From Maid to Mortgage Mogul: How Patty Arvielo Built a Billion-Dollar Lending Empire

Patty Arvielo built her company, New American Funding, to weather uncertainty and she still finds time to pay it forward. 

Patty Arvielo had her full-circle moment 15 years ago. At a sales meeting in Downey, California, she ran into the owner of a real estate business whose offices she used to clean. “I remember those offices,” muses Arvielo, who as a teen used to help her mother, a Mexican immigrant, with her cleaning business. Arvielo isn’t ashamed of her career history. At 60, the co-founder of New American Funding, one of the largest private mortgage lenders in the U.S., is proud of where she’s been. “I was able to tell him that I was his maid!” she says.

Arvielo earned that moment. But to hear her tell it, her rise from maid to CEO, a title she shares with her husband, Rick Arvielo, could be traced to a series of straightforward steps or to happenstance. Spend any time with her, though, and it’s impossible to ignore her hustle.

She not only leads a team of 4,800 that powers more than 280 branches across the U.S., but also finds time to mentor between 60 and 70 budding business leaders annually. Arvielo, who never went to college, even has a business school named for her in Costa Mesa, California.

“It’s almost like Patty has this sixth sense about the industry and what’s going to happen,” says Eva Melgarejo, a loan consultant at NAF, who was one of Arvielo’s mentees. “It’s absolutely impressive.” And rare. Out of the top 50 mortgage companies by loan originations as of 2023, the latest year for which data is available, NAF is one of five lenders with at least one female founder, and it’s just one of three companies with a female CEO.

But the past couple of years in the mortgage business have been trying for even the most prescient industry insiders. After the pandemic-fueled housing boom, which benefited from historically low mortgage rates, the market started to spiral in 2022, as rates began to climb and homes for sale languished on the market. Mortgage rates hit a recent high of 7.79 percent in October 2023, putting already lofty property values out of reach for many new homebuyers. And even though the Federal Reserve cut its interbank lending rate three times in 2024, mortgage rates held steady around 6 or 7 percent through January.

New American Funding has weathered this challenging time well. Revenue at NAF, which has landed on the Inc. 5000 list of the fastest-growing private U.S. companies eight times, grew 51 percent last year from 2023, according to Arvielo.

Arvielo credits her company’s ability to withstand the latest market turn, in part, to prioritizing organic growth. NAF, she says, remains privately held and has never taken on outside investment. “Rick and I have built a very sustainable platform. We’re not overleveraged at all,” she says. “I think we’ve kept 95 percent of the profits in the company since we built it.”

It’s also helped that Arvielo has a keen eye for spotting opportunities.

After a decade-long decline in mortgage rates, in 1994 a jolt in rates gave the industry pause. “That’s when I learned that loans don’t just fall from the sky,” Arvielo says. At the time, she was in her 20s, working at Countrywide Financial, and she noticed that the real estate offices in neighboring Santa Ana, which boasts a large Hispanic population, were still busy. She thought: “I speak pretty good Spanish. I know how to do mortgage loans!” So she began visiting local real estate offices to get some on-the-ground perspective. “The passion for home ownership in this community was like nothing I had ever seen,” she says. “Like crying when we would call and tell them their loan was closed. And their whole family is coming to pick up the keys.”

She left Countrywide to start her own business in 2003, and for the first five years it grew fast. But then came the 2008 financial crisis, which roiled the housing market and sent many mortgage lenders—including her former employer—into financial ruin. However, NAF, which never got into the marketing of subprime loans, really took off at that moment, says Arvielo. Of subprime loans, Arvielo says, “They didn’t make sense to me,” as lenders often didn’t require income verification.

In 2013, with growth on her mind, Arvielo made a concerted effort to hire bilingual staffers at all levels. She placed a particular emphasis on hiring Spanish-speaking loan officers to help grow the client base. “That was really the beginning,” says Arvielo, referring to NAF’s Latino Focus program, which prioritizes lending among that community.

Three years later, Arvielo found another growth opportunity for NAF. That was the year that a Black audience member at a Mortgage Bankers Association event called Arvielo out for not placing a similar emphasis on the Black community. “He stood up and said, ‘You know, I think it’s really great, Mrs. Arvielo, what you’re doing for the Latino community, but what are you doing for the Black community?'”

He had a point. At the time, only 3 percent of NAF’s loans went to Black homebuyers, a number Arvielo calls “very embarrassing.” Once NAF refocused its attentions, loan volume spiked. Now, 12.4 percent of NAF’s mortgage loans go to Black clients, she says.

Today, the company’s overall volume of loans has been a saving grace. NAF did need to lay off some staffers after the latest real estate downturn, but “not drastically,” says Arvielo.

To stave off more severe cuts, Arvielo says NAF has been doubling down on servicing. The company maintains over $70 billion in servicing assets. (Servicing includes collecting payments, managing escrow accounts, and all the other customer service that goes along with managing a mortgage after it has been closed.) “If you’re not building servicing, you’re not thinking about sustaining a platform that’s going to endure,” Arvielo says. When rates are hovering around 7 percent, servicing values are higher. “So we’re able to use the income off the servicing to supplement what we’re not making on the origination channel.”

“I’m trying to teach the women already in the industry that the generational wealth that Rick and I built for our family is attainable.”

Despite the tough times presently, Arvielo remains convinced that real estate can lead to entrepreneurial success—particularly for women. “The mortgage industry has been built on women’s talent since the beginning, but we were always the processors, the openers, the underwriters, or the operations managers,” Arvielo says. “I’m trying to teach the women already in the industry that the generational wealth that Rick and I built for our family is attainable.”

She ardently wants more women to rise: “I want them to own the type of company that I’ve owned!”

Arvielo can be very persuasive. Before becoming a loan consultant, Melgarejo was initially hired to do public relations and marketing for NAF in 2015. Arvielo would soon persuade her to become a licensed loan officer. “She was relentless,” Melgarejo says, chuckling. “Patty saw in me what I couldn’t see,” she adds. “I was a natural salesperson.”

Melgarejo is just one of the hundreds of people Arvielo has mentored. Most mentees find their way to her through Thrive & Lead, a free online mentorship class that she advertises on LinkedIn and Instagram. The class originally started as a way to mentor Latinas, but it has evolved to include men and women of all backgrounds.

Vanguard University, the private nonprofit institution whose business school now bears her name, has similarly wide appeal, though 45 percent of the students identify as Latino. Around three years ago Orange County officials approached Rick about naming the business school after his wife. He agreed, but didn’t tell her about it.

On the day of the ceremony in 2023, she thought he was being honored. “He surprised me!” says Arvielo. She was the one whom hundreds had gathered to see. During Arvielo’s acceptance speach, through tears, she told the crowd that her mom was a housekeeper and she wants to be seen as a housekeeper’s daughter. “Many students came up to my mom and me afterward and said, ‘We clean houses, too’ or ‘My mom cleans houses,’ ” she says.

This representation matters, she says. Feeling like you can achieve—even when something feels impossible, because you’ve seen someone who looks like you do it—is what matters. “Everybody needs to see themselves in leadership,” she says.