Make hers a million
Growing up brainy and gifted at science, “I knew for certain that I wanted to be a brain surgeon,” Jillian White said recently at her terrace apartment that is also her office in Trump Plaza in downtown New Rochelle.
As an undergraduate at Columbia University, “I worked at Columbia Presbyterian for a few months, and that was the end of that,” said the 28-year-old entrepreneur. Allowed to watch surgeons perform in the operating room, the premed student found herself nodding off to sleep. “I thought it was going to be like ”˜ER”™ ”“ and it wasn”™t,” she said. “It was very routine.”
Growing up in Yonkers, White also had a passion for real estate. “Specifically, I liked looking at houses. That was like a family pastime. On certain Sundays we”™d all pile in the car and look at homes.”
Graduating from Columbia in 2002 with a degree in neuroscience, White briefly tried real estate sales before moving to the appraiser”™s side of the industry. She worked five weeks in appraisals at a company in Greenwich, Conn., where she learned from a colleague that most appraisers work from home.
White started looking for independent contracting work. “That”™s when the journey really began,” she said. “I found someone to train me and I worked for five or six local appraisal companies.”
In 2005, she incorporated her business, White Picket Fence Appraisals Inc. The principal and company president was 23.
“I started the company on my credit card,” she said. Working from an office in her parents”™ home in Cortlandt Manor, “I had my filing cabinet, my laptop. I got my P.O. box and I set up a bank account.”
The startup business owner slowly transitioned from doing work for appraisal companies, where fees were split between company and contractor, to working for banks and lenders and collecting the entire appraisal fee. Demand was strong in Westchester and Putnam counties for her service in mortgage lending, house purchases and refinancing and home equity loans.
In 2007, the U.S. Small Business Administration”™s New York district honored White with its Young Entrepreneur of the Year award to business owners under 30.
The thriving housing market sustained her business for a few years. “That was fine until 2008,” White said at her apartment, where she operates a virtual office and farms out work online to more than 100 appraisers around the country. “Because of the mortgage meltdown, quite a few of my clients went out of business. The mortgage brokers were pretty much annihilated.”
In the housing crisis, lending banks began using appraisal management companies as clearing houses for work that formerly went to independent contractors such as White. “When that happened, that”™s when it got really bad in terms of fees,” she said. “It became really hard to run the business in that way.”
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Seeing that “my original business plan wasn”™t working out,” White turned her company”™s focus to reviews of broker price opinions, or BPOs, miniature appraisals of salespersons”™ house price estimates that White and her pool of appraisers do as desktop reports. She said she receives orders that range from 10 to 1,000 properties from managers of distressed assets on which lenders either have foreclosed or are about to foreclose. The orders often come from states hardest hit by the housing market collapse and the recession, including California, Florida and Michigan. ?The business, said White, “is paperless and really easy to run in that way. It”™s great because we have people all over the country, so an actual concrete office wouldn”™t serve any purpose anyway.”
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White assigns most of the reviews to other appraisers, after first studying the assigned product herself and creating an online training seminar for her appraisers. “I manage the process just to be sure that we hit our deadlines,” she said. “It”™s a matter of days, certainly not weeks, so it”™s crunch time when they (orders) come in.”
Working in BPO reviews “has its highs and lows,” she said. “We”™re in a bit of a low now. There is a moratorium on foreclosures, so nothing is buying or selling. Nothing is moving, so they don”™t come across our desk.”
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White”™s ability to adapt her business to the changed real estate market and grow in revenue and her competitive skill with a three-minute business pitch helped bring her another honor and opportunity recently. At a women”™s business summit hosted by American Express OPEN in Houston last month, she was one of 10 female entrepreneurs chosen for the Make Mine a Million $ Business program.
Started in 2005 by Count Me In for Women”™s Economic Independence, a national nonprofit provider of business resources and community support for women entrepreneurs, in partnership with American Express OPEN, the so-called M3 program provides coaching, marketing and some financial resources to help women grow their businesses above $1 million in annual revenue. Its sponsors said only 2.6 percent of the more than 10 million women-owned businesses in the U.S. report more than $1 million in revenue, with most generating revenues below $50,000.
White said she has 12 to 18 months to reach the $1 million goal for her business. She was interviewing her coaching candidates by phone ”“ she has three to choose from ”“ and planning to join in women-led training sessions on how to get government contracts, a business direction on which she has newly set her sights in the still-ailing residential real estate market.
In the Make Mine a Million $ Business program, “There are huge success stories,” she said, “not just of women hitting the million-dollar mark, but hitting 12, 13, 16 million in just two to three years, and that”™s always because of the government contracts.”
While Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae could propel White Picket Fence Appraisals to its revenue goal, White said she expects her BPO review business to pick up again, too. Those distressed properties “at some time are going to have to start moving again,” she said. “They”™re just sitting in the pipeline.”
Those BPO appraisals could give her company enough work “to last us until 2013,” she said.