I'm taking the company forward with you guys.
That's what I'm doing.
Right?
To the moon.
Like those Reddit investors, we're taking this to the moon.
Let's get it.
Welcome back.
Welcome back to another episode of Value Nation.
Special, special episode today.
We got a special guest coming through, Charlie, don't we?
Super pumped.
He's kind of a big deal in our space.
Well, I mean, at least for our company.
We like to.
And it's our first ever guest.
I mean, it's our first ever guest, you're right.
We actually got someone to come on the show with us.
Well, hopefully it won't be the last.
I think this is going to be a good one.
Everybody's going to enjoy this one.
All right, we want to welcome our esteemed guest, Mike Moore,
our chief revenue officer from Nationwide, Property
and Appraisals.
Double the mikes.
Thank you, my good man.
The our Yoda, our El Capitan, if you will, leads the ship,
keeps things going.
Mike, say hi to your family and friends.
Doing my best.
I thought the esteemed guest was going to be Schwartz's dog.
Hey, you got Liv back here.
She's my co-host.
She is not big.
She has nothing to do with you.
She has no clue what's happening.
So Mike's a fellow Ohio guy.
So Schwartz, you're outnumbered at this point.
I feel real good about it.
Although he does like the Buckeyes.
So me and him, that's like oil and water being Irish.
It doesn't work.
Yes, but you're the oddity here.
People growing up in Ohio don't root for Notre Dame.
Some really strange people root for Michigan.
But being a Buckeye means being a Buckeye.
So you can't just kind of pick and choose.
I don't know how you're getting away with that.
Well, I mean, look, speaking of picking and choosing,
you went to Xavier.
So you guys didn't have a football team.
So I get it.
You wanted to find someone to root for.
It's semi-close.
And win some games.
Well, hot off the presses, Xavier
is actually looking to get back into football,
which is really frustrating because the t-shirt that
says, Undefeated since 1978 is going to go out of style.
And I'm not happy about that.
You're going to have to frame it.
Put it up on the wall or something.
For real.
Are they really going to try and make that move?
I mean, we do have the upper hand
of having great colors for uniforms.
So I mean, that's there.
I got to give them that.
But other than that, I don't really see the idea.
I mean, they're trying to compete
in the college landscape.
You see what's happening.
Realignment with all these conferences,
it's all based on football.
So in order to stay relevant, keep your basketball
team in a big conference, they're
going to have to get a football program.
So all the folks at home might not know,
but you're basically like Mr. McDonald's in Ohio.
You got some.
Mr. McDonald's, what is this?
What is this?
Mr. McDonald's.
Oh, breaking news.
Yeah, what is this?
Give me a little something.
My parents were owner operators for McDonald's for 50 years.
They just actually sold last year.
As you might imagine, I started my working career
at McDonald's at 12 because my older brother started at 13
and I had to one up him there.
Were you a fry guy?
Were you working the fry?
I did it all, man.
I did it all.
This is when child labor laws apparently weren't a thing.
So yeah, it was 12 years old.
It was the middle of summer and I
would spend eight hours on top of a grill
cooking hamburger meat, literally eating my lunches
in the freezer because I had been sweating all day.
So but yeah, so I worked for 10 years at McDonald's
and managed some stores through college.
And my oldest brother got into it
and I just I didn't like what I saw there.
It didn't look like the career I wanted to get into.
I decided I should use my degree on something else.
I won't say better, just else.
And got into being a loan officer actually
for Charter One Bank, which then became Citizens Bank.
Spent about five years there and went
to work in the vendor management department
managing our AMCs and appraisers from there.
Got picked up by one of my vendors and AMC out of Chicago
to go run operations for them.
Spent a few years there, had some success.
Funny thing, I live in Nashville and I had a guy
calling me for about a year.
It's like come to move to Nashville,
help me run operations here.
And I just laughed at him.
I'm like, I'm not moving to Nashville.
Are you crazy?
Like, X.
And I came down for a weekend and I'm like, I'm crazy.
I'm an idiot.
I need to live here.
This place is amazing.
So I came for that job and I've been here eight, nine years
now and I don't see myself ever leaving.
I love it.
But through that journey, about five years ago,
got hooked up with Nationwide to come run the sales division.
We've had a great run the past four and a half, five years.
