Point of View: Opportunities Shift For Mortgage Execs.

Mr. Glass has served the mortgage banking industry since 1983. Before opening his own firm, specializing in nonprime mortgage sector executive search, he led the mortgage division of the nation's largest executive search firm.

Today's tighter mortgage market has created new and complex conditions for every company and its leaders.

Firms that have survived the downturn are focused on safety, soundness and execution. They are carefully testing and repositioning platforms for future capacity and efficiencies while seeking safe havens in GSE programs. Most were forced to significantly improvise their infrastructures. On the servicing side, platforms are challenged to address the onslaught of delinquency and loss risks in the face of skyrocketing costs.

Leadership in this environment requires dedicated, high-performance "athletes" who can adjust and engage in a more transparent, risk conscious and uncertain environment - one made even more uncertain as scarce liquidity sources are still thawing and a new landscape is forming.

Loan servicing platforms are squeezed by turmoil. Today's executives perform in this evolving landscape. They are faced with unprecedented change, different expectations, more data and new best practices. Success is a tall order in an industry that been accustomed to relatively high margins and predictable availability of credit on an asset whose value previously was "certain" to rise.

We have seen a deflation of the classic credit inflated asset, as described by Alex Pollock, resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and former president/CEO of the Federal Home Loan Bank of Chicago. In the aftermath, fingers were pointed in all directions. Legislators, especially, have been quick to blame lenders, mostly ignoring the impact of cyclical market forces. The structured finance model had some glitches, and the markets lacked transparency. Today, all are being repaired.

Going forward in each mortgage discipline, leaders are both savvy and selective, with eyes wide open to the realities of a ravaged landscape, one that is currently evolving from the ashes of this sector's greatest downturn. Some say the nonconforming market may never return. Those liberal underwriting practices that prevailed in the years leading to this recent downturn, weak labor markets, falling home values, overleveraged borrowers are driving record levels of defaults (up some 75%) and foreclosures.