As he tells it, the turnaround artist had a unique combination of experience, skills and determination that made him a perfect fit
., had second thoughts about using the Titanic as an analogy for the tangled combination of catastrophes that nearly sank the alternative mortgage lender in 2017, just before he was hired to rescue it. But Bissada raised the subject himself—twice—the first time we talked.
As they had years before, short sellers—who profit from share-price declines—ganged up on Home, arguingwere overheated and the company’s stock overvalued. As the crisis of confidence escalated in 2017, Home was also suffering from a classic run on the bank—bleeding cash as depositors fled Home Trust, which the subsidiary company used to gather money to fund mortgages—and some Canadian banks and other lenders discouraged their reps from selling Home GICs.
And at first, things went fabulously well. Bissada stopped the bleeding, modernized Home’s outmoded systems and reinvigorated its 700-plus employees. By late 2019, the share price had hit $30, a target he’d been hoping to reach within five years. But then came new turbulence—plenty of it.
With the various crises at Home Capital escalating in early 2017, Bissada—along with just about every other mortgage-industry vet—could hardly believe the stories pouring out in the media. His overarching thought: This is not right. When a corporate recruiter called Bissada about the CEO job, in many ways, he felt an obligation to preserve an important company in trouble. And his life and career had certainly prepared him for that challenge.
But the plotline of the hardworking new Canadian kid derailed during university. Good at math, he studied commerce at the University of Toronto. “I didn’t do drugs, but I was like, Woohoo, let’s party,” Bissada recalls. After two years, humbled, he took a year off and went to work selling cameras at a Blacks store. “It was a great experience. I learned so much about selling,” he says. In 1981, Bissada plugged back into studious mode.
Canada Trust CEO Ed Clark took note of the young exec, and in 1998 he lured Bissada away to run the bank’s mortgage division. Six months later, TD Bank announced it was buying Canada Trust and put Bissada in charge of the entire single-family mortgage business. “We had the largest market share, and I was running it,” says Bissada. “And I loved it, loved it, loved it.”
As Lamoureux discovered, Home had been too deferential to its founder, but its financials weren’t in bad shape. Buffett’s investment in June helped, calming markets and pushing Home’s share price back up to around $15. But DiRisio says the atmosphere inside Home was excited rather than panicked. He doesn’t think the business cliché “Never let a good crisis go to waste” applied, but pressure often clarifies things, and the company was a promising candidate for an overhaul. There was a good mix of long-term and and new employees, and all were committed to the revamp. Bissada himself understood the technology, and the company was just the right size—at 875 employees, not too big, not too small.
Home’s revenue and profit have been consistent over the past couple of years, but the mortgage market has shifted beneath Bissada’s feet. After climbing back past $30 in 2019, Home’s share price plunged along with the rest of the market as COVID took hold, climbed back to more than $44 in late 2021, then began a long and painful decline back below $30.
We both arrived on bicycles—his snazzier than mine. Early in the pandemic, he’d bought himself a $5,000 e-bike in yellow rather than the red one he wanted, because new bikes were hard to get. “It’s called a pedal-assist,” he told me, “and it’s definitely exercise.” It’s also a lot faster than the unpowered kind .
But time was not on Home’s side. The Bank of Canada kept raising interest rates—from 0.25% at the beginning of 2022 to 2.5% by the summer, and all the way up to 4.25% in December. House prices and sales volumes kept declining, particularly in Toronto and Vancouver. And Home’s stock price kept sliding, too—in the summer it slipped below $30, even after Home tried to push up the price with a small buyback offer in August, which elicited an unenthusiastic response.
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