| Ignoring industry norms to forge new business, personal opportunities
The birth of a child is a powerful thing. Suddenly there is this new life, and it is yours to nurture and guide. Your world has changed forever, and you have a great responsibility and greater purpose. The birth of her second child definitely gave Barbara Griest pause. But was it time to stay at home and put career aspirations aside?
At the time, Barbara was working in the mortgage industry for Hamilton Bank in West Chester, Pa. This was no small feat in 1979 in a male dominated industry. She started as a receptionist — having gone to secretarial school after attending college and taken a typing course — but rapidly moved into the commercial lending department after three months, reviewing loan documentation. From there, Barbara was hired by Jack Hoopes, of Hoopes Inc. Realtors, who, in his experience of working with Barbara, felt she was perfect to help launch a brand new concept with Quaker Mortgage and Quaker Abstract.
 "I worked closely with the title operation in the same building," she said. "We were a residential mortgage broker and originated loans for a lot of different lenders. One of the challenges for me, not having been in the mortgage business, was learning it, having to make credit decisions and work with lenders to make deals because a real estate agent was on my back trying to get it closed."
The work itself was less complex than today, with fewer documents comprising the loan package and less regulation, but that didn't make it less stressful. The company was new; the business model was new; and Barbara was new. The newness eventually wore off after several years but the stress remained as a refinance boom took hold, driving business to the brink of its capacity.
And to top it off -
"I was pregnant with my son," she said. "I left and debated whether I would go back into the mortgage business or not."
“At the time, I didn’t want to go back in the mortgage business after how intense it was when I left,” she said. “When he gave me that opportunity, I thought I had a fair amount of familiarity there and didn’t want to do anything stressful with a new baby, so I just started out typing title policies just part time. I was thankful to not be managing for a little while.”
The “he” in that story from 1987 is Gerry Griesser, then-co-partner and later co-owner of Prudential Fox & Roach Realtors. He called and asked Barbara to help him build a new affiliated title business, Trident Land Transfer. She took him up on the offer to jump into the world of title because she could do it on her terms, part-time, and not have the burdens of management.
Fast forward 26 years and Barbara is president of Trident Land Transfer with 170 people reporting to her. She is the 2013 chair of the Real Estate Services Providers Council (RESPRO) — only the second female chair in 20 years. She helps coordinate the Realty Alliance Title conference each year, serves on the Government Relations Committee for the American Land Title Association. Oh, and she also has three children, three grandchildren and a husband, Wayne, who is president of Continental Bank in Plymouth Meeting, Pa.
“When I decided to go back full time after a year, I went into training to be a settlement officer. Then I did closings for about 20-some years, but at some point during that time Gerry asked if I would manage the operation. He had about 20 employees at the time.”
And she said no. She still wasn’t interested in the management lifestyle at that time. But about a year later she finally agreed, and when she did, it was like getting back on a bike.
“I had to take a hard look at the staff, and the way we were doing business. How were we handling the money, the back-end risk on the settlement accounts and minimizing losses? How were we going to handle the sales side of it? That was a big part for us because we had a lot of high-end buyers. We needed sophisticated settlement officers.”
Affiliated business arrangements (AfBA) now have a ring of controversy, but at the time she helped to launch the relationship between Quaker Mortgage and Quaker Abstract for Hoopes, an affiliated business model was a novel, unknown commodity in the market place.
“The debate didn’t exist then, or at least I wasn’t aware of it,” she said. “We didn’t really encounter issues of that type. It was a new thing for real estate firms to have their own title and mortgage operations, and it took time to get people used to it.”
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"I had to take a hard look at the staff, and the way we were doing business. How were we handling the money, the back-end risk on the settlement accounts and minimizing losses? How were we going to handle the sales side of it? That was a big part for us because we had a lot of high-end buyers. We needed sophisticated settlement officers."
Barbara Griest
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This is where Barbara thrived. Her most notable characteristic, her people skills, was crucial for selling customers and clients on a new way of doing business with a new company. Prudential Fox & Roach started to grow through acquisition during the ‘90s, and those acquisitions brought real estate agents who had their own title and settlement relationships and were uninterested in using Trident.
“The struggles were all relationship building. To sales agents, it didn’t matter to them who our company was owned by, they just wanted their deals done and closed. When we did our first acquisition, I remember going to a sales meeting as the representative of their new title company, and everyone in the room all had their relationships, and I just got shelled in the meeting because they wanted to use their own title company,” she said with a laugh. “So, it was a challenge. I had to have a plan to win over those relationships. That was a relatively small acquisition, but it gave me the ability to learn how I needed to do that in order to start growing the capture in those offices.”
