California

Tustin

New American Funding has hired Charles R. Lowery Jr. as director of legislative policy and external affairs.

Lowery, who will be based in Washington, brings more than 20 years of mortgage, housing and advocacy experience to the position.

Previously, he served three years as the director of state regulatory relations for Ocwen Financial Corp. Before that, he spent five years with the NAACP, including as interim senior director of the National Economic Department and director of Fair Lending and Inclusion.

District of Columbia

Washington

MISMO has selected Seth Appleton as its new president, effective Dec. 1.

He currently serves as the assistant secretary, policy development and research, for the Department of Housing and Urban Development and as the principal executive vice president of Ginnie Mae.

Appleton joined HUD in 2017 and added his Ginnie Mae position in 2019.

Iowa

Des Moines

LenderClose has hired Trinh Le-Coulter in the newly created role of director of operations.

She brings more than five years of experience in shared services operations and previously served with Businessolver, a provider of employee benefits administration technology.

Along with the addition of Le-Coulter, the firm is promoting Melanie Wacha to lead operations specialist and hiring Cory Ellerd as an operations specialist.

New York

New York

Verus Commercial Real Estate Finance said that Ken Wood,Stratos Athanassiades and Ken Gaitan and joined the company as managing directors.

Prior to Verus, Wood was VP of originations for Money 360 and has served in executive management and leadership roles for MC-Five Mile Capital, Patriot National Bank, Hometown Commercial Capital and Impac.

Athanassiades previously served as the Midwest regional director for Money360 and prior to that was a commercial mortgage portfolio manager at Alliant Credit Union.

Gaitan was previously a regional director for Money 360 and has served in production and leadership positions with national mortgage banking firms (CBRE and HFF) and CRE lenders (Merrill Lynch, JPMorgan and Bank of America).

Texas

Irving

BSI Financial Services has hired Brandon McGee as vice president of mortgage servicing rights transaction manager.

A 15-year veteran of the mortgage industry, McGee comes to BSI from Fannie Mae, where he has worked for the past 11 years, most recently as a relationship manager.

He also held various positions in JPMorgan Chase’s mortgage division and at H&R Block Mortgage.