Acquired some great companies.
Mike Schwartz comes from OrderPro,
which was the second company we picked up.
We've just been really on the move
and even changed investors once about a year ago.
So we're just, again, we're doing a lot of things.
I'm being very active in the space.
We've grown threefold in the four and a half years
since I've been here.
So we've just had a great success story
and you guys have joined that and been a part of that.
Here we are.
We have a podcast now.
I mean, we're a big deal.
We are.
We're huge, man.
We have like 10 subscribers right now.
I just texted my brother and told him to get out there.
What the heck?
You haven't told everybody, like and subscribe.
Rogan started with 10.
I mean, he immediately went to a million,
but he had 10 at one point.
So Nashville for a minute or Nash Vegas,
as you locals call it now.
The taxi cabs say Nash Vegas on top of it.
They do.
It's wild.
Are you kidding?
And you guys live and breathe that.
Well, maybe not you.
You're a Burbs guy.
But the downtown folks, hey, they're from another world.
They throw up like in the middle of the street.
It's weird.
I want to be let's be fair here.
It's Nash Vegas because there's all these people coming in
from out of town to party.
It's the tourists.
Oh, it's our fault.
Those are people growing up.
Yeah.
We all live in the suburbs and appreciate you guys paying
our sales tax for us.
That's kind of how we roll.
So Mike, you had a pretty solid Halloween costume, I will say.
We just had that holiday pass.
That was good.
I was super jelly.
Had a real beard.
Maybe we can throw a picture up on the screen.
Oh, Jordan, yeah, you got to go get it.
You got to go get it.
You know, Halloween, most years, you get to October 15th.
You're like, what am I going to do?
And you're scraping together.
Literally, Jamie and I, on November 2nd of last year,
we're like, oh, we should have been ripping Beth.
We're doing it next year.
So literally waited a whole year for that costume
to come together.
Oh, you were prepared.
Yeah.
I was excited.
You guys nailed it, though.
I embraced the character.
I became the man.
That's your Nashville.
Nashville's just seeping into you right there,
even though he's way up in country, God's country.
Where are they?
Wyoming or something like that?
Montana.
So you weren't the Daisy Confused version of that actor.
You were the modern day version of that actor.
Yeah, correct.
I don't know if I could pull off that guy.
Took me two years to figure out where I knew him from.
And it was Daisy Confused.
Yeah, it did take a minute for me, too.
He's got range.
He does, man.
I was impressed.
I mean, Costner, he just owns the screen every time.
He does his thing.
Yeah.
Ever show you that picture when I met him at NBA annual
in Boston?
No.
Oh, I'm going to have to send it to you.
He was out at a bar.
And one person, it was some after party.
I forget who was putting it on.
Maybe Radiant or something like that.
He just happened to show up.
He's at the bar getting a drink.
And somebody recognized him.
And instantly, there was a line of like 50 people
trying to get their selfies.
Who leads the catalogue?
No, no.
I got in line.
My man, he did Draft Day.
That was close to my heart.
We're a Browns fan.
Oh, Cleveland, yeah.
So I was like, I said, hey, I really
loved your work in Draft Day.
Can I get a picture?
He said, absolutely.
He gave me this little smirk.
I'll send you guys.
You guys will love it.
It's perfect.
But speaking, you said the NBA.
Speaking of the NBA, segue.
Ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba.
We just got back.
We just got back from Nashville.
This is in Mike and his home city for the NBA National
Conference.
What's our takeaways from attending the show
and getting to mingle with our industry's finest?
They know how to party.
That is a good point.
Yeah, no, they do.
Did you see Darius Rucker?
Obviously, I was sick, so I didn't get to go,
which I was disappointed about.
No, no, no, no.
I didn't see that one.
Once an Old Dominion with you handsome gentlemen,
that was a new one for me.
Mike was feeling it.
I had no idea who they were.
They're a great band.
They got good range as well.
And what's cool about them is they were songwriters
before they were a band.
And part of their show is they get up there
and they actually perform a lot of the songs
that they wrote for other artists.
And I think that's super cool.
They've been around a lot longer than we realize
because they were not on the radio,
but they were writing songs for other people.
So like I said, I thought they put on a great show
and the venue was super cool.
And look, it was a good night to get out together.
