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The old offices of the Loan Depot, William J. Camuti remembers, were noisy, cluttered and overcrowded. "They looked like hell." He resolved that the new offices, opened a year ago in a 30,000-square-foot office building he constructed in Randolph, Mass., would be different. No tacky art. No postcards from Fort Lauderdale. No silly signs. No cat posters. "None of the crap people put in offices."
Indeed, the phone rooms of the Loan Depot are as far from that atmosphere as one can get. They are as cool and silent and efficient as Camuti's new Mercedes sedan with the personalized license plate. At row after row of 150 slate blue work cubicles, softspoken young people take a steady stream of phone calls. The desks are clean of personal clutter, the walls devoid of art; there is no sound above the blank hum of electronic equipment. That's the way Camuti, president and owner of the company, likes it -- a stark, efficient machine for making money. Ten thousand calls a week are received. About $40 million in home equity loans are processed each month. They don't call them telephone banks for nothing.
"This year we'll write $500 million," says Camuti, 42. "Next year we'll do a billion. Home equity loans \and credit lines} are the most active products in the consumer loan market right now."
Strictly speaking, his company doesn't make the loans. The Loan Depot is a mortgage banker. They take the calls, pitch the customer, process the application, and do the credit and collateral inspection. They then sell the paper, collecting a markup representing 1% a year for the term of the loan, to various investors and banks such as Ford Motor Credit, Travelers Insurance Cos. and Security Pacific National Bank, giving the privately held company as estimated gross of $50 million to $70 million, an estimate Camuti doesn't argue with. But, according to observers within the industry, the Loan Depot has become the largest company in the country specializing in selling home equity loan products and has done it in just six years.
LUCKY TIMING
Camuti says he spends...