In this podcast episode, Dino Katsiametis shared insights into Ethos Mortgage Company’s innovative hybrid business model, which combines the flexibility of a mortgage broker with the control of a delegated lender. He explained the advantages of this model, such as lower costs, scalability, and the ability to choose from multiple lenders to ensure the best pricing and service for clients. Dino discussed the concept of “Mortgages Under Management” (MUM), which assigns a value to loan officers’ portfolios, providing long-term value and stability. He also highlighted the role of AI in improving efficiency and client service, aiming to reduce loan closing times and offer 24/7 consultations. Dino emphasized the importance of building strong client relationships through personalized service and ethical practices, and he outlined his vision for Ethos to become the largest and best mortgage brokerage in the U.S. by supporting loan officers with diverse income streams and a better work-life balance.
[David] Listeners, excited to have joining me on the microphone today is Dino Katsiametis, Dino has a new business model for his mortgage company that I thought you should all know about it. Actually, it was Dave Savage who contacted me and says, Lykken, you’ve got to have Dino on your podcast as he is someone who’s really dynamic. You’ll enjoy meeting him. And I got to tell you, I felt like I’ve known him all my life just after our first call. He’s a great guy and I’m excited to have him joining me on the microphone. Dino, good to have you here, friend. [Dino] Thank you, David. Thank you so much. I’m excited. [David] You’re wearing your company shirt Ethos. You’ve shared this with me, but share with our audience. What is Ethos mean? [Dino] Yeah. Ethos is a man of high moral character and when doing business in the finance world, I would think a man of high moral character, a person of high moral character is really the right person to be handling the work for anybody out there. [David] That’s great. It does set the bar for you though. Because when you put your company name as someone with a highest character and moral standing, the way you go about things, it can raise the bar and create all kinds of expectations and the consumer’s mind. So, I think it’s gutsy that you did it. Kudos. I love that. But also I just love the name. It was really good. I want to share with our listeners a little bit about your background, how you got to where you’re at. If you wouldn’t mind, walk us through that. [Dino] For sure. I’ve been in the business now for somewhere around 25 years. I lost track. [David] He’s a veteran then. Okay. [Dino] We’ll call it 25 years. I’ve been a producing loan officer my entire career. I’ve owned the company for quite a few years as well, but I’ll be honest. I never did anything for it. Anybody that wanted to do loans here, any other loan officers, it was always one of those things. I won’t bother you. You don’t bother me. I’ll let you run your business underneath my umbrella. Let’s just make life easy. And all I cared about was doing loans for myself and taking care of my clients. And I did that, I think at pretty high level and I really enjoyed it and everything was great. But as they say, sometimes when you get to the back nine, things start to change a little bit. And I honestly thought I was on the back nine and I was starting to take it easy. In fact, I was golfing once a week and starting to do things again that I hadn’t done in a while and was really enjoying it and then just out of the blue, this idea just came together. Literally on December 27th, 2023, it hit me and on January 2nd, 2024, it went into action and here we are now about six months later and we’re live but we still have this roadmap of a lot of little things to come because it’s quite the undertaking. [David] You’re a mortgage broker is that correct? [Dino] I am, it’s like the hybrid model, right? Delegated. But we are a broker which I value it’s how I grew up in the business as a broker. I think the way I like to explain it is for a short period of time I was in correspondent lending. Every loan officer was always at the mercy of whatever management or the owner, whoever it was wanted to do. If they wanted to raise rates, they could raise rates, right? If they wanted to change around how we were going to do things, it was up to them. In the broker side of space, if you are using, say bank A, and all of a sudden they decide to up their rates a little bit for whatever reason. You as a broker have the option to go somewhere else. And I always found that valuable because you’re not going to tell me what I have to do because if you think I’m going to do the best thing for my clients and then you’re not going to let me, something’s wrong. But as a broker, I have that right to go wherever I want to that’s going to either offer me the best price or the best service. [David] So many of our listeners are mortgage bankers and I love talking to brokers for this very reason, especially when we get into talking about your business model, which is so wonderful and refreshing. But also, you don’t