Scarpero says the gap between his tools and a major retail lender's has nearly closed
Before the recent advancements in AI, it was very difficult for an independent mortgage broker to keep up with the technology of a large retail lender. This impacted brokers not only in loan tech, but also in marketing.
The only way they could do this was to partner with a wholesale lender who also had the budget to build out the same level of tech. However, as AI has improved rapidly, the playing field has leveled.
Companies with big marketing and technology teams can build slicker calculators, better content, and more polished outreach than a small shop typically can afford.
That gap has shaped how brokers think about competing for business, often assuming certain marketing tools are simply out of reach without a large staff. However, one veteran broker who has leveled up his business with AI says that gap has all but closed.
Carlos Scarpero (pictured top), a mortgage broker at Edge Home Finance, has been running an AI platform called Viktor to build tools and handle tasks he used to pay other companies for. He said that capability has closed much of the gap between his one-person operation and a national retail lender's in-house team.
"That gap is really narrowed. I'm one of the few people who understands this," Scarpero told Mortgage Professional America. "There's not a single tool Veterans United has on their website that I cannot create right now. It's really just my creativity that's my only limiting factor at this point."
Bridging the tech gap
He pointed to his own calculator tools as an example of how quickly that gap has closed. That includes a calculator for Basic Allowance for Housing (BAH), the tax-free stipend the military pays service members that plays a role in qualifying for a VA loan.
"I made my first BAH calculator, and I tried to go into ChatGPT and make it, and it was such a pain," he said. "It wouldn't have the right data. It wouldn't pull in the right things. It was a total mess."
Scarpero said the same task that once took him hours of trial and error now takes minutes.
"Now the technology is getting so good that basically you just go to Viktor and say, ‘Hey, go look at this calculator here on Veterans United and copy it, make one that looks like that and use my branding,’" he said. "It just takes a couple hours."
He said that speed changes the calculation for a broker deciding whether a given tool or piece of content is worth building at all.
"Really now it's just my imagination and what I want to spend," he said.
That same capability, he said, has changed how he thinks about tools he already pays other companies for. He pointed to a realtor portal tool he had been renting from a third-party vendor as an example.
"I had bought this realtor portal tool where you can make these tools for realtors, and they can log into it and create headshots and stuff," he said. "This guy was selling this tool; it was like $79 a month, and it sounded good on paper, but I was like, I can make something better on my own."
By building the technology himself, not only could he save on a monthly subscription, but he could customize it the way he wanted.
"Why don't I just make my own little webpage that has the same stuff, and then I can cancel this thing," he said. "It starts making suggestions, and then it does its thing, and it finishes it."
Scaling outreach without a team
The same approach, according to Scarpero, applies to generating new business, not just building tools. He is still working out how far he wants to take it.
"I would start with outreach, because the technology is there to scrape websites," he said. "You just create a Gmail template that comes personally from my Gmail and identify the people I want to talk to, and then just have it send out 10 to 15 a day, enough to not hit the spam filters."
Scarpero said he has a specific use in mind for that system once it's built out.
"That's probably how I'm going to start booking these realtor meetings," he said. "More of the blasting kind of marketing, but consistently. Eventually you'll get a buy-in."
He said the constraint on how far he takes any of it comes down to money and bandwidth rather than the technology itself.
"My limiting portion at this point is taking the calls and having the budget to make the thing happen," he said. "If I threw $20,000 a month into this thing, I know I could really blow it up, but then I've got to have the backend support to make sure the calls come in properly."
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