Podcasts

Varun Krishna shares Rocket’s plan to “become the Apple of homeownership”

January 9, 2025

This week on Power House, Diego sits down with Varun Krishna, the CEO of Rocket Companies. Prior to joining Rocket in 2023, Varun came up on the personal finance and enterprise software side of the tech space, with roles at Intuit and Paypal.

Rocket has a growth plan to make home ownership easier, enjoyable, and sustainable for homeowners. Diego and Varun talk about how Rocket aims to achieve that by using AI tools to optimize the origination-servicing flywheel and by building long–term relationships with clients, not just one-time transactions. They also talk about recent hires to Rocket, their 2025 brand transformation plan, and whats next in-store for the company.

Here’s what you’ll learn:

Buying a home is an emotional process that should be simplified.
Building long-term relationships, not just transactions, with clients is essential for success.
AI is being leveraged at many points during the homebuying process to enhance operational efficiency and customer service.
Rocket has an 85% recapture rate due in part to its customer-centric approach.
The TPO channel is a significant priority for Rocket’s growth strategy.
Rocket’s new marketing strategy aims to position Rocket as the ‘Apple of homeownership.’

Related to this episode:

This episode transcript has been edited for length and clarity purposes. To kick off the interview, Krishna explores his background and how it aligns with Rocket’s growth strategy.

Diego Sanchez: Welcome to Power House, where we interview the biggest names in housing and ask them about their strategy for growth. I’m Diego Sanchez, president of Housingwire. My guest today is Varun Krishna, CEO of Rocket Companies and a true powerhouse. Varun, it’s so great to have you on the show.

Varun Krishna: Diego, thanks for having me. I hear great things about this podcast, so I appreciate the opportunity.

Sanchez: Looking at your background, you came up on the tech side of personal finance with brands like PayPal and Intuit. What does your hire at Rocket Companies tell us about Rocket’s strategy for growth?

Krishna: I grew up in tech — specifically in product. I spent the first half of my career on enterprise software and then switched over to consumer products. I came to Rocket for a few simple reasons. I think there’s a huge opportunity to apply technology to modernize the space. I saw a company that has a restless ambition, that’s an innovator and a disruptor and has been for many years. And the culture of this place is just amazing. So, I think what the hire probably should tell folks is that we’re serious about technology, and we’re serious about transformation.

We have a big role to play in the future of homeownership, and we’re committed to that. Having worked at many different companies over the course of my career, Rocket is a very special place, and I think it goes back to the legacy of our founder and chairman, Dan Gilbert, who created a culture that I think really represents strength, endurance, and grit. I saw that just being a huge place to have an impact. I’m very happy to be here, and I’m excited for what’s ahead.

Sanchez: I’ve done a couple of mortgages in my life, and I can’t say that they were fun. Should they be more fun for the consumer?

Krishna: Yes, absolutely. One of the things that I learned from Turbo Tax and Intuit, as well as being in FinTech and products in general, is that these products and services are emotional in nature. Buying a home is one of the biggest decisions the average consumer will ever make, and it’s one of the most important decisions. It’s the bedrock of the American dream. It’s such an important thing. Housing is 20% of the GDP. It’s a very important part of the day-to-day life of a person. And the experience of buying, selling, or financing a home is painful today. You’ve got to find documents and go through this wait-and-wonder phase. You lack certainty, confidence, and value in the transaction. I absolutely think it should be easier. It should be more confidence-inspiring. It should be something that makes you feel empowered because the outcome of it creates long-term value. There are things that we can do to make the process easier, simpler, frictionless, and confidence expiring. Rocket stands for that, and it’s a big part of who we are and how we built our brand.

Sanchez: In addition to mortgage, you have home search, personal finance, and some other companies under the umbrella. However, even the biggest companies prioritize one business. For Apple its devices, and for Google its search. What is your primary focus at rocket companies?

Krishna: If I were to think of one word to describe our focus, the word that comes to mind is homeownership — the process of making homeownership safe, sustainable, and enduring. When you think about the different focus areas of our businesses, the one thing that unifies all of them is that singular focus on homeownership. We want to make it easy for you to buy or sell a home, find a home, or stay in the home. A lot of that comes down to your financial sustainability, making the searching and financing processes simple, being able to take equity out of your home, cash-out refi, and second liens, right? All of our focus is around the entirety of making homeownership safe and sustainable.