have the control that you can do where you can lean on corporate some of the controls, but how would you argue against that? this is one of those good things, I hate that expression. Brokers are better because that just puts the divisive spirit into the thing. I don’t like that, but there are advantages to both sides and I think that’s what I’m trying to get to here. [Dino] T hat’s a good question. Brokers are better, right? I’ll tell you loan officers that are good or better. It doesn’t matter where there are, where they’re a broker [David] It don’t matter if they are a banker or broker. Yep. [Dino] If you’re good. You’re going to figure it out and you’re going to make it happen for your clients. As a correspondent lender, when I was, I used to say things like I have an underwriter sitting right next to me. If I have to get my question answered, I can get my question answered and now as a broker, I can say, you know what, it didn’t really matter because one person or two people didn’t have as much control and as a broker, if I were to get a hundred new files in, assuming I could process a hundred new files today, I can submit them all and I could get an answer by tomorrow. If I put a hundred new files in to pretty much any correspondent bank, they would be gridlocked and that system would not be able to handle it versus on the wholesale side. [David] For someone who has a really good model and can grow their business, you’re saying the scale of being a broker gives you advantages in that sense. [Dino] And the cost. My gosh, the cost, right? [David] I think that’s a big one, right? The cost structure. You don’t have to employ the underwriters. We don’t have to risk, a mistake that the underwriters might make, right? We don’t have to buy back the loan because of an underwriting mistake. Fraud. Yeah. Different story. But we don’t have that responsibility and for that, we don’t have the markup in price. Not to knock any of it, but middle management, there’s no middle management in the broker space. There’s no region. [Dino] From a cost standpoint and from an execution standpoint, I get it. And again, it really depends on from company to company. I would like to think that all the companies that my clients that I work with they’ll compete, if not better than any brokerage out there and it’s so much of how their runs. I think it’s good to get feedback on that thing on that particular talking point, but where I really want to go is when you and I spoke the other day, You talked about the mortgage brokerage model is broken, and I would agree with you, but I want to get your perspective on that. Talk about that. [Dino] I believe it’s broken and the reason I’m going to give is I’m going to go over flip flop a little bit. I’m going to go over to the real estate side and I’m going to look at EXP and the real brokerage, right? The direct selling piece that they’ve initiated and that has grown so incredibly fast and so big that it’s taking over the space. And I believe within the next five years, you’re going to see the traditional brokerage model on the real estate side be done. I don’t think it’s going to really exist. This other revenue share side, right? If they’re excelling said that is going to really be the wave of the future and the fact that they have grown, EXP has like over a hundred thousand agents. Back in December had 6,000. Six months later, they got over 20,000 now. It’s explosive growth, and they’re doing things the right way and in an environment like ours, where the loan officer is the one that has to go out there and create the relationships, has to go out there and spend his own money oftentimes to generate some business, he or she is self-employed at the end of the day, they are self employed people, unfortunately, in too much of the mortgage space, especially in the correspondence side, they can’t be 1099 or self employed. They have to be W2. The reality is if they don’t close the deal, they don’t make any money. In the broker space, our loan officers are 1099. We treat them like they’re 1099, like they’re self employed people and because of that, this revenue share piece is super exciting. And I think the wave of where the future mortgage company is going, and that’s just because we can see it already happening on this real estate side, we all know mortgage because it’s finance. Finance takes forever to catch up, right? technology, everything, but eventually it does. And when it does, it’s going to go. So, what I’m doing is I’m bringing this revenue share piece over to the mortgage side. [David] Very interesting. This has got to involve technology and one of the things we all know, we’re not the fastest to adopt cutting edge technology, and we’re hearing more and more about AI coming in and transforming how loan officers work. What are you employing at Ethos? And then also what are you finding as far as the advantage from AI? [Dino] There’s a lot of fear also, but I believe if you use it the right way and you adopt it, not to take over things, but to be a little more efficient at how you do things it can definitely change the way business is