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When Mortgage Banking magazine first caught up with Rodrigo López, CMB, it was at the end of the 1990s and López was promoting his new company, called AmeriSphere Financial LLC, based in Omaha, Nebraska. ¶ The headline for that article read, "International Dealings from Omaha" and the story noted: "AmeriSphere Financial not only provides commercial banking services, mostly in the Omaha area, but is also an international consulting firm, assisting other companies in the development of projects and enterprises outside the United States." ¶ As it turned out, that last sentence was wishful thinking. ¶ AmeriSphere never got around to performing much in the way of international consulting, as it was too busy with mortgage banking. ¶ "Initially, AmeriSphere was to be a mortgage banking business and I also intended to do consulting," López explains. "The first half of the name, 'Ameri,' referred to America, while 'Sphere' referred to the globe, or international. Except the mortgage business was so successful that I frankly did not have time to pay attention to what I thought would be international consulting. For the first three years of business, my time was consumed with placing commercial loans with insurance companies."
That, too, proved temporary.
AmeriSphere Financial, which was founded in November 1997 and sold in 2015 to Minneapolis-based NorthMarq Capital, wasn't even that long in the traditional mortgage banking business (acting as a correspondent for life insurance companies). Once it became a Fannie Mae Delegated Underwriting and Servicing (DUS®) lender in 2000, that was all it did for the next 16 years.
Mortgage banking and Fannie Mae DUS lending for multifamily are all good skills to pick up along the journey. That kind of versatility will be useful when López, currently executive chairman of NorthMarq Capital, and formerly president and chief executive officer of AmeriSphere, becomes chairman of the Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA) this month.
"We are big supporters of the MBA, and becoming chairman of the organization is a major event," notes Eduardo Padilla, chief executive officer of NorthMarq Capital.
"It is also a major time commitment. I was chairman of COMBOG [Commercial Real Estate/Multifamily Board of Governors], the commercial side of the MBA, and that was as far as I was planning to go. Rodrigo is...