Two major reverse mortgage lenders to sponsor financial planner conference

The Alliance of Comprehensive Planners (ACP), a trade association for financial planners, will be holding its annual conference this October in Savannah, Georgia, and the event will feature two of the nation’s leading reverse mortgage lenders as key sponsors.

Plano, Texas-based Finance of America (FOA), currently the industry leader in the reverse mortgage space, and Paramus, New Jersey-based reverse mortgage lender and servicer Longbridge Financial will be sponsoring the event. The ACP annual conference is primarily designed for “tax-focused, fiduciary financial advisors who provide comprehensive wealth building strategies for their clients on a commission-free retainer basis,” according to an announcement of the event.

A full agenda has not yet been released, but keynote speakers include financial planning professionals who will speak about business topics relevant to the profession. The organization said it expects “over 100 members to attend this year’s conference — in addition to other advisors, partners, sponsors, vendors, and journalists.”

The presence of two reverse mortgage industry leaders at the event conforms with a stated desire across the industry to cultivate more solid and productive referral relationships with financial planner professionals. These professionals are a key constituency that reverse mortgage industry members believe can help to cultivate new business opportunities.

At The Gathering by HousingWire this past April in Scottsdale, Arizona, FOA President Kristen Sieffert suggested bringing more financial planners up to speed on reverse mortgage product mechanics.

She felt these professionals could potentially advise their senior clients about the use of a reverse mortgage to protect against sequence-of-returns risk, where a reverse mortgage line of credit is tapped in times of market volatility until an investment portfolio stabilizes.

FOA has also performed outreach to financial planners through its vice president of retirement strategies, Steve Resch. He recently told HousingWire’s Reverse Mortgage Daily (RMD) about how the industry’s conversations with financial planners have changed over the past few years.

In a 2022 interview with RMD, Longbridge CEO Chris Mayer explained the importance of facilitating reverse mortgage conversations between financial planners and their clients.

“For financial advisers to really learn and understand the products for them, to meet groups of people to talk with elder care attorneys or real estate agents, many of those are local conversations,” Mayer said. “And to be able to have that kind of impact, you’ve got to have people around the country who are able to […] have people who can have those on-the-ground conversations.”

According to Home Equity Conversion Mortgage (HECM) volume data compiled by Reverse Market Insight (RMI), FOA maintained the first-place position among the nation’s reverse mortgage lenders with 7,784 endorsements in the 12-month period ending May 31. Longbridge was No. 3 with 2,972 endorsements during the same period.