done. From my perspective, a great loan officer can fund a loan in 15 days. When the market’s doing 30, a great loan officer can do it at 15, right? It’s not easy. They got to have the right team. They got to have every system in place and it’s got to be perfect in order for that to happen, through AI, right? You can automate so much of that stuff that a 15 day close should become the norm. [David] Should become that norm. I agree. [Dino] Now, the other piece that I’m really excited about is, we’ve always been a boutique lender, right? because it’s always been like me doing my own loans and I’ve only ever been in California. And to be honest with you, 90 plus percent of all my business has only been in Orange County. So I used to say I can’t compete with Rocket Mortgage or Loan Depot. My gosh, A person can call them any day or night, any holiday, any whatever. And somebody is there to answer the phone. How do I compete with that? Now, one of the things we’re working on through AI is we’re recording every possible scenario that a client could be up against. Ex-wives, multiple properties, multiple businesses, self-employed, now W 2, you name it. Whatever the situation is, right? We’re recording every possible scenario. We’re inputting knowledge and moving forward. It’s going to be a little while still, but moving forward when that time hits, any day or night, if a client says, I want to talk to somebody, I want to apply for a loan. They’re not going to just fill out an application. They’re going to have a one-on-one true consultation, the way a high-end loan officer would have, not the way some Rocket, or bigger company loan officer would have. And that could happen any day or night. So now all of a sudden, a small guy with the right AI and technology can compete with one of the big guys. [David] AI is no question going to transform our lives. Dino, you’re located in the part of the country where I used to live. And I was a partner in a mortgage company right there in Mission Valley in your neck of the woods. And then we moved it up to Irvine as we grew, because it got so big and it was a consumer direct selling model. It worked really well. It was low cost. We started out as brokers and then I helped transition them into being bankers. But talk about why you believe the direct selling model is the better model. [Dino] I guess there’s a couple of ways to look at that, direct selling in the way of the loan officer is the one that’s going directly to the clients and getting the deals and all that, I’m not big into advertising. I’m really big into creating relationships and then generating business from that. I think that’s really important. We are developing many systems around that to help support the loan officers. So, what we’re basically doing is we’re trying to take everything that I’ve always done as a loan officer and we’re taking the things that I believe are what made me successful and we’re trying to systematize them and automate them, so that the loan officer doesn’t have to work 60, 70, 80 hours like some of the old school guys did, right? and what does that do that can give you bad health, that can give you a poor relationship with your kids that can give you a poor relationship with your wife that can give you all sorts of problems and all you think you’re doing is the right thing because you’re working hard and our industry is exceptionally difficult and stressful, right? we are trying to figure out how to change that for the future loan officers and I’m going to get into the future loan officers a little bit later, but. But we’re trying to systematize and automate everything so that the efficiencies are all there. Because in the past, the only way a loan officer could really become successful is he had to hustle and have zero work life balance so that he can work really hard, make a bunch of money, and then he can actually afford to hire somebody to have a personal team, right? A personal assistant, a personal processor, whoever it might be and now what we’re trying to do is create all that for them so that they can have a little more work life balance early on and have that full team, but shared team with other loan officers and they don’t have to take on the responsibility of taking care of all these people, right? Even all the way down to the training and all this, we’re going to offer all of that for them. But the piece that I’m really excited about is the revenue share model and that’s how I believe we’re going to grow into the largest mortgage brokerage shop in the United States. [David] That’s your goal. That’s an aggressive goal. [Dino] I’m not one to typically talk like that. But I am so confident in what we’re doing and I truly believe in what we’re doing that I feel within the next two to three years, we will be the largest mortgage broker shop in the United States. And if we’re not the largest, we’ll definitely be the best. [David] I think I would shoot for best than largest. I know some large ones that are pretty crummy out there, but there’s nothing keeping anybody from being the largest and the best, so go for it. I’m thrilled to