Florida-based Atlantic Avenue Mortgage became the top reverse brokerage firm in the U.S. in 2025, less than four years after its founding, and it sees more room for growth in 2026.
“We just had our best month ever. We’ve done over $90 million in loan volume in Q1. We expect to certainly be at the top of the broker space. We’re really excited this year,” founder Eric Manley said in a recent interview with HousingWire’s Reverse Mortgage Daily.
“If the reverse mortgage product had some of these changes that the market has been discussing, it would not only help us, but help others too,” he added. “The more loan originators, the more businesses that offer reverses, the better it is.”
The company, launched in 2022 and now licensed in 35 states, topped the Home Equity Conversion Mortgage (HECM) rankings from Reverse Market Insight with 899 endorsements last year. It also built a staff of more than 70 employees, split between its Florida headquarters and an office in Maryland — including 47 salespeople, according to Manley.
Atlantic Avenue’s production is driven almost entirely by data-powered direct mail, a heavy focus on first-time reverse mortgage borrowers, and a growing share of proprietary products aimed at higher-value homes and more affluent clients.
Manley, who has been in the mortgage industry for a decade, said Atlantic Avenue has already closed more proprietary loans in early 2026 than in all of 2025. It’s leaning on a custom-built CRM system and in-house modeling to refine its targeting and improve conversion rates.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Flávia Nunes: Atlantic Avenue Mortgage became the top reverse mortgage brokerage by HECM endorsements in 2025 after less than four years in business. What is driving this performance?
Eric Manley: I’ve been in the mortgage industry for a little over 10 years. I’ve worked at a lot of bigger mortgage companies, and unfortunately, it becomes a numbers game at some point. We have high retention here at Atlantic Avenue, and it has to do with who we are.
We focus on compliance. More importantly, compliance is trying to treat every interaction – you either enhance the interaction or diminish it with the customer — and take it on the education level.
Atlantic Avenue started a little over three and a half years ago. A few of us moved down to Florida, and now we’re over 70 employees. We have a range of products. We also do some forward mortgages as well, but our focus is the reverse product. That is our sole focus.
FN: What borrowers are you focusing on?
EM: We’re seeing growth across both the traditional, typical reverse mortgage borrower, as well as more affluent borrowers. Many financially strong homeowners now are viewing home equity as part of their retirement strategy.
The reverse mortgage is something that should be used a lot more. It’s an amazing product. There are a lot more people in America who need this product than are using it. The biggest thing that’s sad is when we see older borrowers who have been in the house for 40 or 50 years and, instead of taking out a reverse, they would rather downsize and move to an apartment.
FN: How do you see proprietary products evolving?
EM: We’ve already done more proprietary products this year than in all of last year. We did about 60 to 70 proprietary products last year, and we’re already at around 60 right now. They’re becoming more important, especially for high-value homes and more affluent borrowers. But at the same time, there are additional benefits even for borrowers who aren’t in that situation.
They don’t have the upfront mortgage insurance, which is pretty high. We have the ability to pay off debt, which is huge. The proprietary principal limit factors are, at times, even more competitive than the HECM. Years ago, that wasn’t the case.
There are quite a few times where it still depends on the principal limits for the benefit of the borrower, but you’d be surprised how frequently you’ll see the proprietary loans allow borrowers to get more access to cash. And on top of that, the closing costs are less. From our standpoint, it’s just becoming a more competitive product. There’s a broader reach.
The challenge is education, but we make sure that our team knows the difference between the HECM and the proprietary products. It seems like the secondary market has a better appetite for proprietary products. It’s more flexible as well.
FN: What are your expectations regarding the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD)’s request for information on the HECM and HECM Mortgage-Backed Securities (HMBS) programs?
EM: It’s encouraging that there is an RFI. It shows regulators recognize the importance of the reverse program and are looking for ways to improve it. I know there’s a liquidity side, the efficiency and sustainability side, and looking at some of the articles from the National Reverse Mortgage Lenders Association, probably one of the most important things is the upfront mortgage insurance.
The Mutual Mortgage Insurance Fund is doing very well. Maybe we can reduce the 2% upfront premium and find a better system so that you can put more borrowers into reverse products.
FN: What’s your perspective on some recent broker-lender agreements?
EM: We’ve always had those letter broker agreements. I do think that they’re making some positive steps, and it shows the industry is evolving. There’s better alignment between brokers and lenders. It benefits everyone. That’s always been one of our main focuses at Atlantic Avenue — trying to have the best relationships with third parties.
But the key to it, even with the agreements there or not, is actually that relationship with them. We have great relationships with our lenders, with the companies, with our AMCs, with our title partners. Regardless of what those agreements say, the most important thing is having that human to human interaction with lenders and really working as a team, even though they’re different companies.
The agreements are great, but they alone aren’t the solution. The long-term success still depends on fair economics between both sides, strong support and product availability.
FN: These agreements are also seen as a way to deal with refinance churning. How are Atlantic Avenue’s originations split between purchase and refis?
EM: The HECM endorsement reports show us as more heavily weighted toward HECM-to-HECM. But last year, over 40% of our loans were what we call FTRs – first-time reverse. We had months last year where over 60% of our business was first-time reverses.
It is something we’re expanding. We’re really honing in on our marketing to continue to grow that out. Probably the most important thing we can do is put as many loans as we can into this space and educate as many people as we can for the first time.
FN: How are you attracting more borrowers, and what is the main source of your leads?
EM: We focus on direct-mail marketing. That’s all we do. We’ve tried web marketing as well, and it’s really hard to qualify. We get a lot of referrals in the South Florida area, but it takes a long time to build out that referral network. We think that data-driven marketing is the way to go. That really separates us.
The biggest room to grow is in the FTR proprietary space, because there are already people who have proprietary loans and people are refinancing them. But one thing we’d like to focus on is growing that pool of affluent first-time reverse borrowers, which is a tough code to crack and has a lot to do with behavioral marketing.
We have tried social media. It’s good to show brand awareness. We’ve done Google ads. The juice is not worth the squeeze, at least for our level. If we were a big lender, we’d probably do it just to keep the brand out there. Unfortunately, you get a lot of people who don’t qualify, and you can educate them, but at the same time I still need to make sure we’re providing our sales floor with qualified leads.
FN: How do you deploy technology, AI and data in your marketing strategy?
EM: We do a lot in-house. We have our own custom-built CRM, which is constantly evolving. And then we have numerous models, different mail strategies and something we update weekly. I think that’s what really separates us, how focused we are on data.
We buy the data from various vendors. We try to buy the best data we can, both property and credit data, and we try to make sure that we’re targeting the people we think have the best chance of qualifying as well as responding. The team we have working on our models understands reverses. It’s really hard to find people who like the reverse space and at the same time want to dedicate a lot of time to figure out how we can build it out.
A lot of companies would do auto dialing. I’m really against auto dialers. It’s not good business. Same with trigger leads. I believe those are done. We’ve never done anything like that. We’ve done manual outbounds at times, but we don’t do this often.
FN: How has Atlantic Avenue performed so far in 2026?
EM: We just had our best month ever. We’ve done over $90 million in loan volume in Q1. We expect to certainly be at the top of the broker space. We’re really excited this year. We certainly expect 2026 to be our best year yet, especially with the pace we’re on.
If the reverse mortgage product had some of these changes that the market has been discussing, it would not only help us, but help others too. The more loan originators, the more businesses that offer reverses, the better it is. Unfortunately, some businesses don’t like the idea of competition. The more competition there is, the better. It raises the standards and requires you to be more educated on the products.