickled pink with this program, it has already paid for itself and more", Dennis said after discovering the payout inconsistency.

Community Lender shares some of the same values as Cellarstone. Dennis has a firm belief that "the client comes first, and that excellent service should be provided to every customer." Dennis says, "For such an affordable product, I am amazed at how much effort CellarStone put into making sure that I was satisfied". CellarStone's purpose is "to satisfy customers by solving problems" and it was expressed in the partnership with Community Lender.

Customer Profile

REDWOOD MORTGAGE provides quality mortgage lending within California for both residential and commercial properties. Founded in 1978, Redwood Mortgage is an established financial organization with 35 years of experience in arranging and funding mortgage loans in California. Redwood Mortgage and its affiliates have arranged around 2 billion dollars in loans and currently manage a loan portfolio of over $275,000,000. They provide tailor-made loan direct funded solutions secured by residential, multifamily and commercial properties.

The Problem

Prior to QCommission, Redwood Mortgage was calculating commission manually using Excel and 3rd party application report. Samina Shaheen, Compensation specialist spends time in mining the data manually to line up to their commission rules for all their Agents, Brokers and Manager. One of their key problem is calculating override commission when the manager cross overs tiers. Due to new commission rules, too many variables for clean calculation in excel is a very time consuming task every month. The company had new commission fees in place and Samina wanted to have accurate calculation and to handle various scenarios for current plans and new changes in future down the road. The company also expects to have a good customer services when needed readily.

The Project

QCommission implementation crew worked with Samina and her team and underwent an in-depth discovery meetings and designed the commission rules in a way that can be easily processed their current needs and for future changes. QCommission could integrate a custom version of mortgage transactions from an excel file to feed QCommission for processing.  There were 3 different commissions plan incentives configured in QCommission (Personal Production Commission, Closed Loan Volume Bonus and Override Commission). The software processed commissions and bonuses on loan amount on any closed deals correctly without any errors given the complexity of year to date tiered rate calculation. The project was average in complexity and got accomplished with the project accessed estimated and on time. I am very happy to have professional looking commission statement being produced every month without any delay to my team.

Customer Profile

Stearns is a highly ranked and rated mortgage provider. Headquartered in Santa Ana, California, the company employs approximately 2000 people.

Stearns has been in the business of providing home loans for over 28 years. Over the past few years, they have released over $58 billion in funding, representing about 230,000 funded loans.

The Problem

Stearns has quite a complex sales compensation plan, which meant it took at least 4-5 days every bi-monthly pay period to process their sales commissions.

With their old process, Stearns had:

• limited calculations available
• no draw calculations available
• difficulty with splits and sharing
• could not upload or directly share their report with Payroll.
• had to manually key in everything from their old sales commission system to payroll batch.
• did not have a plan document solution nor a change request workflow and approval solution available.

Stearns’ old process was difficult and time consuming to say the least.

The Project

After conducting a vendor search process, Stearns selected QCommission for a needs analysis and a requirements-based demo. Satisfied that QCommission could keep up with their needs, they met with the CellarStone QCommission Team to get the ball rolling.

Stearns provided the following requirements that needed to be met:

• Plans/payees (Each of which will have their own payout rules for calculation and payout timeframes)
• Some commissions are flat rate
• Some are flat rates, based on a tier rate matrix
• Customer: Some transactions are excluded from processing based on the customer it is transacted through, or paid a different rate
• Product: some tranactions may be paid a different rate for certain products
• Channel specific plans and requirements (Retail, Wholesale, etc)
• Payroll specific file outputs
• Date based/effective date based calculations and prorations
• Splits and Sharing Agreements
• Recoverable and Non-Recoverable draws
• Referral and Lead Source
• Overrides
• Handling canceled transactions
• Termination of payees/payouts
• Monthly true-ups on bi-monthly pay-outs
• Monthly and Quarterly Production Bonuses
• Audit reports for pre-processing review
• Reporting needs for post processing analysis
• Plan documentation and plan approval/sign-off
• Workflow processsing, with Management and Payee sign-offs

The QCommission team got to work and tailored the QCommission system to the needs of Stearns.

Challenges included:

• Concurrent, interdependent, conversion of source data systems
• Interdependent source data system projects
  • Complicated finalizing what data elements (fields) would be known and available, in order to calculate and pay commissions.
  • Added a historical complexity, wherein certain known fields needed for calculations were also being readdressed in new Loan Origination System itself, so would need to be addressed there first, before being known and available to be brought into QCommission for calculations. Resulted in some delay to the project schedule.
• Project had to be completed within a minimum timeframe, because previous source systems were being retired; so, without the timely completion, there was no current/previous payment system available to fall back on.
• On-site hosting at Stearns own site, with four multiple environment installations (Stage, Test, Prod, etc)

Once QCommission was all set, the team helped Stearns set up for processing, completed the training, and facilitated the turnover to the customer.

Melody McClain, VP for Human Resources, had this to say about the QCommission Project and Team: “Above and beyond. We have a very complicated system of commissions and we also made some changes during the implementation process. We also made it, I think, more difficult with our specific IT requirements of internal hosting. This made it exceedingly difficult to stay on our targets, so things did take longer than anticipated but the team worked regularly to keep us on track and were very responsive in resolving everything and trouble shooting.

Stearns is a satisified customer, and has been using QCommission for 2 years now.