Flaherty Funding expanding here, along East Coast

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After opening three area branch offices, a privately held Henrietta mortgage banker is looking to expand into four states along the East Coast.
Flaherty Funding Corp., which opened a licensed office in Nassau County on Long Island on Feb. 24, marked last Friday the openings of branches in Irondequoit, Spencerport and Newark.
Founded in 1987 as Irving Properties, the firm was bought in 1995 by Thomas Flaherty, who became its president. Flaherty changed the company name and transformed it from a mortgage brokerage to a mortgage banker. Private mortgage bankers evolved in the mid-1980s, he said, as an alternative to commercial banks for homebuyers.
Flaherty Funding is licensed by the state Banking Department, which supervises some 330 mortgage bankers nationwide, including 10 in Monroe County.
Flaherty Funding employs 42, including a commission-based sales staff of 24, at its branch offices.
“In five years,” Flaherty said, “we could have 200 to 250 employees. My guess is, we would have 100 here and another 100 or so in other states.”
The Webster resident is a certified public accountant and a 1987 graduate of St. Bonaventure University.
Flaherty has licenses pending for branches in Connecticut, New Jersey, North Carolina and Virginia. He hopes to open all of them by Jan. 1.
Those four states were chosen after company research showed them to be the richest in housing demand and appreciation, he said. In Charlotte, N.C., he said, 10,000 new homes were built in 2003, compared with 1,100 in Rochester. The median price there is $300,000, compared with $100,000 in Rochester.
The company headquarters are in an 8,000-square-foot facility at 2595 Brighton-Henrietta Town Line Road, where the firm moved in November. Headquarters will remain there, because it is cost-efficient and he can take advantage of the area’s educated work force during the expansion period, Flaherty said.
“The banks that we sell to are based all over the country, and they all say that Rochester is rated sky-high,” Flaherty said of the work force.
For revenue, he said, the New York City area is the most lucrative. Three commissioned-sales staffers operate from an office in the Long Island community of Wantagh.
“In the last four years, 40 percent of our business has been out of the New York City area,” he said. “If you had told me four years ago that we’d be doing business in New York City and processing it in Rochester, I’d have said that’s not possible. But automation means everything.”
Flaherty Funding handled 860 mortgages totaling $110 million in 2003. It is projecting 1,000 mortgages totaling $130 million in 2004, Flaherty said. “In the next five years, our goal is to get to $1 billion in production.”
([email protected] / 585-546-8303)

10/15/04 (C) Rochester Business Journal