There are a few things that we really double down on when it comes to enabling that. We call that our Super Stack. It starts with having the origination and the servicing flywheel that are connected to each other — not just helping you be in the home but also servicing the transaction and making sure that we have an ongoing, enduring relationship with our clients. It goes down to just having multi-channel experiences of buying and selling a home, whether it’s engaging with realtors, brokers, or working directly with us. We want to meet clients where they are.

It’s about betting big on technology, leveraging artificial intelligence, knowledge engineering, and machine learning. Those are just some of the capabilities that are out there to make the process easier. And, creating a brand that stands on the same shoulders as some of the big brands that you reference, like the Apples and Nikes of the world, but also a brand that stands for something that’s enduring. We like to say internally that we make 30-year bets on clients who make 30-year bets on themselves.

Sanchez: I love that you brought up 30-year bets and a flywheel because homeownership does have a lifecycle, and it matches the customer lifecycle in mortgage. It sounds like you want to play at all the different points in that customer life cycle of home ownership.

Krishna: That’s correct. It’s important to remember that your relationship with a client is not transactional. It’s a long-term relationship. We don’t just want to originate a purchase or a refinance. We want to have an ongoing, continuous relationship with our clients for life. That is a big part of our brand. That’s a big part of our value proposition, and that continuity is important. When you think about things like servicing, for example, a lot of our focus is on having an awesome experience. It’s understanding things like natural disasters, forbearance, and when to have forgiveness in our payment processes. And so, the relationship for us is enduring. That’s why clients trust us. They know that we’re there for them through the inevitable ups and downs that come with life. It’s far more than a transaction to us.

Sanchez: I like that you brought up servicing as a really important touch point, and it’s probably an area where the industry overall has come up short. I don’t think many homeowners like their servicer for a variety of reasons. One of the biggest stories in mortgage for 2025 will be the servicers trying to improve that customer experience and using technology to originate from their book.

Could you talk about how you have a partnership with Annaly Capital, and how you’ve done some other work to grow your servicing book over the past couple of years. Tell us more about your strategy for servicing.

Krishna: I’d start by just saying that it is an essential part of our strategy. It comes down to the foundation of having a long-term relationship with your client. As you move on from originating a transaction, you become a part of that long term relationship — and that takes place through servicing. There’s a reason why Rocket Mortgage wins the JD Power Award for Excellence in servicing. It’s because we care about our clients.

[Laquanda Sain] is our leader in the servicing business, and she is great at what she does. In fact, her team has a mantra that we call “love, protect, amaze.” That’s a religion in terms of how we think about the experience that we want to deliver for our clients. We have everything from helping clients with natural disasters to understanding when they’re in situations where we need to care for them. We focus on the details of those interactions.

The great thing about that is when you get good at something, you earn the right to deliver it for others. That’s an example of where the relationship with Annaly has been something that we’re very proud of, and would like to do more of. In Annaly’s case, they care about the retention of their client base. When we provide subservicing capabilities for them, we’re allowing them to retain their clients at a higher rate.

There’s a reason why Rocket has an 85% recapture rate. It’s because we deliver an outstanding experience. It’s responsive, timely, technology-driven, personalized, and empathetic. That speaks to the culture of what we’ve built in our servicing business. This is a great example of a win-win, where we can serve that client base, deliver great experiences, and originate new products and services for them.

As clients transact with Rocket, they become a stronger part of Annaly’s servicing book. So, shout out to David Finkelstein of Annaly. We really appreciate the partnership, and it’s just an example of where we’re taking the capabilities of our platform and extending it to partners in the ecosystem.

Sanchez: An 85% recapture rate — that number really stands out to me. It’s higher than the industry average. How do you achieve that?

Krishna: It’s actually a lot of things. A big part of it is details, right? It’s making sure that with every client, we have a data driven, highly personalized relationship. It’s also making sure they know that being part of the Rocket experience is special. It means they get personalized emails, folks on the phone when they need it, and they can interact with capabilities like chat.

I go back to the mantra of “Love, protective, amaze.” That’s something that is more than a mantra. It’s a higher calling of how we operate our business with our clients. We have a philosophy that says, “Every client, every time, no exceptions, no excuses.” We look through cases every single week. We look through places where we could do better. We’re relentlessly optimizing the experiences that we deliver for our clients. Ultimately, it comes down to commitment, focus, and dedication.

And again, shout out to Laquanda, who leads our servicing business, but the testament of capability is oftentimes one of leadership. We have a great team. They’re very good at what they do. They’re fiercely passionate about our clients, and they focus on those inches every single day. It is a huge source of pride for us, and it’s where we think that servicing business is a core part of our strategy to connect with our origination business. As we serve our clients, we earn the right to do more business with them.