hear you talk about that. You talked about the keys that made you successful. What were some of the principles that you would say have been that no matter what AI or not AI, what are the basic principles which made you so successful? Do you know? And what that really made Savage banged down my door to say, you got to interview this guy. [Dino] There’s some basic ones that I can’t for the life of me understand why people don’t follow. Like for example, actually knowing your trade, knowing how to do it professionally. Yeah, that’s a big one. Number two, do what you say you’re going to do. Number three, answer your darn phone. Those are just the basics. So by all means know your trade and be good at it. Answer the darn phone. But the other things and it’s funny because the way I explain it, it’s not very masculine and some people just don’t get it, but the easiest way for me to explain it is I love my clients and if I truly love them, I’m going to do the best possible job I can for them. So my company has a hashtag that we’ve used for many years now. It’s just a hashtag. “Who can we serve today?” And it stemmed from, I think the Christian side of me in serving, but I’m here to serve them. If they’re going to entrust me with something so big in their lives, I’m going to serve them to the absolute best of my ability and the mere fact that I love them is, I know that’s a big word but I do. And because of that, it’s just not hard to do a great job, right? If you know how to do your trade and you love somebody and you want to serve them, You’re going to do a good job. And I think that genuine feel comes out when I’m serving my clients and they know it, and because of that, they trust me and then the referrals come in because of that, and then your business just grows and continues to grow. [David] What is the level of repeat business that you have? We’re abysmal at that in this industry. Most companies really struggle. Loan officers, companies Broker banker, we have really struggled on getting the customer that we made the loan to in the past back a second and third and fourth time. [Dino] I’ve never advertised. It’s the only way I do business and aside from getting new deals from realtors and financial planners and so on and so on. The vast bulk of my business comes from past clients. And I believe, you have to do a great job. If you do a great job, why wouldn’t somebody want to come back? [David] Yeah. There’s a guy when I lived in Southern California, there’s a guy by the name of Joe stump and he had a program called by referral only. And he had a model that was really… [Dino] by the way, that’s the first seminar I ever went to earlier in my career. And it was the catalyst, to me doing business a certain way. [David] I’ve admired Joe’s presentation, because what he said is by the time you’ve been in the business, two years, I think is what I had recalled me to see if I’m saying this right. He said, you should never have to make another call. You should have developed enough business where you can have a very good living by just the referral business that will come back to you. [Dino] Yeah. And one of the things that, that I’ve done really well that we’re now giving to all our loan officers as well, have you heard the old saying, beware of Greeks bearing gifts. I’m great and we gift an awful lot. So, we stock our clients. If we gave them social media that they had a wedding anniversary, they’re going to get a gift from us. If they bought a dog, the dog’s going to get a gift from us. If it’s their kid’s birthdays, the kids are going to get gifts from us. You name it we got it and we’re looking for those opportunities to take care of our clients. And I swear to you, I’ve talked to enough loan officers to know that after the deal funds. The last thing they’re going to do is spend money on something they don’t love, they don’t care about it. I’m going to keep up with them and, gosh, we’ve probably all heard that saying, you’re only as good as your last deal. We’ve heard it since the very first time I got into this business and I got to tell you, I’m still doing loans for people that I met 25 years ago. [David] Yeah. I made loans 50 years ago and I cannot believe that I’m still good friends. I got a phone call from one of my first borrowers. I did loan just calling to check in. He’s retired. They paid cashed out for everything and it cracks me up. That’s a relationship. And he’s referred me more business way to go Joe stump for putting that out. It’s nice to meet someone who knows who he is. I think he’s retired out. I’m not sure what he’s doing these days, but what a great program it was. It was countrywide. I think at the time that made me aware of him, I really liked the program, really respected. It made so much common sense. By the way, I should have guessed from your last name that you’re Greek. One of my favorite movies was My big fat Greek wedding? I love that movie and there’s a good Greek community in Orange County. And I have been to some of their festivals up there when they’ve had them, when we lived there and oh my gosh, they’re fun. Greeks know how