Director of Lending - Licensed MLO (Qualifying Individual)

Build a mortgage company from zero. $150,000 base, $185,000 guaranteed year one, uncapped commission.

Sagebrush Holdings sells rural Texas land and finances most of it. We are standing up our own licensed Texas mortgage company and need the person who will build it.

This is not a role where you inherit a department. You are the first lending hire. You write the policies, hold the license, originate the loans, and build the team under you.

Compensation

• Base salary: $150,000
• First-year guaranteed minimum: $185,000, trued up quarterly
• Licensing milestone bonus: $25,000 when our license issues and the first in-house loan closes
• Volume commission: 0.5% of funded loan volume, uncapped
• Legacy portfolio project: 1.5% per legacy note refinanced (65 notes, roughly $64,500 available)
• We cover your Texas license, NMLS fees, continuing education, E&O and D&O

The guarantee exists because commission cannot be earned until the license issues. You will not spend six months building infrastructure on base alone.

2027 projection: $28.2M in closings across 336 deals, roughly 65% owner-financed. Volume ramps from 65 financed deals in Q1 to 107 in Q4. Commission is uncapped because we would rather you have upside than argue about a ceiling.

About us

Veteran-owned. We buy raw Texas acreage, subdivide it into rural residential tracts, and sell retail under the Victory Land Sales brand. Roughly $18M in land sales this year, targeting $55M by 2028. Most buyers finance with us at 11.99% fixed.

Today we route every financed deal through an outside licensed originator. It works, but it is expensive and it is someone else’s license.

We have outside regulatory counsel engaged and a bank credit facility in progress. You will not be figuring out the legal framework alone.

What you will do

First six months: build it

• Serve as Qualifying Individual on our Texas mortgage company license
• Run the MU1 application through NMLS and work the SML deficiency process
• Write the compliance program: policies and procedures, AML/BSA, fair lending, complaint handling, record retention, advertising review
• Select and configure the loan origination system, including timestamped disclosure delivery
• Build the underwriting standard and decision matrix
• Train the sales floor on what unlicensed staff can and cannot say

Then: run it

• Take applications, underwrite, make credit decisions, issue disclosures and adverse action notices
• File quarterly Mortgage Call Reports, manage renewals, commission the annual AML audit
• Prepare for and manage the first Texas SML examination
• Manage our third-party loan servicer relationship, including boarding, reporting and escrow administration
• Support bank diligence on the credit facility

Then: grow it

• Hire a processor and build the lending team
• Refinance the legacy portfolio onto compliant documents
• Evaluate bringing loan servicing in house as the portfolio scales

You report directly to the CEO. Permanently. The person accountable for loan quality should not report to the person paid on sales volume, and we are not going to set it up that way.

Qualifications

• Active Texas MLO license, or licensed in another state and able to obtain Texas quickly. We pay for it.
• Experience through a state examination. Not reading about one. Sitting through one.
• You have built compliance infrastructure before, or been close enough that you know what good looks like
• Willing to work full time in our Castle Rock, Colorado office. Not hybrid, not remote.
• Comfortable being the accountable person. The Qualifying Individual answers to the State for every file, every ad, every exam.

Strongly preferred: conversational Spanish. A large share of our buyers speak Spanish at home. We will hire a bilingual processor under you, but it matters.

Honest about the hard parts

This is a brand new lender. That means a guaranteed examination in year one and no existing file to point at. You will be the only licensed originator for the first several months, carrying both the build and the production. Volume ramps hard in the second half of 2027.

If you want a seat at an established shop, this is not it. If you have been running someone else’s lending department and want to build your own, with real compensation and real autonomy, this is the job.

Job type: Full-time, in office

Location: Castle Rock, CO 80104

Pay: $185,000 – $292,000 per year

To apply: Send a resume and your NMLS ID to View email address on click.appcast.io. Tell us in a few sentences why you are the right candidate. We move fast. If you are a fit you will hear from us within a week.