Sanchez: You gave a presentation that was mostly focused on Artificial Intelligence at HousingWire’s “The Gathering,” which set the event abuzz and eventually led us to creating our own one-day summit focused on AI. What is the latest and greatest with artificial intelligence at rocket companies?.

Krishna: AI, in some ways, is the air we breathe. It is a real technology. There’s no hype around it, and I think we’re in the earliest stages. What a time to be innovating in the homeownership mortgage fintech space, leveraging this amazing capability. I’ll give you a couple of examples of new tools that are starting to explode internally and externally.

I’d start with an internal tool called Synopsis. One of the things that attracted me to Rocket was the sheer mass of the data that we produce as a company. We have 65 million call logs. We’re generating 300,000 transcripts and a million calls a week, right? That is data science or an AI fan’s dream — to play with large data sets and machining models.

Synopsis is an incredible tool because it creates meaning out of that unstructured data. It understands things like sentiment, tone, purpose, pain points, and objections. We’re able to leverage that, create insights, and actually coach our bankers, client service experts, and our operational team members to do better. It creates a very natural feedback loop that’s data-driven, working on a large data set that allows us to become more efficient, personalized, and productive. This technology is saving us about 800,000 hours annually, and that’s a great number. That allows our team members to serve more clients, do a better job, take the experiences and scale them, and have a broader impact on homeownership.

We also implement limited AI into our chat experiences. Chat is a very sort of emerging modality. It used to be like getting on the phone and having these conversations. The beauty of chat is that it’s asynchronous. It’s available 24/7, and it can communicate in different languages with tone and context. We’ve now extended generative AI capabilities to our chat.

A banker or a client service specialist can speak with multiple clients at the same time, and still deliver exceptional service. Chat has three times the conversion compared to non-chat interactions. Quarter over quarter, we’ve had almost double the number of clients that are using it. And, generative AI is great because it provides that personalization that our experts are looking for so they can interact with more clients with a higher quality service and better conversion.

And one more example is a technology internally that we call Navigator. It is a low-code, no-code AI platform that we’ve built internally for our team members. We have thousands of team members that adopted this, and they’re generating hundreds of thousands of LLM queries. This is the layer that we’ve built on top of integrations that we have with anthropic Open AI and a couple of the other platforms like Amazon, AWS, and Bedrock. It lets you have incredibly powerful information at your fingertips without being a technologist. You can say, for example, “Hey Navigator, analyze these calls with a particular client and write for me the three best ways to text this client to create confidence.” Or, “Analyze these one thousand calls and give me the main objection that a client is facing.” It takes a vast amount of data, and it uses simple prompt engineering to allow anyone to become an expert.

So, there’s three examples of just some of the latest and greatest in AI. We’re just scratching the surface. This technology will get better. The nice thing about Rocket is we have so much data to play with, and that data set creates a bit of a natural playground for us to be able to innovate. It’s one of the biggest reasons why I wanted to come to Rocket and to be a part of that transformation.

Sanchez: I’m hearing sentiment analysis, better chat experiences, saving a lot of time, and also enabling your internal team to be more focused and do their daily work better. How does that translate into Rocket taking market share in mortgage in 2025 and 2026?

Krishna: Growing market share profitably is our North Star metric. That’s what we look to every day, and that’s what we focus on in terms of growth. I think the way you focus on shared growth is just by serving more clients more efficiently with higher degrees of quality, personalization, and experience. A direct example of that would be the origination and servicing flywheel. How do you take service clients who have a great experience with Rocket, leverage AI capabilities like CRM, personalization, targeting, predictive analytics, and understand what mindset a client is in when they’re likely to think about another transaction. Or vice versa, when they’re not ready to think about another transaction.

AI equips us with the ability to have a specific and quantifiable understanding of the intent that the consumer has around something as important as homeownership. If you’re in a purchase transaction, it might take you months to find a home. You might if you have a life event, and it may spur you to buy a new home. AI distills these consumer insights into models and algorithms that allow us to have a holistic view of intent, and we can leverage that intent to create better targeting, personalization, and ultimately create a great experience. If we do a good job with that, our share will grow, and the rest will sort of take care of itself. It just creates understanding, which is really important in this space, because there’s a lot of signals. There’s also a lot of noise. If you can distill signals from noise, that’s what AI is really good at. That’s how we’re going to leverage it to grow our share in purchase and refinance.

Sanchez: You recently hired Dan Sogorka as General Manager of your TPO channel. Should that indicate to me that TPO is a big priority for Rocket in 2025?

