counselor

real estate agent

office administrator

office manager

business services representative

Neighborhood Assistance Corp. of America

I started working for NACA shortly after graduating college.  I have worked few sales jobs prior, but nothing stable as in 2009 job market was a mess.  Needless to say I was short in the experience department.  NACA offered me employment in their Washington, DC office as a mortgage counselor.  What attracted me to NACA was their incredible mortgage product and fact that ALL services they provide are free to their members.  It was a brand new industry for me, but with training and excellent local level support I managed to become a productive consultant assisting 45 new families purchasing their homes my first year.  In addition to regular job duties, with NACA I was offered opportunities in advocacy and community outreach as well.  About 15 months into my employment with NACA, I was approached by upper management and offered an opportunity to serve as a regional operations director.  I eagerly accepted and was assigned 7 offices on the east coast; that number by year 2 increased to 15.  During my years as a regional operations director, I had an opportunity to travel the country, support NACA events that helped thousands of homeowners, and work alongside our CEO who is one of the best community advocates I have come across.  After serving my time as regional operations director, I settled into an office manager’s role and have since then been managing NACA’s local DC office.  

A lot is expected of you as a NACA employee on every level and a great deal of responsibility placed on you as you assist NACA members in their quest for either home ownership or assistance with their current mortgage.  The experience and opportunities I was given to grow professionally and personally with NACA are immeasurable; not to mention the satisfaction of assisting NACA members in becoming homeowners.  

As I continue working for NACA in my current role, I am always challenged to do better.  I truly enjoy working for NACA and growing our footprint in the DMV area.  It has been quite an experience and I am looking forward to future challenges.

What is the best part of working at the company?
The members you work with. That is the good part of the job

What is the most stressful part about working at the company?
Management micromanagement and are highly disrespectful. You are clearly a number to them. They couldn’t care less about your needs and will make you work in dangerous environments. They put cameras behind your work space and as my manager advised me “I will zoom in on your computer screen to see what you are doing” she also admitted if you have your phone out I will zoom in on your phone screen also to see what you are doing. They are so confusing about what you are supposed to do, the CEO will tell you what he wants done and the management under him will do what they want. When you sit in a meeting as an adult and have a manager tell everyone to “Fix your faces” on a zoom call and yells at you for no reason that should tell you enough about this company. 

What is the work environment and culture like at the company?
Dealing with your office staff is great because for the most part all the leaders are in another state. But the problem is the leadership tends to destroy the good office environment by watching you on the camera and asking you why you are talking to other coworkers during the work day. And will time how long you spoke to them but have no context or clue what is going on and they do not care. Culture for me for the company as a whole gets a negative number. 

What is a typical day like for you at the company?
Typical day you come in to the office.  You open the building for members. And you go into a morning zoom meeting and get yelled at about horrible everything is and how bad the team is doing and then you are released to your work day with the bad attitude the leaders created. And then as you work you get yelled at more in a Chat about stuff you are doing wrong even though you are doing your job according to how they trained you to do it. But the rules constantly change so you never know what exactly you are supposed to do.

I had been a loan officer for years and came to NACA to support the mission. The product seems like a great program but execution really lacks at NACA.  Training was not the best, as they often gave false information about the program, and never gave us the tools to successfully do our job. They only teach you how to do a counseling session, not other essential daily tasks like submitting offers, submitting a file for qualification, bank app etc. Then when I asked others for help it seemed like I was bothering them. Naca uses a program from 2004, riddled with typos, bugs and often times does not work, but that was not the worst part. The way management and underwriting talks to you is so condescending, and when asking them to explain how they got to their decisions on files, they would often make you feel dumb for asking, even though you know the member qualified. The pay is 15/hr + commission but they make you jump through a million hoops to earn commission. They load up your calendar with appointments for members who do not even fill out the basic steps for an appointment, when that time could be spent on others who did the work. They also make you work events, that only exist to cater to the CEO ego, and you can not work on any of your files during those 3-5 days of 12+ hour shifts. This company was by far the worst company I worked for, and it had nothing to do with work life balance, or the hours. It was due to coming to work every day and being talked to terribly, not by the members but the staff! 

There was never a dull moment working for this company.  If you are looking for a pay check you will fit in perfectly.  If you genuinely care about helping people you will not last.  They don't take training seriously at all but they will expect for you to counsel members knowing you are not providing accurate information to members as promised.  The fee the company collect for counseling sessions become far more important than doing what they say they do.  The underwriting policies change whenever the director feels like it.  It's so bad upper management can't underwrite a file, so forget about requesting their help to fight for a member.  When it comes to underwriting files an entry level underwriter has more authority than a Regional Manager.  They just walk around with titles and not one iota of power to get things done making your job that much tougher.   Finally the company needs to figure out how to embrace diversity.  It's important to learn from one another, when the majority of your workforce is predominantly made up of one or two groups of people you get exactly what they have, a bunch of closed minded, in the box thinkers who have no desire to be challenged in any area of their lives.  It is definitely a unique organization.  Probably a little too unique for my taste and no I am not going to write a favorable review at your request I am going to give my honest opinion based on my personal experience.