And that's what I love about these shows
is it's a good opportunity to get in front of people
and just not talk about appraisals,
not talk about loans, but just talk about everything else
and connect with people in a way that you don't get to
when they're visiting your booth.
When they're visiting your booth,
we're going to talk business.
We'll try to keep it casual here and there.
But you're kind of forced to talk about business.
And at the end of the day, we all
have lives that take place, take way more of our day
than what we do for work.
And it's nice to connect with people
and learn things about them outside of just
how many loans did you do this month?
I agree with you.
There was a lot of, at the NBA, there was a lot,
people seem to be pretty focused, super dialed in this year
versus in the years past where maybe they went to a speaker,
maybe they listened to something.
But this year, it was much more focused.
People were much more scheduled and rigid.
Some guys are talking about, we're
in a period of change and reset.
And I feel that's very accurate.
Mike, I know you had some conversations one off.
Anything what you learned from some of those people?
I don't know.
I would say, first and foremost, the sentiment there
was not doom and gloom.
It's easy for people to feel that way.
But the people who are going to be successful,
people who are going to recognize
the opportunity in this type of market
are the people who see past that.
People see past the next three to six months.
I think we're in that space, obviously.
We believe that we can be resilient through this process.
And we're actually looking at, hey, what opportunities
do we have here to actually come out of this thing
better than where we started?
And I think that, again, was the sentiment of a lot of people
there, like, hey, what do we need to think about?
What do we need to do differently?
What do we need to reshape in our own organizations
so that when the market comes back, because it will,
it always does, and housing comes back first,
so that we're in a position that we're, again,
a better spot than when this all started?
Because let's face it, guys, you're
both tremendous salespeople.
We have an amazing sales organization.
But a lot of what we experienced in 2020 and 2021
was just rising tides.
We all could sit back and just kind of let the orders come in
and just figure out a way to manage it.
So it was so much business.
And this is when, again, the good
gets separated from the bad.
And we're going to see a lot of organizations fall down.
We're going to see a few organizations grow.
And again, we've been saying AMC consolidation
is coming for a long time.
It's here.
It's legit happening.
There's going to be a lot of companies that
don't have the cash flow to get through this piece.
And we're not somebody that anybody's worried about.
We're going to come through and look at more opportunities
at other organizations who need our help, who
want to partner up.
And we're going to come out of this with another order pro,
another first choice, another old city, all of that.
And we're going to be even better.
So does it look scary in the next three to six months?
Sure.
I mean, everybody feels that way.
There's no denying the fact that 8%, 9% interest rates
are bad for us.
But we know that that's not sustainable for the long term
for the market.
So we're just going to weather that storm and get through it.
And like I said, I think a lot of the lenders out there
recognize that as well.
A lot of the title companies, the other people who are at MBA,
everybody who is there are the people
who are the long term thinkers.
The people who are freaked out are at home.
So that's why I thought the Senate was so positive there.
So all right.
So Mike, from what all we learned at MBA,
the conversations you had, there's
a lot of talk about alternative valuations
and a lot of concentration there, of course.
Obviously, why don't you tell some of the folks at home,
how do we fare in this kind of space?
And any news that you can break for us?
Yeah.
A lot going on there, obviously.
Alternative valuations, it's been a hot topic for years.
Modernization of appraisals and all that has been around.
And it's been something that's kind of stopped and started
several times.
And a lot of that has been market driven.
And honestly, it just kind of had a bad run during pilot.
But I do believe, talking to some folks
I know at Fannie and Freddie, it's coming.
It's happening.
It's going to be a real thing.
Freddie's already rolled it into policy.
But Fannie and Freddie are approaching it two different ways.
So the way Freddie's handling it is
they're taking actual situations where a full valuation would
have been done.
And they're saying, we feel pretty good about this.
We'll let you do a hybrid.
So that's going to be like an ADM with an inspection done
by someone who's not an appraiser.
It could be an appraiser, but they don't have it.
Fannie's going at it a little bit differently.
What they're going to be doing, and this is expected
to roll out in 2023, is they're going
to take loans that would have previously
qualified for a waiver.
And those will be done with a hybrid, or possibly just
an inspection.
And when you really think about it, this had to happen.
And the reason it had to happen is the model
that they make these decisions on
has to have data fed into it.
