Top Originator: Danny Horanyi delivers, every time

From pizza debt to power originator

Top Originator: Danny Horanyi delivers, every time

Danny Horanyi has been in the mortgage industry since 2003. As he says, it’s a complex world, and there isn’t a one-fits-all success plan for everyone. But while there’s no magic bullet, Horanyi lives by a simple method to business in general and partnerships specifically that works: Set expectations on all sides, line up what you know you can deliver on, identify that that aligns with what they need, and deliver. Every time.

PO: What separates a truly stellar originator from the pack?
DH: The main thing is just having a repeatable process. And the reason for that is a couple main pillars: One is, that way you can scale because you’ll be able to predict the outcome if you create a system with a predictable outcome, and the other is that you can communicate your system to a referral partner so that they then can understand what you do. That gap between when they refer you to when a loan closes, in their mind, that’s just a black hole, or a block box. They put the lead in, give a name and a number to you and then out pops a closing sometime. But if you can fill that in with, ‘This is what we’re going to do Day Zero,’ and then all the way through that journey to the end, where everybody’s celebrating because they’re getting the keys, the creation of that process and the fact that it exists means that you can communicate it to your partners.
 
PO: How does the recent merge with loanDepot affect your team’s future technology opportunities?
DH: The key thing is how those [technologies] are being implemented. Our team has always been system driven, it’s always been technology assisted or technology enhanced, and to have a company that’s really investing heavily in that same vision of having a technology-enhanced local professional, that’s what we’ve been preaching for years. We have been leveraging technology, both internally within our team, and then externally, with our customers – these are very, very powerful leverage tools that help free up our time so that we can be out serving more realtor partners, serving more clients.
 
Anybody that follows loanDepot on social media will have seen – which, their presence there is pretty phenomenal – will have seen the mello tech center, the campus that had its grand opening [in March]. There are extraordinarily smart people looking toward the future and building a bridge between where we are today and where the CEO and founder, Anthony Hsieh, and then also the chief technology officer, along with all the other pillars of the business, they’re all contributing to predict that future state, and then they’re actually spending the money to bridge it. And that’s the difference between a company that can, that has great ideas – there’s so many companies with great ideas, but there’s very few companies that have the resources and willpower to actually implement those ideas. We’re talking right now on a macro scale of technology and the implementation of technology, but that’s true all the way down to the originator. There’s no shortage of ideas. What there is a shortage of is commitment, follow through, work ethic. These are the things that allow somebody to build that bridge between where they are and then that future state.
 
PO: For a while, you were educating high school students about finance. Why them? Why you?
DH: It really came from a place of – holy crap, I can’t believe how little I knew, going from high school to college, how little I knew. Literally day one, walking to orientation and there are slews of banks giving credit cards away. I signed up for a credit card, and 45 days later, I had $3,000 worth of pizzas in credit card debt. No one told me that I had to pay it back! That wasn’t part of the conversation! I just didn’t know! There’s been many studies done that show how shockingly few high school graduates understand how interest works, let alone how compound interest works. So it’s about being able to share the power of responsible borrowing, responsible leverage, and asset accumulation through savings . . . finding ways to add that and let people avoid all the land minds that I stepped on as well as many of our customers. First-time home buyers come to talk to us and find out they have a 510 credit score because they have a collection account from a couple years ago because they didn’t know or they thought it was okay to get the $65,000 car and the $1,200 car payment and not understanding that that was a choice that was going to take other choices off the table. So it goes hand in hand with what we do, the advice that we give to our current clients and just recognizing that there’s definitely a gap there. I get excited about the opportunity to share. 
 
PO: What’s special about the job?
DH: I can’t think at any point where I didn’t love what we do. It’s a very unique opportunity to be able to truly impact somebody else’s life. If you hold that as something that’s valuable, everybody wants to do good and make an impact. To be able to say, ‘You know what, that person sat down with me, I did my very best to share the knowledge that I’ve accumulated and I know in my heart that made a difference in their life,’ there’s very few jobs on the earth where that’s even possible.