Bruce still runs this place like it's the 90s. The mission of this company is great and honest. However, it doesn't do enough to keep up with today's demanding market. The CEO boasts about the advocacy this company supposedly does, but that hasn't happened lately. Not at all in the two years I worked there. The counselors are given expectations to qualify as many people as possible, whether they can practically afford a house or not. The infrastructure of the company is a nightmare. The operations department runs like a chicken with its head cut off. We are required to work on software that is never fixed. They constantly drop updates on the software that hasn't been tested making it more complicated than it has to be. There is no upward mobility in this business. The management won't listen to you. You can't rely on anyone to get anything done, so half of your job is doing everyone else's job as well. They are all about nose to the grindstone here. They will make you work 45-50 hours a week and also you lose several weekends for company events and every other Saturday regardless. Burnout is ridiculous. All they expect from you is to "Qualify" as many people as you can. And a lot of people qualified can't actually afford anything they're qualified for, so it gets really depressing after a while. 

As an HC, my day was filled with scheduled appointments to counsel members through NACA's homeownership approval process.  My first week out of training I was assigned 3 appointments per day & up to four per day by my second week.  This was a challenge as each appointment (per NACA's P&P's manual) could take from 1.5 to 2 hours.  Of course, being new at the entire process, my initial calls were apprx. 3+ hours subsequently leaving very minimal time to complete all additional task & requirements.
I learned a great deal in a very short amount of time.  NACA's mission is amazing & the education that myself as an employee as well as the members receive regarding finance is life changing, bar none. 
I'm not able to give an accurate depiction of management as well as my co-workers as so much of the NACA process was in transition during my time there.  However, there are some wonderful people in the HC department.
The hardest part of the job were the unrealistic expectations and extremely poor processes for both the staff as well as the members NACA was founded to assist.
The most enjoyable part of the job were learning and attempting to execute the mission of providing non predatory mortgage products with minimal out of pocket cost (comparatively) to low to moderate income families with less than perfect credit.  Doing this will help families, who could not do so otherwise, build generation wealth & stabilize neighborhoods.

Its a great place to learn the ropes of the mortgage field (and leave in a yr or less) as its an elementary version of the forward mortgage field. The retention rate is below 25% within the first year for a reason.. Its impossible to get ahead of the curve since you are a loan PROCESSOR and a MLO second. You spend most of your days talking to people, processing paperwork (as a processor) and fighting silly underwriting criteria.. Underwriting works against you and every turn for a simple loan qualification. By the way, it takes 1 week just for UW to look at a file, if they see something they dont like, add another week to hear back. Its the worst UW turn around time Ive experienced. 

The average loans closed for the Houston office is 2- MAYBE 3 closed loans a month for the BEST MLO (on avg. since some months will be 0 closed loans), don't be lied to. You wont make over $3-4k per month (only due to working 50-60+ hrs per week and Saturdays) unless something changes. Good luck.

The good of this company does not outweigh the bad, you make the base pay of $15/hr at least for the first 6 months, then it get reduced to $12. It takes forever to close loans for you to actually get any other money. The turnover rate is very high and the management is the major reason for it. You are expected to do the job as loan processor, counselor , and loan officer. you have to meet session quotas and there is no time in between to process documents forcing you to work hours of overtime in order to get anything accomplished. They claim you have the "opportunity" to make a lot of money , but for most people that just insist the case. The CEO and the rest of management are rude and establish a company culture that is different from everyone else. If you can get past the bad eggs, and be patient until you actually start closing loans, it could be a good place to work for. However, I have not seen that

I worked as a Housing Counselor at NACA. While I worked there, my supervisor was having health issues, and as a result, I was working without much supervision much of a time. I was expected to work very long hours and received only a salary, so I was not compensated for the extra hours I worked on a daily basis. Make sure when you accept a position at NACA that you will only be working for a set number of hours (eight hours a day), and that if you are expected to work extended hours, you will receive compensation for those hours. I really respect the NACA mission to help provide affordable mortgages to low and middle income families, and I found it very fulfilling to be able to help people afford homes who might otherwise not be able to do so.

A typical day of work was supervising my crew and making sure that every member or client was taken care off. There was lots of  follow up and making sure that our members cases were reviewed by the banks and or financial institutions so that our clients could be kept in their homes. I learned that being consistent always works.  Management was fast  and always improvising to situations since no one had a clue on how to react to the abrupt  changes that our economy was going through. The work culture was energetic and together. Everyone was on board to the next step in order to get things done.  The hardest part of the job were the hours, specially when we travelled around the USA to get help to those home owners that needed the help.  the most enjoyable part of the job was being able to help all this people in need.

Top Job Titles	Average Salary
Counselor 45 salaries reported	$81,620 per year
Real estate agent 47 salaries reported	$80,000 per year
Office administrator 44 salaries reported	$22.56 per hour
Office manager 13 salaries reported	$80,000 per year
Business services representative 10 salaries reported	$20.00 per hour

Working at Neighborhood Assistance Corp. of America: Company Overview and Reviews

Neighborhood Assistance Corp. of America

Neighborhood Assistance Corp. of America Ratings

Popular jobs at Neighborhood Assistance Corp. of America

Salary Satisfaction

Job Seeker Tools

Employer Tools

Browse

Stay Connected