The next hurdle was learning the business beyond the comforting borders of Pennsylvania. Prudential Fox & Roach expanded outside of Pennsylvania for the first time in 2000, and Barbara, also a Pennsylvania-lifer, was chosen to take over management of New Jersey and later Delaware.
“First, it was important to hire the right people. If we could hire someone from the company they were using, then we would do that, which helped a lot with relationships. Aside from that, it was spending a lot of time with them and asking them to let us do one deal. Just see how we do. If we don’t do well, you never have to use us again,” she said. “We would have to have exceptional service because they would get concerned a buyer would say ‘you told me I could depend on them to get the deal done.’ In some respects they’d rather it be an arm’s length transaction so there is no blame that falls on them if it doesn’t get done for some reason. We had to fight hard and prove ourselves.”
“I was very fortunate to have the strong support of PFR’s owners, Larry Flick, Gerry Griesser and Jim Waters, which allowed me to think out of the box for ways to grow the company,” she said.
She stayed out of the business for a short while to take care of her children, and now Barbara frequently travels to Washington, D.C., to protect the business model she helped create. As the 2013 chair of RESPRO, she is meeting with lawmakers, regulators and representatives from other industries, which has been an eye-opening experience during such a pivotal time for financial regulation. The main issue she's focused on is written in the proposed qualified mortgage rule. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's (CFPB) final rule provides that a loan cannot be a qualified mortgage if the points and fees paid by the consumer exceed 3 percent of the total loan amount. Third-party charges from affiliated service providers are included in that calculation while unaffiliated fees are not.
 “I got handed a very challenging year this year,” she said with a laugh. “I’ve learned more about D.C. in the last 12 months than I ever thought I’d know. It has been an incredible experience. It’s very much an uphill battle, but we’ve got glimmers of hope in various areas. On the back end we are preparing for the fact that maybe it doesn’t go through and how we handle the business that doesn’t qualify.”
Her concerns today at Trident extend beyond that specific issue and to the broader regulatory conversation and how an affiliation with a mortgage company may bring even greater scrutiny.
“Because we are an AfBA with a mortgage company, which is the most regulated of our businesses, who is to say the CFPB doesn’t come in to audit them and, because we are a related company, expect that we would have the same policies and procedures in place as the mortgage company? We’re anticipating that we will be scrutinized more than an unaffiliated title company. From an underwriter’s view, we might be in a better position, but not to an outside lender or to a warehouse lender.
“The trust between lenders and title companies has gone away,” she continued. “We need letters of good standing from underwriters that you never had to have before and now warehouse lenders require all of this documentation from a title company to whom they are going to wire funds, and requesting everything an outside lender would require from us. The vetting is so intense. As long as there are defalcations in the title industry and lenders lose money, it will not ease up.”
If only 1980s Barbara, the one stressed from an intense workload, could see her efficient 2013 operations. She noted proudly that the company is paperless, “dragged kicking and screaming three years ago,” and the three divisions are able to work seamlessly despite the wider geography with any office capable of accessing any file.
“What we had before, the transaction coordinators were all out in different sales offices. It was inefficient. Someone goes on vacation and all of their files are there,” she said. “Now that we are electronic, if someone leaves, the manager can go into the file and see what was done, what wasn’t, and split them up among other transaction coordinators or title people. We were able to execute a big centralization plan over the last five years.
“Keep in mind how much more work you have to do to close a file now compared to 15 years ago,” she continued. “Clearing title is clearing title, but dealing with lenders, of any kind, is much more of a challenge because they have so many more regulatory issues, and we bear the brunt of that sometimes.”
 Barbara is a Quaker, from a long line of traditional Quakers. Her family had 11 acres of land with horses to ride. She and her four siblings went to Westtown School, a small Quaker school. Her grandparents were so traditional that they used ‘thee’ and ‘thou’ in everyday speech and never touched a drop of alcohol.
"We changed that in the next generation,” she laughed.
Talk about a recurring theme: At the ground floor AfBAs; moving from receptionist to the commercial loans department; and taking a title company paperless. Barbara always seems to be near change.
I wrapped up the interview by asking what would have happened if Griesser didn’t call and get her back in the industry.
“I wouldn’t have stayed at home,” she said. “I like to focus on a specific goal and to learn as much about it as I can, and that’s pretty much what I did. I started that with mortgage and then title. … I have a comfort in being focused on a singular thing. But then when I’m comfortable with that, I want to branch out.”
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