So if you're putting appraisal waivers on 50% of the orders,
that means half the properties out there
are not getting fresh data input into their model.
So they kind of got to pull back on the waiver piece.
And they don't want to go all the way back
to full traditional appraisals.
So what are they going to do?
They're going to do the hybrids in between.
So it makes a lot of sense.
Again, we're being told that that's going to happen.
But they originally said it was going to happen this quarter.
But we all know anything in the public space
doesn't happen on time.
There's a lot of moving parts in there.
So I would say probably Q2, Q3 of next year,
we're going to see those rolled into policy.
And what that means is if you're an AMC that only
offers traditional appraisals, your value
just dropped in half, because you can only
deliver half of what your lenders are going to need.
Quit the roadshed.
Exactly.
So for us, that's been a big focus.
And we're about two weeks away from being
going to make a pretty big announcement about how we're
going to do this.
But we're going to have all of our alternate valuations done
in-house.
We won't be leveraging any third parties
to take care of that for us.
And we're going to do it in a way that is going
to make us a leader in the space.
So maybe I'll have to come back.
I'll give you some more details at that point.
But again, we recognize the importance of that product set.
And we're investing heavily to get what
we need to be a leader in it.
I like that you're already asking
to come back on the show.
It makes me feel real good about it.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Hold on a second.
And I didn't even offer you a bottle of bourbon for that.
That's legit.
That was very heartfelt.
I feel like at this point in time with this show,
anybody can invite themselves on over.
Sure, come on.
Let's go.
Let's see.
We'll talk to anybody.
That's totally fine.
You guys have any different feelings about any of that?
What are you guys thinking?
Swarovski?
I'm thinking Arby's.
About the alternate valuations, the way things are going.
The beef and cheddar, that's what you're thinking.
Yeah, no, I like that chicken bacon and Swiss, actually.
Well, yeah, and I was going to chime in when you were talking.
I feel like the increase in waivers
the past couple of years was a response
to how nutty things were.
Because that was an unprecedented percentage of waivers
that were happening, where they're
saying we don't need an appraisal,
we don't need that yet.
Looks good enough.
Non-risk, let's go.
And so I fully agree with you that waivers
are going to go down if they haven't already.
They're going to have to find another source where they don't
want to go through the full appraisal process for people
who are well-qualified, low-risk loans, low loan value,
so forth.
And so you have to be a player in this space
to be able to provide an alternative valuation
source that has been a full $500, $600 appraisal
to get these things moving.
So I agree with what you're saying,
and you have to be set up for this.
I know it's something that's been going on for years.
We talked to appraisers who have been doing this
for a long time.
They've been saying they've been trying
to get the appraiser out of the process since the 80s.
That's always been the fear.
They're going to automate this.
They're going to take us out.
You can never take that piece of it out.
Even if it is alternative valuations
and they're doing an inspection, they're
still going to need that desktop appraisal from somebody
who's in the market that knows the market, that
can run the data and actually analyze it and produce
some kind of number for them.
Yeah, and I think the reason, part of the reason
it's struggled in the past was appraisers
didn't need to do them.
Like they had enough traditional appraisal work
they could do more than they could do.
And we all know, I mean, appraisers are calling us
nonstop asking for work.
They're open to different valuation sources at this point.
And I hate to look at it like they're desperate.
I don't want to seem like we're taking advantage.
I think what it is is that we're, again,
looking at an opportunity.
And this is an opportunity to get that product out there
because the appraisers who specialize in these things
love them.
Think about what their job really is.
They're meant to give value, to give their opinion
on the value of a property.
Measuring that house doesn't contribute to it.
That's not the skill that they have spent decades
crafting, right?
What they've done is figure out how do I value this property?
Well, that's all they do in the desktop space
is they work on the value.
And measuring to make sure that the septic tank is
100 feet away from the property or 150 feet away
from a well on a property.
That's not included.
That's not what they signed up for.
It's like, I was going to appraise these houses,
figure out the market value of them, and go from there.
And that repetitive ANSI revisions.
Crawling around in crawl spaces and attics and.
Oh, yeah.
But it is like you said, it's taken a while for this
to really take off.
And we talk about what is it going
to take for it to really sink in and the changes to happen.
Danny and Freddie are doing their part.
