Lending is a game of risk, and the mortgage industry prepares you for a lot of curveballs. But a Category 4 hurricane — especially one roaring through the mountains of Asheville, North Carolina, more than 2,000 feet above sea level and hundreds of miles from the nearest coast — isn’t one of them.
At least, not usually.
Yet that’s exactly what happened when senior loan officer Kim Winters and her Asheville, North Carolina-based team at Movement Mortgage found themselves in the eye of the storm after Hurricane Helene devastated the region in September.
The behemoth cyclone didn’t just brush by; it barreled through the Blue Ridge Mountains, wreaking havoc and dumping nearly 14 inches of rainfall on Asheville. High winds and flooding claimed the lives of 43 people in Buncombe County. Entire communities, like neighboring Montreat, Swannanoa and Chimney Rock, were virtually swept away.
More than a month later, the western reaches of the Tar Heel State remain in the throes of recovery. The familiar rolling landscape remains obscured in some places by debris and wreckage tossed by the floodwaters. For Winters and her staff, the storm’s aftermath is far from over, both personally and professionally.
“Some areas of the county are ground zero, like there’s just still no power,” said Winters, one of Scotsman Guide’s highest ranked originators in North Carolina. “The infrastructure damage is wildly unique in that we have the mountains. In Florida, you have a hurricane, and you definitely have flooding and you definitely have damage to property. But the damage here, I think, has been exacerbated by the fact that we have the topography that created a mess.
“There were over 1,900 landslides in our area. Think about that — they’re calling it a geological event. There’s so many trees down everywhere, and we don’t have palm trees. We have big, old oak trees and pines. Massive trees on houses that have to be picked up by cranes.”
Winters said that roughly 126,000 homes were damaged in western North Carolina. Many of those homes were changing hands under Movement Mortgage’s watch, pressing her team into urgent action even as they themselves grappled with the fallout.
“Initially after the storm, we spent the early days trying to sort of triage what transactions were our clients. Second of all, were our agents OK? And if they were, what were they dealing with? … We had one person, their house got clipped by a tree and a tree fell on every single car they had. We have another person whose whole sewer system was taken out.
“Thirdly, who was impacted in terms of things in process — properties that had trees fall on them or they were flooded out. It was a lot of chaos. I like to say somewhat controlled chaos, because I feel like our team is pretty organized. But that took a little bit of time to connect with everybody.”
That task was easier said than done because crippled communications compounded the crisis. Fortunately, Winters’ staff wasn’t concentrated in the Asheville area, and those with cell phone coverage and internet access could take point.
Within four to five days, Winters said, her office had a clearer picture of which transactions were terminating: homes too damaged, buyers’ finances too strained, second thoughts ignited about moving to the area. Other deals, meanwhile, weren’t scrapped entirely, but had their timelines dramatically altered.
“I think we had 47 [active] transactions, of which 30 were impacted, which is huge,” Winters said. “A lot of those, we’ve been able to navigate. One of the biggest issues that we had, after we figured out which houses were damaged or not damaged, was the water situation. You can’t close loans if [the properties] don’t have basic utilities on.”
Winters said that while most parts of Asheville had their water restored by the end of October, the operational water supply is non-potable — unfit for consumption or cooking.
“People are able to flush their commodes now without having to have the bucket brigade, you know, that sort of thing,” she said. “But I’m hearing it’s probably another month, at least, before our water treatment plants are brought back online. … Obviously, the most important thing is how it affects people, but as a mortgage professional, you also do have to think about timelines in that sense.”
The storm’s effect on productivity has already been quantifiable, Winters said, even accounting for the difficult rate environment. Applications are down about 40% for the month compared to typical figures. Leads are down some 40% to 50%. Locks, which typically range between $17 million-$18 million in October, were down to $11 million, although there has been a recent upswing since many locals are suddenly in need of new housing.
Winters’ office is licensed in multiple states, so there’s business to draw from elsewhere. But in terms of Buncombe County, she estimated that leads, locks and applications likely won’t recover for at least six months to a year.
