Despite a drop in overall profitability in the fourth quarter of 2024, FOA, one of the nation’s leading reverse mortgage lenders, remains optimistic about the total addressable market for home equity-based retirement products and will continue to develop its offerings in 2025.
This was some of the perspective shared this week by Kristen Sieffert, president of Finance of America (FOA) when the company presented its earnings results for the fourth quarter and full year.
Sieffert called 2024 a “significant period of strategic alignment” for the company, citing the unification of its disparate brands under a single banner, and the challenges she said were overcome as it processed the particulars of its acquisition of American Advisors Group (AAG), the industry’s former leading player.
She cited the full integration of the companies’ retail platforms, and the expansion of the proprietary second-lien reverse mortgage product to become a key fixture of the company’s strategy including by making it available to wholesale partners.
“We also overhauled our data and reporting infrastructure using an A.I. driven tool, enabling us to capitalize on trends that drive performance,” she said. “These milestones, combined with successful execution of our remaining operational initiatives, positioned us to close 2024 with our largest production month since 2022.”
Growth in 2025 will come from additional optimization of business channels, she explained, and a “focus on areas with significant upside opportunities.”
She cited the recent appointment of two new employees to the executive team — Brian Conneen as chief information officer and Karime Benaissa as chief customer officer — saying “their leadership will be pivotal in enhancing the customer journey and enabling us [to] more meaningfully tap into the $14 trillion senior home equity market.”
The demand for loans among homeowners at or over the age of 55 represents more than 31% of all second-lien originations in 2023, she said, which indicates the potential of the “HomeSafe Second” product.
Sieffert said that while the potential for their involvement in second-lien originations remains high, getting to their goals is another story. FOA’s second-lien product accounted for only one tenth of 1% of total second-lien lending to the senior demographic.
“This highlights the enormous opportunity ahead by capturing even a small fraction of this market through our digital transformation, expanded partnerships with traditional lenders and modernized advertising campaign and brand platform launching in Q2 this year,” she said.
Despite continuing to operate in a “challenging” mortgage market environment, FOA remains optimistic about its prospects in the years ahead, she added.
During the Q&A portion of the call, Sieffert also elaborated on the transition the company is planning for in its marketing approach.
“We’ve invested quite heavily in consumer research to really understand how to better reach the total addressable market that exists,” she said. “We’ve been working over the last year now on a complete advertising and brand platform transition, [which] goes live in Q2. We’ll be fully migrating away from our legacy advertising campaigns into the new campaigns in the summer.”
That transition is expected to be complete by June, she explained, attributing upside potential to it by moving beyond FOA’s more traditional approaches, particularly on television.
“We see a huge amount of upside there to really optimize the amount of investment that we’re making in marketing across the funnel,” she said.