And we talked about it at the NBA, the VA finally
opening up their scope, so to speak, to say, hey, look,
we need to be able to help our veterans get secure a home
faster than 60 days.
They want to open up conversations up
to look at some of these alternative valuations
where they can get there and get there faster.
So I mean, it's progress.
It's been a little bit of progress
over the last couple of years.
But we might actually be there.
And it's exciting for us, for nationwide.
We're going to be leading the charge.
I feel it.
Feel it in my bones.
Hey, evolve or die.
Right?
That's the way it is.
Amen.
You remember when EAD dropped?
And changing from good average, new, to the C ratings
and all that stuff on appraisal, they
changed the appraisal language back to 2009,
something like that, 2009, 2010.
And man, it took years for people to get the hang of these.
It was UAD ratings, right?
But that was for the EAD system.
But it made all the sense in the world
when you sit back and look at it, right?
Good is a relative term.
C3 is something that's clearly defined on a page.
And again, you got to come up with a way
to beat it into analytics.
Because anybody who thought that analytics
weren't going to be a major part of this business
is just kind of wearing blinders, I think.
It's everywhere.
Data is king, my friend.
Data is king.
So Mike, I'm going to put you on the spot.
If you don't know the answer to this, we can cut it.
OK.
We have that power.
We do have that power.
But to keep one last current news piece
that we got going on here, Fed once again
announced rate increase.
Now, I want to say most people, but a lot of people
hear that, and they instantly think,
oh, mortgage rates are going up.
Yes, in the like a couple of steps down the road,
that's usually what ends up happening.
But that actually isn't directly what that means.
Do you have an insight on a simple way
to explain on when the Fed says rates are increasing
or increasing rates, whether it's a 0.75 again,
what does that do to our industry?
How does that end up in the back end affecting mortgage rates?
Well, yeah, what they're increasing
is the short-term interest rate.
And it's actually what we pay for the money
we borrow from China and everywhere else, too.
So it's not directly correlated to mortgages.
Mortgages are actually tied more closely to the 10-year bond
rate, which, look, when they raise short-term rates,
long-term rates are going to go up.
But it's not like for like.
So if they raise 3 quarters of a point,
it doesn't mean 30-year mortgage rates or even
15-year mortgage rates are going to go up 3 quarters of a point.
They're going to go up because people
are making loans on other types of transactions and stuff
like that.
So that all kind of carries over.
But the insinuation that 3 quarter point Fed
rate increases is going to result in rates going from 7
to 7.75 is not the case.
And in a lot of cases, you actually sometimes
see a short-term dip in mortgage rates
right after the Fed rate increase.
So we usually will see our appraisal orders go up
for a few days after these increases.
And then, of course, they come down a little bit.
I'm an econ major, if that helps.
So he knows.
There's a perfect guy for this.
He knows it.
20 years ago, I studied econ for a couple of years
extensively.
And I remember very little of it.
How do you do that?
How?
I'm bombed.
I had to take one econ class.
And I was like, I'm up.
Never again.
So Sorcy has some quick hitters for you, Mike.
So no pressure here.
Rapid fire questions.
He's going to give you some options.
And first thing that comes to mind.
We're going to close you out with this.
And you can elaborate if you want.
You don't have to just answer it with one word answer.
Just a little background works if you want to.
So we're going to start off with nice and easy.
We might know the answer, but I don't know.
What is your favorite band?
Band or musician?
Boo Fighters.
Ooh.
Boo Fighters.
Good choice.
Big variety.
Lots of music, big catalog.
Good choice.
But I got the Beatles going on back here for what it's worth.
So I'm plus.
Yeah.
The Beatles.
I mean, yeah.
Hot coffee or cold brew?
Cold brew.
Gotcha.
No matter what season.
How would be coffee cake?
Dunkin' or Starbucks?
Dunkin'.
Ooh.
Oh.
Good guy.
All day.
Really?
Yeah.
I thought you were better than that.
Pumpkin spice.
Legit or overhyped?
Leave it for the ladies.
Oh, enough.
That hurts my heart.
iPhone or Android?
iPhone.
Now, don't get those green messages out of here.
It's because he's old.
Simplicity.
There's a definite gap, right?
So we have me and Schwartz are kind of in the middle.
Mike, you're older.
And by older, I mean you're like a year or two old and older
than me.
