Cliff Auerswald, president of All Reverse Mortgage, explains how the Orange County lender has operated as a HUD-approved direct lender since 2007. His grandmother's reverse mortgage sparked the business after her limited income and paid-off home made her an ideal candidate. The company fights misconceptions by publishing educational content that answers over 2,000 borrower questions.
My name is Cliff Auerswald, and I'm the president of All Reverse Mortgage. We're— our corporate offices are out of Orange County, California, and we've been lending exclusively reverse mortgages since 2007, and we are a HUD-approved direct reverse mortgage lender. The first reverse mortgage that we actually completed was for my own grandmother, who's still alive. It met her needs absolutely perfectly. At the time, we had not heard of what reverse mortgages were. Prior, we were doing conventional and FHA types of loans, and my stepfather had gone over to his mother's house, my grandmother's house, to fix dishwashers and this and that, and she was on a, a very limited income at the time, no Social Security. Just a small pension, and she had a free and clear home in Villa Park. It was worth approximately $700,000, and Grandma was pinching pennies. She had, uh, every Christmas she would ask for things like Costco gift cards, and what she would do is she would stockpile canned goods in the garage. So we just saw what an enormous lift this did for her retirement, and it was almost shocking that there was such little information available. At the time over reverse mortgages. And still to this day, there's still the vast majority have some type of misnomer or there's a stigma attached to this type of loan. So as a company, we were actually one of the first to write a blog and start addressing all of these topics and subtopics of the industry that was just really hard to find online on how a reverse mortgage really works. A lot of people at the time assumed that you were just giving your house to the bank, which is not true at all. You know, even to this day, there's, you know, some of those misconceptions that are still present. So what we do a little differently is our type of marketing is just informational. So we, we write the content, people ask us questions, and we write the articles. And all of our business has come from organic traffic on our website. So we'll get these questions like, how does a reverse mortgage work after death? And instead of answering it just directly, we'll, we'll do it on a website forum. I think we have over 2,000 questions that people have asked us, all of the nuances of how it works, mortgage works, and we'll answer them directly on our blog. And that's in a nutshell, our background.