to party and have fun. They’re a great group. [Dino] We love food. So that’s the bginning of it all. [David] Greek food is some of the best I enjoy it still. Anytime I get a chance to go to a Greek restaurant, I jump at it. When you and I talked earlier, you talked about something that others are trying to do, but I’m not sure they really grasp the concept. You seem to get it. And that’s mortgages under management. Explain how this works and why it is working for you. [Dino] I gotta say, in the new company, right? We’re creating something that I believe is going to be industry changing. Yes. You’re going to make money off of the loans you bring in. Yes. If you can refer other loan officers, you’re going to have a revenue share piece that you’re going to be making money there. [David] So you’re gonna allow your loan officers to make money off of other people that they bring into your company. Okay, good. [Dino] That’s right. That’s our revenue share piece. That’s going to be the catalyst of the growth, right? Like the Loan officers will be the recruiters for our company. And as long as we do a good job, they’re going to be happy referring other people, right? Because they’re going to make a little something off of it. And it’s a whole program, just like an EXP or Real, right? You can go wide, you can go deep, you can make just as much money off this revenue share piece as you could off doing loans. So we’re creating different revenue streams and now this MuM, the mortgages under management is really one of the really big ones. I’m excited about the revenue share, but I’m super excited about the MUM. Here’s the way it works. A financial planner has assets under management, right? An AUM and every time they get a new client, it rolls up to their a U M. Okay. And then they know approximately how much money they’re going to make. But more importantly, they’re also building an asset and one day when they want to retire, they know what they could sell that book of business for. An insurance guy gets those insurance premiums and as that grows, they know what they can sell their book of business for. A mortgage guy keeps doing all these loans and unless he has some sort of a backdoor deal with somebody, he has to walk away one day. Because he is built, there’s no annuity. There’s nothing there. So, we are creating the MUM. Now the mortgage is under management piece is going to be really interesting because you have to treat it the way we’ve been talking about, right? You can’t be a transactional guy and have a successful MUM. You have to treat your clients with love and respect. You have to do business a certain way. You have to do business. The Ethos Way. And if you can do all of these things, then we are going to assign a dollar value to your MUM. If you can imagine, a loan officer will log into his dashboard every day, and at the very top, he’s going to see MUM. He’s going to fund a loan, it’s going to say $432,000, then he’s going to fund another loan for another $400,000, now it’s going to say $832,000, right? And every time he funds a loan, it’s going to grow and grow. Every month, due to amortization, it’s going to drop just a little bit, but as he grows his MUM, if he meets all of the requirements, then there’s a dollar value that’ll pop up and that’s the value of his book of business. So, now a loan officer willing to do business the way the Ethos way we’ll be building an asset that one day he can choose to walk away and retire and he can sell it or in an event of an untimely death, we can take that book of business for his family and either sell it to the other loan officers or as a company we agree to buy their book of business. That’s what we’re agreeing to. We’re putting this together. We’re teaching loan officers how to do things the right way and then we’re saying it’s worth money now, here it is. [David] What regulatory hurdles you’ve had to overcome to develop this? [Dino] There really aren’t any regulatory hurdles for the MUM, it’s more just a way of doing business. It’s the true old school way, the relationship way and one of the things that’s important here, right? is the algorithm itself is incredibly complicated and it’s ever changing because you could have a period of time, like we just had not too long ago where you may have funded several hundred thousands or a hundred millions of dollars in business, but everything’s at 2.75%. Your book of business just isn’t worth as much money. But through all of the ways we have of doing business, if those people are referring you new clients, your value, your MUM has just increased in business. So even though they may not refinance again. If the average age of your client is a little bit lower, we believe there’s going to be 20 more years to go. We believe there’s going to be some rental properties. We believe there’s going to be some vacation halls, right? We believe all these things. And through that is how we’re developing the dollar value. [David] Okay. So that’s how you’re doing that. Great. [Dino] And it’s important too, because everybody always goes out and advertises themselves, right? It’s