Michele Evans
Michele Evans has been in the multifamily finance business for over 30 years and has served in different roles at Fannie Mae since 1992. In August, she took over as head of multifamily and executive vice president.
Michele Evans, head of multifamily and executive vice president, Fannie Mae
For much of her time at Fannie Mae, she had been on the production side, working closely with the Delegated Underwriting and Servicing (DUS) lenders. She also was on the team that built and managed the small loan lending platform for multifamily.
But a decade ago, just after Fannie Mae went into conservatorship, she was promoted to senior vice president and chief operating officer of Fannie Mae Multifamily, which allowed her to get an enterprise view of the organization.
“It gave me an opportunity to think about the whole experience behind the scenes and take that transactional rigor you put into a deal and decide what I wanted to get done,” she says. “To me that was really pivotal because it further advanced my background beyond just doing deals, and it served me well.”
One of her biggest accomplishments during that time, she says, was engineering Fannie Mae’s multifamily digital transformation.
“We have been on an eight-year journey to transform the technology used when a loan is first underwritten to when it gets paid off. At the core, we have retooled our infrastructure with an eye toward improving how to do business more efficiently and quickly, and how to use data in ways to ensure solid credit decisions are made in the quickest possible way.”
This investment paid off over the past year during the COVID-19 pandemic. “If we hadn’t done what we did, it would have been difficult to do $76 billion in business last year.”
After the record-breaking year, Evans says Fannie Mae Multifamily will be focused on its mission in 2021. It has a $70 billion cap, with at least 50% of the business being mission-driven affordable housing, defined as affordable for residents at or below 80% of the area median income. She says priorities include providing liquidity in a safe, stable, and affordable way; keeping the DUS platform healthy; continuing the digital transformation; serving renters; having the right staff for the future; and advancing diversity and inclusion externally and internally.
“I love the tangible nature of real estate, and I lean in pretty heavily to the mission side. I come to work every day realizing that I’m not only doing my job, I’m helping support much needed housing for working families.”
