Mike Lee, a 15-year veteran of the residential mortgage business, has joined Planet Home Lending as senior vice president of national production.
Lee is also a member of the company’s executive committee.
Previously, Lee was executive vice president for the Western U.S. at Cross Country Mortgage, where he was responsible for business development, recruiting, operations, fulfillment and strategic planning.
Prior to that, he held executive positions in sales and production at Peoples Home Equity Inc. and CMG Financial.
Earlier in his career, he served as executive vice president of national production for WMC Mortgage, a GE Money Company.
In his new role, Lee leads all sales activities in distributed retail and third-party origination channels throughout the U.S. for Planet Home Lending. He is responsible for strategically building and managing corporate and branch franchises, including recruiting, on-boarding and transition activities.
Lee will directly recruit and hire top-tier distributed retail branch managers and loan originators in the company’s key markets.
Planet Home Lending is looking to increase loan originations to $5 billion by the end of 2018 – up from $3 billion in 2016. It expects $1 billion of this future production to come from its distributed retail unit.
The company expects to expand its retail presence by supporting the growth of its existing branches and strategically adding branches in strong purchase-money markets.
“We are working with and looking for branches that are well established in their markets and have both the potential and desire to build on their existing business,” Lee says. “They’ll gain great pricing from our cutting-edge secondary marketing technology, support from our first-in-class underwriting and fulfillment teams, and Planet Home Lending’s powerful in-house marketing team.”