always Dino. If anything, ever happens to Dino or Dino ever wants to retire, what good is that book of business if Dino’s not around? we’re trying to get people, like it’s still going to be Dino or whoever you are, but it has to be done the right way as a real business. An individual isn’t sellable. A real business is. [David] Dino, you talked about the future loan officer and what that looks like. Would you explain to our audience what that looks like to you? [Dino] Absolutely. The future loan officer at Ethos, at least, isn’t just a guy that does deals, that does loans, right? and funds a loan, gets a paycheck and walks away. It’s a higher end loan officer. It’s a high-end guy that is involved in every aspect of his client’s lives that have anything to do with finances. I’m going to point out like a Ryan Grant in our industry right now, in my opinion, the dude’s a total stud and he’s doing a great job changing the way things are in the mortgage space, right? He does business the same way I’ve done it. His partner, Josh Metal, same exact thing. These are two guys that I believe are doing things the right way and they’re creating opportunities for loan officers. So, what we’re doing is exactly the same thing, just on the mortgage brokerage side, as opposed to the banking side. And our future loan officer will have revenue coming in from his loans, revenue coming in from the revenue share piece of referring other loan officers. We’ll have an asset that he’s building through his MUM. We’re going to be opening up down the roadmap is the Ethos Capital Fund, which is going to be trusted investments. And we’re going to encourage our loan officers to put money into the fund and have another source of revenue there so that they can grow something for retirement and has something substantial instead of just another deal that they funded and another paycheck. And then we’re going to be eventually opening up when the insurance business gets a little better again, we’re going to be opening up our insurance brand and we’re going to be encouraging loan officers to open up their own branch underneath it, which will have corporate at the top. Their individual branch underneath and then another source of revenue and then eventually on the roadmap is going to be a personal loan side business where if we have a client that comes in that has say $10,000 in credit cards and a $700 payment, we’ll refinance it into a personal loan, right? Maybe we lower that payment down to two or three hundred bucks a month. We’ve effectively just lowered their debt ratio. We’ve effectively just raised their credit score. Now they can qualify for a more expensive house and hopefully we’re everybody’s hero. Plus the loan officer can make a little bit more money. And to us, that’s what the future loan officer is. That he’s going to be a part of all that. It’s not going to just be the boys… [David] It’s not just the owners at the top, as you’re saying, you’re going to be building an organization, are they all owners, but they’re owners in an income stream, not necessarily owners of the company. Correct? [Dino] Correct. We’re trying to teach them how to be the higher end loan officer a nd we’re going to, as a company provide all these, we’re going to have their buy in. They’re not going to just get to participate on the insurance side. They’re going to have to open up their own branch and that might even cost a little bit of money and maybe they can’t afford to have one on their own, but maybe they can partner with three or four other Ethos Loan Officers and open up their own branch, right? And then not only do they create another revenue source, but they create another asset and then one day, hopefully they can sell all that. And the way I’m looking at it is if we have another situation, like what we’re in right now, where the interest rates just went up like crazy your revenue stream from your personal loans is down, but maybe you’ve got some passive income coming in from these other people you recruited and got a little bit coming in from your insurance. And oh, by the way, when times get tough like this. The hard money lending, the trust deed investments take off and do even better. So you’re trying to diversify a little bit and be able to have a much better work life balance through technology and AI, so you can manage a true business like that. [David] We talk about the future loan officer, but what does the future mortgage company look like to you? [Dino] It’s basically what I just said. And the difference is that we spoke about it just a second ago. It’s not just the guys at the top. We’re partnering with our loan officers. [David] So, the loan officer and the future company are very much intertwined. You have a loan officers who basically have an ownership interest in their revenue stream, not necessarily in the corporation. [Dino] They have to work for it, they don’t get handed anything. But if they use our technology and they use our way of doing business, we’re so confident in how that is, how that works, that we believe they can be successful at their line of work and increase from just