Dustin DiMisa called a customer and received a lesson in timekeeping. The buyer explained that a delayed closing could have left her without a place to live. Inside a mortgage company, a deadline can occupy a cell in a spreadsheet. Outside it, someone has to decide where to put the furniture. The distinction is rather more persuasive when the customer is on the telephone.
DiMisa recounted that conversation in his Consumer Connect notes. He had set himself the task of speaking directly with borrowers about their experiences, including the uncomfortable ones. The proposed audience was 2,000 consumers. That was a target for listening, rather than a tally of completed calls. It gave a familiar executive ambition, understanding the customer, a practical appointment.
By then, he had spent years building Intercontinental Capital Group, the residential mortgage business he co-founded after working at Countrywide. He knew the organizational side of lending: sales, operations, managers, and the effort required to move an application through a company. The calls supplied another perspective. A borrower could judge the entire enterprise by whether the promised date survived contact with reality.
There is something pleasingly inconvenient about this approach. A presentation allows its author to arrange the evidence. A customer has the dreadful liberty of changing the subject. DiMisa's call notes are interesting precisely when the conversation wanders away from the company's preferred account of itself.
“She mentioned that she was almost going to have no place to live”
Dustin DiMisa, recounting a borrower conversation
Before the calls, the machinery
His mortgage career included managerial work at Countrywide Financial's Full Spectrum Lending Division from December 2002 to June 2005. His responsibilities covered operations, business-to-business sales, and consumer-direct sales. He also worked on compliance with federal lending requirements. That combination placed him near several of the places where a mortgage business can either function smoothly or become exceedingly elaborate.
He earned a place on Countrywide's President's Council and went on to co-found ICG in 2005. The business offered residential mortgages and refinancing. Its work required more than attracting people to an application: someone had to assemble the operation behind the promise. DiMisa's background joined customer acquisition to the less photogenic business of getting work completed.
A clear historical marker arrived in 2018, when ICG ranked No. 907 on the Inc. 5000. The listing named DiMisa as its leader and placed the company in New York. A ranking is a snapshot, with a year attached. Here, it marks a stage in the growth of the business he helped build, before the present chapter at Hoot.
Growth supplies its own management puzzle. As responsibilities multiply, the person leading a company can spend more time discussing customers than speaking with them. Consumer Connect was DiMisa's attempt to shorten that distance. Its method had very little theatrical equipment: a telephone, a borrower, and enough patience to hear the answer.
The purchase loan as a stress test
The early calls concentrated on people who had taken out loans to buy homes. DiMisa explained his reasoning: he considered a new purchase harder to deliver well than a refinance, making it a useful test of the company's service. He deliberately began where the experience could expose weaknesses. A flattering sample would have been easier to enjoy and less useful to operate.
In one entry, he described five buyers who were pleased with their experiences. In another, he recalled a veteran in New York discussing the journey to a first home. The same round of calls brought an account of a purchase through Own It Home Loans that had gone less smoothly. Approval and dissatisfaction were arriving through the same instrument.
The details give the project its texture. He observed that customers were harder to reach on Mondays. He recorded the satisfaction of a good day of conversations. He also acknowledged that making the calls could become difficult to fit in. Customer attention, it seems, has to negotiate with the calendar like every other worthy intention.
DiMisa described himself as a natural conversationalist, while admitting that he sometimes approached another call without enthusiasm. Once the conversation began, his curiosity returned. That small admission makes the exercise more believable: a repeated practice can be useful without becoming endlessly delightful. Even an executive who wants feedback still has to dial.
Consumers he set out to speak with through Consumer Connect.
A stated goal, not a completed-call count.
A little suspicion on the line
One industry friend assumed the project was a way to generate leads. DiMisa said it had been started to learn from consumers, without lead generation as its purpose. The friend was surprised. In DiMisa's telling, the conversation eventually turned toward referring people who might want to work at the company. Listening had produced an unexpected recruiting discussion.
The episode is an anecdote about expectations as much as intentions. A mortgage executive makes a call, and someone looks for the sales proposition. DiMisa encountered that suspicion while trying to hold a different kind of conversation. Good intentions still have to introduce themselves; a job title rarely does the introductions gracefully.
