Carey Ann Cyr originally moved to Nashville to pursue her passion — music. But the Northeast transplant, a graduate of the University of New Hampshire’s business school, never forgot her education.
Pivoting into mortgages, she has leveraged her entrepreneurial skills to build a successful 13-year career in the industry. Since the start of 2016, she has closed more than $420 million in mortgages, including a 2018 in which she closed 667 loans — good for 16th most in the country — for $147.4 million in volume, according to Scotsman Guide’s Top Originators rankings. She placed third on the publication’s Top FHA Volume list in 2018 with $47.8 million in closed loans.
One step leads to two, leads to four, leads to eight.
Needless to say, despite the career change, she’s still hitting all the right notes.
Based in the Nashville suburb of Franklin, Cyr has persevered to build CMG Financial, which she opened with a business partner, into an area powerhouse.
Cyr said her favorite part of the job is making a positive impact and helping families achieve their homeownership dream by finding the programs that not only meet, but maximize their financial goals. This helps her fulfill her own goal of finding a way to make a difference in someone’s life every day. She counts herself fortunate to be in a business in which she can make that happen.
“There are so many deserving families,” Cyr said, noting that CMG created a program that gives back to the community by awarding $2,500 to two families each month. A culture of giving back, she said, is important within the CMG team and feeds directly into the enterprise’s success.
A key to her own long-term success, she said, has been to maintain healthy, synergistic relationships with real estate agents, especially as the mortgage lending landscape continues to evolve. Cyr said that real estate agents are her best referral partners and she works to empower them at every opportunity.
Because of this, Cyr spearheaded a “Mortgage 101” initiative that offers classes to real estate agents. The classes, which run for less than an hour, review a variety of potential issues that could cause the financing process to go awry and loans to be denied. Cyr, a firm believer in the value of ongoing education, also created an internal training program for her sales team to build a foundation of accountability and assist in their career growth.
She also helped start The Real Estate Blaze, a Nashville-based monthly forum and networking event that is focused on keeping the area’s real estate community in tune. At the start of 2019, Cyr launched a radio show and podcast, “The Talk of Music City Real Estate,” with a local real estate agent in which they share personal nuggets of wisdom with listeners.
On top of her professional life, she balances being a devoted wife and mother, with her daughter serving as a big motivator.
“One step leads to two, leads to four, leads to eight,” she shared in a recent podcast. “[It] leads you out the door, leads you walking around the block. It leads you to really remind yourself of why you started what you started, and makes you look at your little one. They deserve that we give them everything that we can.”
She keeps herself busy, she said, because in mortgages — just as in music — “you are the product,” and the business is 80% marketing.
“When I started to market myself, I found success,” Cyr said.
