Business Spotlight:Lending home hunters a helping hand

At 25 years old, Doug Huhn, the president and chief executive officer of a fledgling mortgage brokerage firm based in Glendale, admits that he is less experienced and less educated than the average executive in his industry.

Whereas many business leaders are known to hang their framed college diploma or business degree on the wall in their corner office, Huhn has no diploma to hang. He went to a four-year university on the East Coast, but fell short of graduation, he said.

But in the past two years, Huhn has joined forces with friends and fellow entrepreneurs Gabriel Bolivar and Garen Ovsepyan — who are 25 and 26, respectively — to launch Direct Home Finance Inc. and its Web-based off-shoot YourLoanSucks.com.

And youth, the three partners say, is what has helped their start-up company to stay afloat.

“We’re competing with people who are 50, 60 years old,” Bolivar said. “When they’re sleeping and when they’re down in Cancun sipping piña coladas, we’re up here working to stay innovative, stay ahead of the curve.”

The partners’ brokerage company helps home buyers connect with a variety of lenders and land a mortgage deal. Part of staying ahead of the curve has been the trio’s somewhat risqué approach to marketing, they said.

“We realized we needed a marketing statement as drastic as the interest rates that some people were getting,” Bolivar said.

The company’s marketing materials, which combine bright colors with bright language, stray from the corporate look, Huhn said.

“Everything we do has a deep, sexy, nightclub-type of promotion,” he said. “If it’s not that, it’s humorous.”

Huhn came up with the idea for YourLoanSucks.com, a name that his partners thought would be too off-putting. But not long after the company paid for its first billboard to promote the new brand, a woman who had seen the bright yellow and black sign called Huhn from the road.

“This lady called me from her car and she just said, ‘Man, my loan does suck,’” Huhn said.

As the real estate boom that swept the country, and especially Southern California, throughout the first half of the decade has slowed down, the brokerage business has picked up, Huhn said.

When the market was hot, many people were led blindly by real estate agents and lenders into mortgages that they couldn’t really afford and now those buyers are reaching out to brokers for refinancing help, he said.

“Unfortunately, that’s what’s going to keep us in business for the next two years,” Huhn said.

By a personal approach to client relations, Direct Home Finance and YourLoanSucks.com aim to capitalize on the large group of people that have recently lost trust in lenders, Bolivar said.

“In this industry, everybody puts the blame on somebody else,” Bolivar said. “Loan operators and real estate agents are like vampires and werewolves … we’re education first and we consider ourselves a community lender.”

At a typical closing meeting — when Huhn, Bolivar and Ovsepyan meet with a client to finalize their deal — and once the appropriate documents are signed, the meeting becomes a party, literally.

“We have champagne, get a limo, send the clients flowers, get little things for the kids,” Huhn said. “We like to party.”

Direct Home Finance was incorporated in August 2006, right around the time the company moved into its two-story office building on Burchett Street. With five full-time employees and a 35-strong team of independent contractors, the company is growing, but it is still in its “toddler phase,” Huhn said.

But the company’s Burchett Street office is a giant leap in size and cost compared to the 300-square-foot room where the young trio launched the company in 2005, Ovsepyan said.

“We had four desks, with guys calling on cellphones,” Ovsepyan, the lone Glendale resident of the group, said.

Progress has been steady, but it has not been easy, the partners say.

“I had no idea how much it cost to start a business,” Huhn said. “It took a lot of blood, sweat and tears to get where we are now.”