He wanted the feedback to travel beyond his own desk. Loan officers, processors, underwriters, senior leadership, and operations were all intended recipients. The chain matters. A complaint that reaches the chief executive can make an excellent story. A complaint that reaches the person able to change the process has a chance of becoming useful work.
His explanation also contained a candid warning about executive distance. Travel, sales meetings, and operational projects could consume months before a leader spoke with a real customer. He was describing an ordinary management hazard, and proposing an ordinary remedy. The simplicity is part of the appeal. It is difficult to claim a telephone requires a transformation committee.
Promises have paperwork
The career also includes regulatory scrutiny. In September 2017, ICG entered a Washington consent order concerning advertising practices. The agreement provided for a $55,000 fine, with $15,000 stayed pending an examination. ICG neither admitted nor denied wrongdoing. The charges against DiMisa individually were withdrawn; he remained a signatory as the company's owner.
That episode belongs alongside the company's growth and its customer-service ambitions. Lending is a business in which the wording of a promise carries consequences. The order required an examination of advertising practices, putting a formal obligation around the way ICG communicated. Claims about clarity are more meaningful when the company's actual obligations remain in view.
Consumer conversations and regulatory requirements examine different parts of the same relationship. One asks how the experience felt to the borrower. The other imposes standards on the business conducting it. A company needs to handle both. For a founder whose public work emphasizes trust and understandable transactions, this is part of the record against which those ambitions sit.
Follow the dollars to Hoot
DiMisa's current Hoot work moves the discussion toward the economics of a home purchase. As founder and CEO, he leads a platform built around the idea that money already passing through a transaction might be arranged to improve a buyer's monthly payment. His attention turns to the fee structure, including what representation costs and what remains available afterward.
Hoot describes a flat-fee representation model that can direct remaining transaction dollars toward a temporary 2-1 interest-rate buydown. The intended benefit concerns the first two years of ownership. This is the company's stated approach, with its usefulness dependent on the particular transaction. It does not make the purchase price, future payment, or cost of ownership disappear.
The premise suits someone whose earlier experiment involved asking buyers what actually troubled them. A home purchase contains several numbers competing for attention. DiMisa's Hoot Home Loans work emphasizes the monthly payment, cash needed at closing, and predictable communication. Those are concrete questions a household can put beside its own budget, rather than admire from a distance.
The attraction of this approach lies in choosing a problem inside the transaction that a business can work on directly. DiMisa cannot personally set the housing supply or command a new interest-rate environment. His platform proposes changing the allocation of fees. The ambition is narrower than fixing housing altogether, and more specific about where the work begins.
- 01Flat-fee buyer representation
- 02Remaining transaction dollars
- 03Temporary payment relief through a 2-1 buydown
The people behind the process
A parallel part of his work appears at Perch Home Loans, which identifies him as founder and CEO. Perch concentrates on the platform supporting loan officers and their partner relationships: operational workflows, borrower communication, closing timelines, and systems for growth. It brings the story back to the machinery behind an apparently simple promise to a buyer.
The platform's priorities include recruiting, onboarding, distribution, and fulfillment. These are the subjects that rarely grace a housewarming invitation. They nevertheless shape whether a borrower receives a clear answer and whether the team can deliver it consistently. DiMisa's public career keeps returning to the connection between the consumer-facing brand and the people doing the work underneath it.
His more recent writing opens that conversation to a wider audience. In a January 2026 update, he explained his interest in Reddit as a place where people challenge ideas. He also writes on Medium about affordability, commissions, mortgage operations, and distribution. The discussion has moved from individual calls into public exchanges, where the audience can supply its own objections.
There is continuity here without requiring a tidy conversion story. The ICG operator, the customer caller, and the Hoot founder address related questions from different positions. How does a business grow? What happens to the borrower along the way? Where do the transaction dollars go? Each question becomes harder to answer well if the other two are ignored.
A useful interruption
DiMisa's stated aspiration is to make home financing easier to understand and improve affordability. It is an ambition best judged in the particulars: the explanation a buyer receives, the costs the transaction carries, the deadline the team meets. His own call notes suggest that customers are quite capable of supplying the particulars when someone gives them room.
The buyer worried about having nowhere to live remains the most telling encounter in this story. She had an immediate problem, and a corporate schedule was entangled with it. For a mortgage executive, hearing that directly is a useful interruption. Somewhere between the application and the closing date, the business has to remember that a person is waiting for a key.