this one to a few different buckets, right? That’s where the future comes in. We as loan officers, Joe Stump used to say this all the old school trainers have said this, right? As a loan officer, we end up finding out everything we need to know about a client. Do they have a CPA or do they need one? Do they have a financial planner or do they need one? Do they have a trust attorney or do they need one? Do they have an insurance guy or do they need one? We have the ability to refer out all sorts of business and we should refer it out and expect some sort of reciprocity from those people, but maybe we can actually partake in some of these as well legally, if we do it right. [David] And that’s where it gets a little tricky sometimes the way some of the people structure and so much of it is in the details. How can people learn more about you? what’s the website, what’s your contact information? [Dino] David, you caught me early. We officially just went through our name change. We were California Coastal Loans forever. But in order for this model to work, we have to be nationwide so we just got approved in Colorado and in Idaho, we should have Texas here within the next couple of weeks and then we got a whole list of round one and then we’re going for round two. Soon will be approved all over the place. But we have a few different things and ways you can get ahold of us. One is the website and that’s just ethoslending.com. on social media, we’re at join ethos.com or join ethos everywhere ethos lending. And my personal information is you can put it out there and that’s dino@ethoslending.com. [David] Good and it’s so good to met you and interview you today. I really enjoyed the time together and wish you the best. I will be tracking you. It’d be nice to meet the future number one mortgage broker in the nation. It’s great to meet you now. And I believe we just have, thank you so much, Dino. [Dino] I appreciate it, David. I appreciate the fact that you’ve been. Not to make it sound the wrong way, but you’ve been around as long as you have. And you’re still just putting it out there for all of us. And I appreciate that. I hope that in my back nine, so to speak, I can give back as much as you have to the industry and leave a legacy like you have. [David] So that’s very kind of you to say it’s truly a joy to continue on. I’ve tried retirement. It just doesn’t work for me. So I’m really excited about doing what I’m doing. And like you said, it’s serving others and serving the industry, serving really people who I think can make a very respectable income and do and probably one of the most honorable ways and that’s blessing others and creating homeownership because it transforms lives. I always say there’s four most transformative things that can happen is when you find the Lord, you get a strong faith. Second one is finding an amazing spouse and you’ve been blessed with both of those. Third thing is to when you have kids and you’ve been blessed with a beautiful family. Fourth, most transformative thing is when you buy a home and that transforms how many young men who were reckless or frat boys get married, have kids, and all of a sudden they own a home and they are just transformed. It’s a true, amazing thing that we do in this mortgage industry. [Dino] It is. And I’d like to leave everybody with one of our core beliefs in Ethos Lending. And it’s the golden rule, Luke 6:31. Do you want to others as you want them to do to you? You know what I mean? Just do people, right? [David] So true. It’s a great way to end it. Great way to end the interview. Thank you so much for your time today, Dino. And looking forward, I’ll be watching your success. Definitely keep in a touch with you. [Dino] Thank you. All right. God bless. [David] God bless.Important Links
Since founding California Coastal Loans in 2000, I’ve grown my reputation and my business success on the belief that when you treat your client in the way you would want to be treated, you’re creating the foundation for a lasting relationship.
As a strategic thinker who is never satisfied with the status quo, my ambition is to make profound changes to the way we do things in the mortgage industry. With a great team around me, I’ve developed innovative programs and harnessed advanced technology capable of delivering unparalleled levels of support that, put simply, transform the mortgage experience.
My core values continue to inform every aspect of my approach. I think it’s fair to say I’m respected by my clients and peers for my depth of knowledge, transparency, and willingness to demystify the intricacies of the ever-changing mortgage landscape. Clients have described me as attentive, approachable, insightful, and a great listener – high praise indeed..
A native Californian with Greek roots, I live in San Juan Capistrano, close to family and church, the foundations of my character. On my family farm we produce our own food, respecting the environment and in harmony with the changing seasons.
As the devoted husband and father of four beautiful children, I attribute all the good things in my life to my faith and my family.