And then we have everybody else.
We would have been in high school at the same time.
Take it easy.
I know.
I'm sorry.
But you have more gray hairs than me.
I think I was in elementary school, boys.
Wait, hold the phone.
Well, yeah, you might have been.
But there's a gap, right, where the iPhone started
to get real cool.
And it was cool in college.
I had a good time with it.
And then I switched back over to the green message.
So I'm on the dark side.
But then we got our producer, Jordan.
I would think she's iPhone all day.
So I'm torn.
I'm torn.
But you have your iPhone.
Look, Apple was genius, right?
They reeled you in with iTunes and stuff like that.
And for a while, I was like, well, I can't switch devices
because all my music is saved in whatever that format is.
And then music went online anyway.
And it didn't matter.
But at that point, I'm like, I'm too old to figure out
a new phone at this point.
Yeah, you're already hooked.
You're already hooked.
But you don't have a cool flip phone like I do.
Hashtag Samsung.
That's a fact.
Apple, they'll put one out there about three years from now.
They need to.
I really want an Apple flip phone.
You guys got to get hip to it.
The good old days have just gone.
Gosh, it's a good feeling.
It's great.
All right, Michael, college or pro football?
College, all day.
Even with the changing landscape where college football is
pretty hard to watch if you're not
one of the top four or five teams.
I mean, it's the same teams in the playoff every year.
I'm one of the top four or five teams.
Oh, my god.
Listen, part of that is just biased
because I didn't grow up with a protein.
I was in Toledo, which is between Detroit, Cleveland,
and Cincinnati.
So you had all kinds of options.
A lot of good options.
Terrible options.
Detroit was a pretty solid option.
They were decent for a minute, but I just
never really left them.
Last question, Christmas decorations,
do they go up before Thanksgiving or after Thanksgiving?
You know, I think as a society, it's after.
But for me, it's like you're having people over
Thanksgiving, it kind of feels good to shoehorn your way
into Christmas a little bit.
So I decorate before people come in.
I'm with you, Clark Rizwold.
Let's do it.
Is it like a 100% all of it's up,
or is it like a little transition to it,
and then it's like full blown, let's go Clark Rizwold
after Thanksgiving?
I don't get it out of the basement twice.
I mean, if I'm doing it, it's coming out.
You get a fake tree or real tree?
That's the most important question.
Fake tree.
Gosh, I got to get another one.
Freelit, fake trees are a life saver, man.
Am I the only man in this group right now?
I've been cutting my tree down since my daughter was born.
All right, Clark, easy.
Amen.
No.
It's my name.
Oh, he's talking about me.
All right, Michael, well, appreciate your time, man.
I mean, we took too much of your time as it is.
We are way over budget, way over time, man.
We can't afford to pay you like we promised, I'm sorry.
It's all right, yeah.
Seree's probably been blowing you up.
What are you doing?
I'm taking the company forward with you guys.
That's what I'm doing, right?
To the moon.
Like those Reddit investors, we're taking this to the moon.
Let's get it.
Well, Schwartz, that was another,
I feel like it was another fantastic episode.
Yeah.
Valuation, we're growing.
We are getting a little better each time.
I hope everyone has enjoyed it.
I feel like there's improvement.
For sure, for sure.
Marginal, but we can do that.
Marginal?
So let's get more comfortable with this podcast thing.
Absolutely.
Let's make sure to mention our fantastic producer, Jordan
Sandlin.
She would have been doing a great job for us,
keeping us in line.
I can see you today.
I can see you.
Make sure to go like and subscribe
on all of our new social media platform handles.
Valuation podcast.
We've got it.
IG, Facebook, YouTube, and TikTok.
Schwartz is going to be out there ticking and talking,
like a grown man doing his thing.
I don't do the TikToks.
You're going to have to.
It's now to think.
You're going to have to go live.
We had a chance.
We were just in person twice in about the span of a month.
And I don't remember doing a single talk tick, TikTok,
tickety-tick-tock.
Oh, yeah.
We'll get better.
Maybe we'll Snapchat, chat-snap.
Snapping and chatting?
All right.
Go check us out.
Just throw it up on the Facebook.
Valuation podcast.
Go subscribe.
Get those downloads in.
Thank you very much for joining us.
Thank you.