Glenn Stearns, the founder and CEO of Kind Lending, loves the mortgage industry, which he has been a part of for over 30 years. “I love the business, the culture, and problem solving,” he said. “It’s not hard. It’s very simple. It’s all about people.”
In 2020, he founded Kind Lending, a Santa Ana, California-based multichannel lender, and according to Stearns, the company is doing well, growing by 300% since last year.
This is not the CEO’s first rodeo in owning a mortgage company. From 1989 to 2019 he was the founder of Stearns Lending, one of the top wholesale companies in the nation, making him a bit of a celebrity in the mortgage world.
In 2015, Stearns made the decision to sell 70% of the company to Blackstone Group, one of the largest private equity firms in the world. Four years later, Stearns Lending filed for bankruptcy.
“I really loved what I did, I loved the company, but I got cancer and it kind of freaked me out, so I sold to Blackstone and then took some time with my family and traveled the world,” he said. “After a couple of years, I started to miss [building a company], the people and problem solving.”
“It wasn’t about making money, it was about the people, so the minute I could come back, I did and I made Kind Lending very purposefully.”
During his sabbatical, Stearns traveled the world with his family in a yacht and starred in Undercover Billionaire on the Discovery Channel.
Stearns has coasted through all of the ebbs and flows that the mortgage market has had in store for him the last three decades. Some of those experiences were good, some were not. Nonetheless, the mortgage veteran is enthusiastic about what he does and the industry he is in.
National Mortgage News sat down with Stearns to discuss his soon-to-be published book, “InteGRITy,” and why the mortgage industry keeps pulling at his heart strings.
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