Pursuits
Reverse-Mortgage Rule Changes Draw Professor to the Business
A professor heads a company to lend to seniors under new rules
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Columbia Business School professor Christopher Mayer is so sure reverse mortgages can be a cornerstone of responsible retirement planning that he’s gone into the business. “It’s an enormous underserved market,” says Mayer, who is teaching fewer classes so he can be chief executive officer of Longbridge Financial, a startup reverse-mortgage lender. “You have $3 trillion in housing wealth among older Americans. You have large institutions exiting the market, and more and more elderly with housing debt coming out of the crisis as well as other kinds of debt.”