There’s no denying it: things are different today. For better or worse, businesses of every size are running leaner and doing whatever it takes to stay afloat. As the economy continues to sift, business owners throughout East Orlando have been forced to evolve to survive. They’ve had to drop employees, change hours, offer discounts and more. In some cases, like that of Universal Home Mortgage in Avalon Park, they’ve had to realign how they do business and what services they offer.

Being a small, locally-owned mortgage company amid the recent real estate market, the upstart company was already walking a fine line. As the environment around them continued to shift, Zach Bleznick, director of operations for Universal Home Mortgage, says the company quickly realized they needed a new approach to push forward.

“We really had to restructure our business to become more of a full-service company rather than just concentrating on traditional mortgages like when we started,” Bleznick says. The decision was made to offer more services for clients looking to buy a new home or keep their current one. The company recently launched new options including loan modification and short sale assistance. “Three years ago there was no such thing as loan modification and foreclosure a word that was thrown around. Over the past year or so we’ve had to develop and integrate options to serve our new kind of customer in our new kind of market.”

Bleznick recalls when he was first going into the mortgage industry as a traditional loan officer. His days were filled with inbound and outbound phone calls but then, as the economy started to turn, his days became entirely more interesting. “People started to lose a tremendous amount of equity in their homes, suddenly when people would talk to you, nine out of 10 didn’t have any equity left,” he says. “When we first started, it used to be a cut and dry situation where we could either help you or we couldn’t. We just had to say there were no financing options available because there was no such thing as loan modification.”

Today, the business at Universal Home Mortgage has evolved to keep up with the demand. “We realized if we wanted to stay in business, we had to have a means to keep our clients in-house and help them so that’s what we did,” says Bleznick.

But, because of the industry, Bleznick and his team have had an entirely new set of challenges to deal with as well. Among ever-changing bank programs and laws, professionals in the mortgage industry must continually adapt to how they do business. “Every single day a bank offers a different type of loan modification or changes a guideline or expedites a process that used to take six months,” he says. “We are forced to stay up with all the changes because we are submersed in the industry every day; it definitely keeps you on your toes, that’s for sure.”

Aside from the standards, Bleznick and company have also had to keep up with competitors who, as he puts it, have seemingly come out of nowhere. “With any crisis, people come out of the woodwork to take advantage of the situation and most don’t have the necessary experience, licenses or certifications,” he says. “All of a sudden we saw individuals that were not mortgage professionals advertising they were ‘loan modification specialists’ and they started charging obscene upfront retainers to help people and, really, they didn’t even know if they could.”

Still, even with the new competition, the changing guidelines and the evolving business model, Bleznick says, although hectic, business is better because of the evolution. “We’ve definitely seen an increase after we opened up our options to offer services that people need now,” he says. “If you can show people that you’ll be there through thick and thin, then they’ll stick with you when times are good and bad.”

Article by Corey Gehrold