As a special addition to our member promotion services, the Chamber is now offering a free Featured Member Profile, which will be printed in the Chamber View and posted on the website for a month, then moved into a prominently-placed online archive for the remainder of the year.  To win this free publicity, just drop your business card into the Featured Member Fishbowl at each monthly Networking Mixer and be present for the drawing.  For more information, call the Chamber, 410-719-9609.

Featured Member

August 2009

Adrian Citroni, Mortgage Broker –
Seeing Beyond the Dollar Limitations

In a dicey real estate market of wary lenders and skittish consumers, Adrian Citroni is positioning himself on a broad foundation of experience and credentials, infused with three passionately-held values: service, community spirit and innovation.

They’re implicit in the website content for his private enterprise, New Deal Funding (www.newdealfunding.com). And they were the motivation for his latest career move: partnering with Atlantic Financial Group, Inc. - Mortgage Bankers (www.atlanticfinancialinc.com) to offer a wider range of mortgage products to his clients.

A Dundalk native, Mr. Citroni has spent the bulk of his adult life in Catonsville, attending college at UMBC and serving as a houseparent at the General German Orphan Home (now the Children’s Home), teaching at Cardinal Gibbons, and selling automobiles at a number of 40-West dealerships before launching his finance career in 1993. He founded New Deal Funding in 1999.

Since then, Mr. Citroni, a Catonsville Chamber member since 2003, has become a Member of the Maryland Association of Mortgage Brokers and the National Association of Mortgage Brokers, and now holds the earned national designation of Certified Residential Mortgage Specialist.

In these days of tough credit standards, it’s a position fraught with complexity. “A lot of people used to do refinancing when they were in credit card trouble,” he says. “You could search for the best rate and come up with two or three choices for the customer. Today, it’s much more difficult to qualify. You wind up with something that looks like a spreadsheet of rates, based on many different factors.“

That increased complexity shows up throughout the mortgage process. Insured FHA loans now make up half the business he sees with Atlantic Financial, requiring new policies and procedures. Where in the early days of his career, Mr. Citroni could set a closing date three weeks in advance and confidently expect to meet the deadline, such certainty would be impossible now. New legislation requires, for example, that essential services such as appraisals must be arranged with third-party providers.

Regardless of the mandated changes in operating procedure, however, Mr. Citroni stands firm in his dedication to serving the customer: “The big thing is helping people to achieve their dreams, whether that dream is a house, a pool, a college education for their child or cash for a business venture.” As a correspondent lender, unaffiliated with any one investor, he can provide better deals with minimal expense or aggravation. “My job is to serve the customers’ best interest, not the banks’,” he says.

In addition to the wide range of mortgage services that Atlantic Financial enables him to provide, Adrian has transitioned New Deal Funding into a new direction of customer service: specifically, “other than cash or credit transactions.” These transactions are “value for value exchanges”-- the value received equaling the value given.

“Money is an easy medium of exchange – unless there’s no money or credit available,” Mr. Citroni says. So New Deal Funding is developing ways to offer its customers – mostly businesses - the option of trading goods and services for goods and services (not involving cash itself). This enables the deal to transcend financial limitations and fulfill the customer’s goals in new and creative ways.

To support this initiative, Mr. Citroni is affiliated with three barter networks, and has developed a lifelong network of connections whose roles flow between service providers, clients, customers and friends to facilitate reciprocal trade arrangements. He calls this personal network his “Adrian Team, a network of business relationships and strategic alliances” that has grown naturally out of his extensive word-of-mouth client/customer base.

“I do most of my business with people who do business with me, and most customers become my friends,” he says. “I treat my customers like gold, and I don’t throw anyone away.”

 Past Featured Members