California-based retail lender American Pacific Mortgage (APM) has named vice chairman Bill Lowman as its chairman of the board, succeeding APM founder Kurt Reisig.
Lowman will continue his daily work as an adviser to the APM senior management while more fully guiding the company through his work on the board, the company said earlier this month.
Lowman has been with the lender for more than 21 years starting from managing a founding branch to being promoted as president in 2004, CEO in 2017 and vice chairman earlier in 2023.
“I look forward to driving APM forward in the new year and turning the challenges into opportunities in 2024 and beyond,” Lowman said. “I’m honored to be moving into the chairman role behind my mentor and friend Kurt Reisig. We’ve built an amazing company and an unrivaled culture.”
Reisig, chairman of APM, will remain active as a board member.
The lender has been in acquisitive mode despite the industry downturn.
In 2022 alone, APM acquired 11 branches from Arizona-based Sunstreet Lending and Sunstreet, along with 25 branches from the Minnesota retail lender Lend Smart Mortgage and 51 branches from the now-defunct AmeriFirst Financial Inc.
The lender also brought over 45 former retail branches from Finance of America Companies Inc. (FoA) months after it shut down its forward mortgage segment.
All in all, 900 employees joined the company from the four deals APM completed in 2022, including 540 LOs, Lowman said in a previous interview with HousingWire.
Founded in 1996, APM offers a range of products, including conventional, jumbo, FHA, VA, USDA loans and reverse mortgages as well as renovation and construction loans.
APM has 2,009 sponsored mortgage loan originators with 496 active branches across the country, the Nationwide Multistate Licensing System (NMLS) showed.
The California lender originated $7.62 billion in production volume in the first nine months of 2023, declining 27.9% from $10.56 billion during the same period in 2022, according to Inside Mortgage Finance (IMF).
With a market share of around 0.7%, APM ranks as the 31st-largest lender in the country, IMF data showed.