Catching a break.

• Author: Davis, Lisa

Lenders looked like losers when former NFL tight end Casey Crawford got in the mortgage game. Then the clock worked in his favor.

In 2009, when the economy was still reeling from the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, Casey Crawford was trying to establish his fledgling mortgage bank by making pitches to real-estate companies. It so happened Hadi Atri, owner of Charlotte-based Re/Max Executive Realty, was looking for a lender who would devote more attention to the agents in his offices--one of the largest Re/Max franchises in the Carolinas. "We had no business calling on those guys," Crawford says.

Movement Mortgage LLC now has 10 lenders and assistants based in Atri's seven offices and captures about a fifth of the loans made to his agents' clients, who bought more than $950 million of property last year. Federal law bars lenders from paying real-estate agents for referrals, but Movement rents the space it occupies in Atri's offices, shares some of his marketing costs and helps train his agents. Being only steps away, Crawford's people get first crack at many homebuyers. "I think their business model is quite effective at the moment," says Roberto G. Quercia, director of the UNC Center for Community Capital in Chapel Hill, which studies mortgage finance. "They realize the key role that real-estate agents play in the whole thing."

Despite starting his business after the housing bubble had burst and as the economy slowed, timing is now on Crawford's side. Movement, which markets itself as the "No. 1 fastest growing mortgage bank," is riding high on the industry's recovery. Revenue totaled $155 million last year, up from only $5.4 million in 2009. Loan volume soared to $3.3 billion. It made Inc. magazine's list of the 500 fastest-growing U.S. private companies in 2012 and 2013, and its staff, now about 1,300, is expanding as declining demand for refinancing homes is forcing many lenders to retrench. Its partnerships with real-estate companies give Movement a presence in 314 offices in 38 states. About a quarter of loan volume is in North Carolina, where Crawford lives, works and once played professional football.

About 18 miles from downtown Charlotte and the pink granite tower of One Wells Fargo Center--occupied by the nation's largest mortgage lender--the former Carolina Panthers tight end strides past cubicles to his office in a suburban park. Wearing jeans and a baseball cap, he drops into a white upholstered chair that barely holds his 6-foot-6 frame. He talks animatedly, often punctuating his thoughts with a quick laugh. He opened what was then called New American Mortgage LLC in 2008 with Toby Harris, a former executive with National City Corp., an ailing Cleveland-based bank once among the 10 largest U.S. mortgage lenders. Even as they filed their paperwork the previous year, home prices were tumbling and defaults rising. As they put credit lines in place and rented space, they watched the financial markets freeze and the economy swoon. "I thought I had made the biggest mistake of my life," he admits.

In January 2008, Charlotte-based Bank of America Corp. announced it was buying foundering Countrywide...