My team and I are responsible for distributing all the agency, FHA, and municipal products that Lument originates. On the agency and FHA side, our market is large Wall Street firms and regional broker/dealers. For municipal transactions, we work with larger mutual funds and money managers.

To keep our deals flowing and maintain our pricing and volume, we must be able to gauge the market. As a result, everyone on our team keeps in close contact with our broker/dealer counterparties. We do everything we can to pass our insights and intelligence to our origination group to help them better understand market dynamics.

We place a premium on building relationships based on trust. Our originators can be confident in the guidance we provide on a complicated credit, and the street can be confident that the product that results will work out fairly for them.

All this works because we have a great team. Our people are very, very good at what they do. As a director, I am as hands-off as I can possibly be while ensuring that we scrupulously adhere to guidance from FINRA and the SEC.

One of the things I’m most proud of is the way we merged the trading desks of our three legacy companies. When ORIX closed the Hunt acquisition in April 2020, each company’s trading desk had its own distinct ways of doing business and traded the whole gamut of products. Because the combined firm was so big, we decided to have a dedicated set of traders for Fannie Mae, Ginnie Mae, and municipal securities. We worked as a group to make sure we picked the best people for each product and established uniform procedures. The result: an outstanding year for the trading desk and Lument as a whole.

You might be surprised to learn that I didn’t initially plan on a career in finance. I was about to graduate college with an engineering degree—I even had an offer in hand—when I decided that I didn’t want to be an engineer. I started exploring business, and a vibrant professor sparked my interest in financial markets. After graduating, I took a job in the field and found that I really liked the challenge of trading securities and responding to market dynamics—making my eventual career at Lument a perfect fit.

The pandemic hit me hard. I had a 30-year career in event planning and was working for a hotel when the pandemic broke out. We were sent home on March 20, 2020 and by August, we were released. I have always thrived on taking on new challenges. Although finding a new career was not one I expected, I took it on.

That’s why I was happy when a recruiter from Lument approached me soon afterwards. She had read my LinkedIn profile and thought my skills and experience would be a great fit for an opening in Seniors Housing and Healthcare. As an event planner, I was always researching new experiences for attendees, and I had to be meticulous about details. These two important skills were also required of a business development coordinator. I started in November. I liked the job and appreciated my three colleagues who helped me get up to speed.

But when I learned I had breast cancer in February 2020, I thought, no matter what happened, I would certainly lose my new job. I don’t remember much about that afternoon I sat down with my oncologist — and the next week was like trying to drink out of a fire hose of information. I did know my conversation with my manager, Aaron Becker, would be life-changing, so I made sure I could present the situation to him clearly. I laid out the facts, let him know about the decisions my family and I had made, and how they might potentially impact my role — and waited for his response.

He and Lument could have taken the easy way out and cut their ties with me. But that’s not what happened. Instead, they demonstrated unconditional support, loyalty, and commitment. Aaron was wonderful. He made it clear from the start that I wasn’t going to lose my job.

I went through four surgeries, and Aaron and my colleagues not only filled in for me but were constantly texting, calling, sending food and flowers. And HR was uniformly supportive. It was such a relief know that my job was secure — and that when I recovered, I would have a future with Lument.

I am blessed beyond measure to work with some amazing and talented individuals — and indebted to Aaron, my colleagues, and my organization for renewing my faith and hope when I thought all was lost. Today, I am cancer-free and very much looking forward to 2022 and celebrating my first anniversary as a cancer survivor with those people who loved and supported me.

Celebrating Breast Cancer Awareness Month at Lument

During my time at Lument, I’ve had the opportunity to really get to know the company. In 2012, during the last quarter of my senior year at UC Irvine, I interned in the Lument Irvine office. Upon graduation, I was offered a full-time position as an analyst. I decided to move to New York for a change of pace and to gain more exposure to the other groups within our company. Not quite three years later, I became an associate in the New York office. I was in New York for five years and in 2019, I came back to California to work in the Los Angeles office to be closer to my family and in-laws. After all this time, I think I know Lument pretty well.

One of the things I like about Lument is that I’ve been working with most of the same clients since I started back in 2012, and I think that’s really special. Our loyal clients come to us for their financing needs knowing they’ll receive the best service and trusting that we can structure their loans to meet their unique strategies.

Another thing I like about Lument is that it has a very supportive culture. You can really tell it’s a company that cares about people, especially our clients. Some of the best advice that I received here is to treat clients like friends, to learn how to step into their shoes and know what they want. That’s a longstanding part of the culture here, and I know it’s part of why our clients keep coming back to us.

