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After leaving Movement, Michael Brennan looks to scale something “lean and mean” at NMB

Had things worked out differently, Monday would have been Michael Brennan’s 10-year anniversary at Movement Mortgage, a company he thought he’d work at until retirement.

Brennan joined Movement in 2015 as a regional manager, organically growing the Northeast to a $3 billion a year operation. He climbed the ladder to the role of president, and led sales and operations at a top-25 independent mortgage bank with 5,600 employees that notched $33 billion in volume during the peak of the mortgage boom.

But the subsequent years have been challenging. Like other mortgage lenders, Movement’s executives have had to focus on cost-cutting to return the business to profitability.

“About four or five months ago, there were some changes that [CEO and founder] Casey [Crawford] decided he wanted to make for the company, bringing certain people in, going in a little different direction, changing up a little bit of leadership, and bringing in Steve Smith,” Brennan said. “And for me, I just wasn’t aligned with where the future of the organization was going, and I didn’t feel like the communication was really clear on where were we going.”

Brennan told HousingWire that he was asked to move into a new role where his focus would be on P&L branches and growth (Movement has traditionally operated a distributed retail model), while Smith, who has a deep operations background, served as CFO and president.

“So at the time, I said, ‘No, I’m probably not interested in that,’ but they asked me to stay on and, you know, ‘Let’s talk through it, let’s figure it out, we really we want you to be here long term at the organization.’ I just felt like it was time for me to, after 10 years, look at other opportunities.”

‘No layers mortgage’

While he was looking at making acquisitions of smaller companies and building a “new and improved model,” Brennan met Rich Steinberg, the founder and CEO of Melville, New York-based Nationwide Mortgage Bankers Inc. (NMB). Steinberg’s company, founded in 2011, does a solid book of business in the Northeast but never had the leadership in place to expand nationally.

It was serendipitous. Now Brennan is the president at NMB, where he oversees sales and operations of a 500-employee lender that’s in a different phase of development than Movement. NMB did about $1.6 billion in origination volume in 2024, has 29 offices and is licensed in 47 states.

The company is in growth mode, and while Steinberg and Brennan will entertain M&A opportunities, the focus is on organic growth.

Structurally, roughly 380 loan officers work on a P&L model and benefit from a slimmer management approach than many of its competitors, according to Brennan.

LOs can customize what their needs are on the P&L instead of being weighed down by fixed costs they don’t need, he said. It means LOs can get back about 30 basis points to sharpen their pricing and win deals.

“The reason I liked it from a business standpoint is because if I was going to create a company from scratch starting today, I would probably call it, ‘No Layers Mortgage,'” said Brennan.

“I believe that the new future is no layers, no regionals, not layers of sales leadership. Because the truth is, you don’t need them anymore. You can plug people directly into a conduit. And I like to say that you don’t need to know the answers, you just need to know where to get them. You can put people directly in charge, give them direct access and make sure they have the tools and the resources to be successful. And our job is to support them.”

The company also has a fully automated, cradle-to-grave technology platform with Encompass and Blend integrations called NMB Now, which Brennan says streamlines the mortgage process with fewer touches.

“What we want to do is attract people into looking at the platform, peeking under the hood, seeing it for themselves, and then have the conversations about how we can help improve their business and take them to another level. What got us here, won’t get us there. We need to change the model and we can do what we need to do to controls, which is being lean and mean.”

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