“The amount of effort that we’re going to have to work to get those metrics back in line, it’s going to be a process,” said Winters. “I’m doing business planning right now, and part of that business planning is accounting for the fact that, in probably the next six to 12 months, the Asheville market is going to be somewhat depressed. Not only are houses gone, so many roads are gone. Obviously, our water system was wrecked. We’re a tourist-based community, and trying to rebuild all of that doesn’t cultivate an inviting place to come and visit, much less move to if you don’t have to.
“Sadly, I think there’s going to be an opportunity for our team,” she added with a weary sigh. “You hate to look at it this way, but the reality is there are probably going to be a lot of loan officers who are hanging on by a thread because of the rate environment that are just going to go away. There’s probably going to be a lot of real estate partners in the same token. Now they’ve got this. It’s like a double whammy. But what I can do is keep my team prepared and flexible so we can weather this and come out on the other side of it, hopefully stronger.”
As a member of the community, Winters’ concerns for the city and its people stretch beyond her office ledger.
“Asheville has had a housing crisis, if you will, for a very long time before this in terms of affordable housing,” she explained. “We don’t have a lot of manufacturing anymore. I fear that a lot of the people who kind of keep the machine humming in our community, like the service workers, may go away. They’ll move somewhere else because now, we have an even bigger housing crisis because we have all of these displaced people. … We just have such a vacuum of need in the housing sector.”
With that need now even more magnified, Winters’ team has mobilized to provide crucial educational support, regardless of whether borrowers have loans with Movement Mortgage.
“The first thing we did the second day is we sent an email to our entire database that said we hope they’re safe, first and foremost. But also, you may not be thinking about your mortgage, but it’s going to be impacted and there are relief options for you.
“And I started to see that hit Facebook. One of my clients said, “Hey guys, you might not even be thinking about your mortgage” — because remember this happened on like the 26th or the 27th — “but you’ve still got your mortgage coming due on the first of the month. My lender sent me an email and said you might want to reach out, so go ahead and do that, too.’”
An Asheville eager to rebuild has inundated Winters and her staff with inquiries, she said.
“We have calls, probably about four or five a day, from people who want to know about forbearance,” Winter continued. “They want to know, ‘What do I do if my house is gone?’ Only 1% of the people here have flood insurance. There’s FEMA assistance, but I think that taps out at $42,500. How are you supposed to rebuild with $42,500 if you have no flood insurance? It’s a real crisis.”
One of the programs Winters’ personnel is educating locals about most is the Federal Housing Administration’s Section 203H mortgage insurance program. Available to Americans whose homes are damaged or destroyed in a presidentially declared natural disaster area, the program offers a mortgage with 100% financing to make it easier for borrowers to rebuild or re-establish themselves as homeowners. The product appears often in advisories of federal disaster assistance from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development when hurricanes strike Florida and Louisiana.
It’s not a program that Winters ever thought she’d be educating Asheville about en masse. But in this industry, she said, you truly have to be ready for anything.
“I’ve done this for 25 years, and right when you think you’ve got it figured out, you don’t,” said Winters. “Never take anything for granted. We’ve closed $125 million so far this year. My team is closing about, on average, $15 million a month. That is in a depressed market. We’ve already had it hard, and we’ve been able to sort of navigate that. And now I think what we have to do is build the plane in the air, so to speak.”
Winters is deeply aware that this is not just a business challenge. Her job after such a catastrophe isn’t just about securing loans, but helping people get back on their feet.
“The highest and best use of my job at a time like this is to use my influence,” she said. “By being focused on the things I can control and being present so I can help those people who aren’t necessarily focused, for good reason.
“That’s all I can do,” Winters continued. “We’re talking billions of dollars in damage (in western North Carolina). It’s going to take a long time. But the outpouring of support and the way the community has come together, it’s been amazing. And these are our friends, our co-workers, our neighbors, so we’re all just wanting to do our part.”