Lument also cares about the wellbeing of its employees, which has been especially clear during the pandemic. We receive consistent communication from the leadership team on business and organization updates, as well as monthly all-hands Zoom calls where anyone can ask a question. Since we’ve worked from home, they’ve checked in with employees through a series of surveys that allowed each person to voice their needs, and they made sure to not only listen to people’s responses but to respond and act on them as well.

One of the things the leadership team learned was that there is a pretty even split between employees who want to continue working from home and who want to return to the office. A lot of people are more comfortable working from home for their health or because their children’s schools weren’t ready for in-class instruction. The fact that we have the flexibility to continue working from home, and that the company isn’t trying to push people into returning to the office, shows that they are listening to us and that they care.

Lument also cares for us as individuals. Last year in the midst of the pandemic, doctors discovered a large, benign tumor on my husband’s spine. Lument was 100 percent committed to helping me through it. I spent a lot of my time taking care of him and bringing him to his appointments. My team was really flexible and let me work around his schedule, and I am forever grateful for that.

Lument has also been fully supportive of anything that advances my career. I’ve been given the flexibility and autonomy to do things like go out and source my own business. When you have a good idea, people listen and say, “Go do that.” The company supports our success and backs it up with training. Leadership wants you to succeed and to constantly work on yourself. I think that’s really important.

Asian Pacific American Heritage Profile

I arrived at Lument in 2019 to head its Mergers & Acquisitions group. I had just closed a large, complex nursing home transaction that had made headlines for its structure and price, and I felt the timing was right to move on to bigger challenges. It was a great decision.

I’ve worked at a number of leading firms, but none of them had the creativity and flexibility to undertake the kind of blank-slate strategic planning I’ve experienced at Lument. It may be because it has just gone through a transformative merger and a complete rebranding that Lument feels like an edgy startup. Professionals here are encouraged to act like entrepreneurs and are rewarded for the results they deliver. Lument does a great job acknowledging and supporting positive contributors.

I love the energy and urgency here. Initiatives that would typically take a year or two to implement elsewhere are completed in a fraction of the time here. And the company is very receptive to independent thought and new ideas.

All this bodes well for Lument’s DE&I initiatives. I joined the DE&I Committee when it was formed in 2020, and I’ve been pleased to find my own suggestions being taken seriously, vetted, and translated into action when possible. Retention of minorities is an important issue for me, and I suggested that we engage high-profile speakers who can speak to minority experiences as a way of making our online gatherings more compelling. This suggestion was acted on in just a few weeks.

I also feel it’s important, as part of its DE&I efforts, that Lument actively contributes to nonprofit organizations that support minority communities. I was raised in New York City, and the Chen Dance Center (CDC) was a lifeline for me when I was growing up. It was established in 1979 by two Julliard School graduates and has served the Asian-American community ever since. I served on the board of trustees and have remained an avid supporter. I am working with Managing Director Edward Greene, who heads our DE&I Council, to raise awareness of CDC, which lost its building in a fire last year.

And although I would like to see more diversity at Lument, faces on a website are not always the best measure. To me, diversity includes such things as academic degrees, professional background, and a whole range of experiences. We can measure our success as a diverse organization by how well we harness this diversity to create better outcomes for an increasingly diverse client base.

Women’s History Month: Laca Wong-Hammond

It was 2016, and I was in my last semester at Texas Christian University when I saw a posting on my college’s career search site for a job at Lument. I applied right away and secured a phone interview, which quickly progressed to an in-person interview and a job offer.

I had the relevant background — a bachelor’s in economics and finance — but I had only taken one real estate class. That didn’t seem to matter. The Lument philosophy is that if you have the aptitude and the right combination of skills, they can teach you the business.

That’s what happened to me. I’ve had great mentors and all the training I’ve needed not just to do the job but do it well. As a result, in just over three years I’ve been promoted from entry-level analyst to senior underwriter. Lument not only provided the opportunity for me to learn and grow very quickly but has also recognized and rewarded my determination to advance.

My everyday tasks include evaluating credit and property information to determine if it complies with agency and company guidelines, but I have had ample opportunity to participate in special projects that have raised my profile across the company. I have had a hand in developing our LeapOnline loan application and processing portal, as well as our new loan pipeline management system, and I’ve also been asked to train and mentor colleagues just entering the business. The exposure I’ve gained has been really satisfying.

Equally important to me is the culture at Lument. I cannot believe how great my coworkers are. Everyone is very close and gets along so well. I feel that I am not just part of a team but part of a family, and this feeling extends to every Lument employee I’ve ever met! Some of my teammates have become best friends.

I never imagined that my first job out of college would be a place where I could grow so much and would want to stay for years to come. I feel so strongly about Lument that I convinced a recent TCU graduate who had a number of job offers to choose us. I think she was skeptical at first that Lument could be as great as I described, but I asked her to trust me. Almost two years later, she is still here because everything I said proved true!

Looking In

Looking In