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In this week’s episode of the Power House podcast, HousingWire President Diego Sanchez is joined by Newrez President Baron Silverstein. In this informative conversation, the duo touch on Newrez’s growth and acquisition strategies, the use of technology and artificial intelligence for client retention, and finding balance between mortgage servicing and origination activities.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity purposes. To kick of the 30-minute conversation, the duo explore highlights of Silverstein’s first five years as president of Rithm Capital-backed Newrez.
Silverstein: It’s been a wild ride, but it’s also been fun. It’s been exciting. The mortgage industry continues to basically put up new challenges but also new wins and new exciting paths across our entire industry. Our path has been through a lot of different acquisitions and growth. Throughout every single one of the different hurdles that we’ve had, it’s brought our team closer together.
Sanchez: In 2024, Newrez has been primarily built through acquisitions. In 2025, will M&A continue to be prominent in your growth strategy or are you moving in a different direction?
Silverstein: We’re going to continue to look at all types of opportunities for us. There’s no reason for us not to look at opportunities in the marketplace — whether it’s a servicing, origination or technology opportunity. We will look at each of those to the extent that we feel like it’s creative for our business.
Next, the conversation transitions toward Newrez’s servicing business ventures.
Sanchez:Â Newrez has a giant servicing business with $755 billion in unpaid principal balance. But you also have distributed retail, wholesale and direct-to-consumer efforts. How do you prioritize between these different business lines?
Silverstein: Servicing has always been a core focus, and I think it’s a good place to start. The market has obviously changed in the favor of servicing from an interest rate perspective. Rithm, including their acquisitions of different operating businesses, has always been servicing focused.
In the origination businesses, from each of the different acquisitions, there’s been different channels on how we focus our business. We look at each of the origination businesses as to where we think we get the biggest alpha at that time. We don’t need to be the biggest, and we’ve talked about this in multiple different quarters. Â
To end the conversation, the duo explore Newrez’s tech strategy for 2025 and how it impacts customers.
Sanchez: Is your tech road map for 2025 mostly focused on AI, or are there other components to your tech strategy that you’d like to talk about?
Silverstein: Definitely no. We have Salesforce as a big partner of ours, and as a vendor. Also, there are multiple different initiatives that we have going on with them that will continue throughout 2025, and they’ve been a great partner of ours as we continue to build out.
But our key focuses are certainly going to be on the digital tool side, and how we think about digital tools that allow for that self-service and make it easier for our customers to connect with us. So, it is not just AI focused. There are multiple different prioritizations that we have in technology.
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