Krishna: Yes, it should. Dan is an incredible leader. We’re very lucky to have him. I was just talking with him a couple days ago, and we were talking about how excited he is to be at Rocket, but also the potential for the TPO business. We are passionate about mortgage brokers, and there’s a reason why we call them “broker partners.” It’s because they’re in it with us. We think about them as a community and family.

There’s a few things I would share in terms of our strategic focus areas. Firstly, we are a technology company. We always have been, always will be — especially into the future. One of the things that we’re excited about is extending the capabilities of our origination platform, our servicing platform, CRM capabilities, notification and mobile personalization, and bringing that innovation to our mortgage brokers. Being able to equip them with technology and tools is one critical element of our strategy. Dan is super excited. We have serious innovation coming to the market next year.

The second thing is when you think about your client, in this case a broker, the most important thing is to understand their biggest problems. We spend a lot of time with our broker partners and ask them: How can we serve you better? They want competitive pricing, fast turnaround times, top-tier service, and ultimately, they want the power of choice.

Those pillars are the foundation upon which sits our broker strategy. We’re doubling down here. We’ve increased our resourcing. We have an increased focus on marketing, and our broker partners are critical to our growth — especially in purchase. They’re a vital part of the community, and they’re a significant value proposition for us. TPO and brokers in general are very big parts of the future of Rocket. We’re very committed to that community for the long term.

Sanchez: On behalf of our large audience of mortgage brokers that read and interact with HousingWire on a daily basis, I want to say I’m really excited to hear that. There’s a lot of opportunity in that channel for growth, and it’s great to see Rocket invest in this way.

Krishna: Thank you. We take this very seriously. We’ve had a lot of conversations around this being a building block for our growth strategy. I also had the chance to shadow our mortgage brokers, and they’re a noble, passionate, skilled, and vital part of the industry. The more we can do to empower them, enhance them with choice, flexibility, competitive pricing, turn times, and technology — we’re in it to win it with them.

Sanchez: Rocket Mortgage’s long-time CMO Casey Hurbis recently left for Bet MGM. I imagine that leaves a little bit of a gap in terms of marketing at Rocket. What does marketing, leadership and branding look like for Rocket Mortgage and Rocket overall in 2025?

Krishna: Yeah, great question. Thank you for that. I want to start out by just giving Casey a little bit of a shout out, because he’s a great human. We actually play pickleball once a week. We are good friends, and we’re always going to have a close connection. I also want to thank Casey. Thanks to his legacy, we have a great foundation to build upon, including the Rocket Mortgage Classic, our Super Bowl integrations, brand partnerships, etc. These are all the great things that he’s created a foundation for.

We’ve also brought in a new CMO. We brought in Jonathan Mildenhall. He was a CMO at Airbnb and Coca -Cola. He is one of, if not the best marketing leader on the planet. One of the reasons that he’s here is to spearhead and lead a brand transformation for Rocket. We’ve talked about this with our investors, and I wish I could share more. But I can leave you with a bit of a sneak preview.

The rocket brand has significant potential to grow in terms of aided and unaided awareness, creating a holistic value proposition, and reaching deep into the attitudes, segments, and locality that is home ownership. We are about to restage our brand in a massive way. It’s going to start at the Super Bowl. You’ll see a refreshed value proposition. You’ll see a look and feel that resonates deeper with our clients. A lot of that is thanks to Jonathan and his leadership. The next chapter for Rocket, from a marketing perspective, is very exciting. We’re going to be out there in the biggest way we’ve ever been, and it’s going to start in January, extend into the Super Bowl, and then it will endure.

We are the Apple of homeownership, and you’re going to see our marketing strategy reflect that in a bold, consistent, and enduring way. I’ve seen some of the work, and it is exceptional. I’m very excited about it again. Big shout out to Jonathan for spearheading that transformation in the short time that he’s been here.

Sanchez: January’s just a couple weeks away. So, this is exciting stuff that’s happening pretty soon.

Krishna: It is. In fact, we’re all cylinders ahead. I’ve had the chance to look at some of the production work and some of the redesign. We are the proud new owners of Rocket.com. That is, again, a part of our go-to market strategy and more to come. We’re putting the finishing touches on our go-to market plan, and it’s going to be a big year for us. And I’m very proud of the team, very proud of the execution.

The Power House podcast brings the biggest names in housing to answer hard-hitting questions about industry trends, operational and growth strategy, and leadership. Join HousingWire president Diego Sanchez every Thursday morning for candid conversations with industry leaders to learn how they’re differentiating themselves from the competition. Hosted and produced by the HousingWire Content Studio.