Robert Cannon
Age: 53
Company: Equitas LLC
Hometown: Needham
Residence: Cumnaquid
Robert Cannon, founder and principal of Equitas LLC, is a former trial lawyer who created a law firm that does just one thing: close Home Equity Conversion Mortgages (HECM), known as reverse mortgages. The HECM program, administered by the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), allows anyone over 62 to convert equity in their home into a lump–sum payment, monthly payments, or a line of credit. The reverse mortgage principal plus interest is repaid once the senior no longer lives in the home, and the remainder of equity in the home goes to the heirs.
Cannon created Equitas with a vision beyond keeping seniors in their home. Cannon wants to make legal representation affordable for the middle-class, hence the name of his firm, which means “equality” in Latin. His plan is to create law services with very little overhead; his business is entirely digital. There are no brick and mortar Equitas offices. Equitas is actually three companies: a technology company (called Equidocs), Equitas Marketing and the law firm. All three companies work to streamline the process of closing reverse mortgages.
Revere mortgages have had some bad press in the past, when they were depicted as predatory. What do you say to that claim?
It wasn’t the reverse mortgage that was bad, it was the use of the money [received from the reverse mortgage] that was bad. In every single one of those articles, what happened was the broker selling the reverse mortgage with the senior also talked them into using the money to buy an annuity. Buying an annuity is a bad use of reverse mortgage funds. Going to Foxwoods is a bad use of reverse mortgage funds. There are other things that are very good use of the funds, like buying a long–term care insurance policy. Or turning the funds into a line of credit and letting it grow until you need it.
Part of what sets you apart is that you help lenders find candidates for reverse mortgages, right?
We believe that our job as lawyers is to represent the best interest for our clients. The best interest of our lender clients is to get business. So we have a separate company, Equitas Marketing LLC and we work with our lender clients and we do a marketing campaign in their name, in their neighborhood. Equitas Marketing gets the lender client that business. We hope that the lender thinks well enough of us and our expertise to give Equitas Law Firm the closing, because Equitas the law firm is separate from the marketing company. Most law firms sit by the phone and wait for it to ring, wait for the lender with the business. We do the opposite; we go out and get them the business.
How does the technology on your Web site streamline your business?
The Web-based closing system is called Smart Closings. What Smart Closings does is allow people in different geographic areas be all in the same footprint in terms of getting the closing done. We analyzed how a real estate closing works for a lawyer… I’m never going to be great at making sure [paid-off mortgages] are charged, actually come back in a timely manner and get recorded. So for that aspect of it we actually have a service provider partner that works for us. We pay them a flat fee per closing and their only job is to make sure the mortgage that paid off, the mortgage is charged… and gets recorded. We have an accounting firm that every time we do a closing verifies that all the funding is in place and that the reconciliations get done, so that I go to bed knowing for a fact that my account is in perfect balance. What brings it together is this Web system… we’re all looking together at the same thing at the same time.
How do you like working from home?
When I first started doing it, it was a little funny, especially coming out of a trial law situation, where every day was putting out a fire. I had this sense that I had an unbelievable amount of free time, and I was like ‘I must be doing something wrong,’… because I wasn’t putting out a fire. Happily, I got over it… and it’s great. All of our people work out of their homes. It’s a different kind of culture. Every week we conduct a pipeline call. We go through what our closings are and where we stand, and so on. Some people who are on that pipeline call every day, I haven’t seen face-to-face in two years. But it works for us.
Five books that helped create Equitas LLC:
"The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century by Thomas L. Friedman"
"Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… and Others Don’t by James C. Collins"
"Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant by W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne"
"The E-Myth: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It by Michael E. Gerber"
"The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement by Eliyahu M. Goldratt"
