by Michele Newbern Gillis
Staff Writer
Paragon Home Funding, (PGNF) a public mortgage company, has been public for two years and its leader says it has nowhere to go but up.
“Every employee has stock in the company, so everyone has a vested interest in the parent company’s success,” said CEO Edward Parnell. “We can build a better organization being public because we can recruit people, get better talent and better prices from the lenders we deal with. It’s really about us building a platform that we could never quite build as strongly if we were private.
“We can also do marketing things in the public arena that we could never do in a private company. We are working on something that is very exciting.”
Also, Realtors and builders could buy stock in the company. If they did business with the company, it is an added advantage to them because they would have a vested interest in the success of the company.
Scott Vining is the chief financial officer of the company. Alan Touchton is the manager of the Arlington office and Rachel Rogers is the manager of the Avondale office. Though they have many board members, Steve Croskrey, retired president of Armor Holdings and part owner of the Jacksonville Barracudas minor league professional hockey team, is probably the most notable in the area.
There are about 40 employees including receptionists, managers, loan officers and processors.
Parnell is based in Orlando and comes to Jacksonville once or twice a month. He and his managers are actively pursuing recruiting more loan officers to join their company.
“The best opportunity is now,” he said. “Because of the last year, the stock is down, so the amount of stock they get is pretty significant. Anyone who comes on board between now and the end of December this year basically gets a double shot of stock. There is definitely a reason for people to find out more about us.”
Parnell said there will be one more office opening in Jacksonville that will hold the corporate entity and some high end loan officers.
Parnell opened Paragon Home Funding in 1998. He was approached two years ago by an Internet pharmaceutical company for a merger and become a public company.
“These guys had the concept and wanted to merge into a public shell,” said Parnell. “Our local contact in Jacksonville told them to come and talk to me. They came down to me [in Orlando], liked what my thoughts were and they asked to take my name. I sold to the holding company that was public in February 1993. They merged their Internet pharmaceutical company, Planet RX, into a public shell and changed the name to Paragon Home Funding and then changed the name to Paragon Financial Corporation.”
Paragon Home Funding has a sister company in Charleston, S.C., First Charleston Mortgage, that has opened five branches throughout the South Carolina.
Being a public company allows the company to offer a benefit package like no other.
“I have stock in a public company that no one has, I’ve got the brand name that mirrors more of the big banking companies that people are familiar with and I’ve got the best commission split,” he said. “It’s a combination of brokering, banking and adding the stock element to it.”
In most mortgage companies that are not usually public, it is the commission structure that lures new loan officers in, but not at Paragon Home Funding.
“You just can’t keep out paying people on a commission structure because there is a point of no return there,” said Parnell. “You have to have something that you can give that is not just a higher split. That’s what being public did for us. It allowed us to create a brand name, give us a benefit package that is better than most brokers, commission split of the brokers and stock that gives people a vested interest in ownership of our company.”
Paragon Home Funding has three locations: Avondale, Orlando and Arlington.
The home office for the mortgage division is located in Orlando, but the Paragon Financial Corporation, the parent company, is located in Ponte Vedra Beach.
Another benefit to being a public company is that it gives employees something to look forward to if they decide to leave the company and move on to other ventures.
They get vested over a three to five year period in the stock and then they can sell their stock.
“It’s like a 401k on steroids,” said Parnell. “It just expedites their exit. I don’t know any loan officer in this business that wants to keep doing it for the rest of their life. It just helps them get there quicker. If you are private, there is no exit strategy. Being public allows people an exit strategy that is real, it’s not a promise of something in the future. Being public is expensive, difficult and you better have a CFO that knows what he is doing.”