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Almost overnight, Craig Corn went from being one of top executives for MetLife’s $70 billion mortgage business to out of a job.

He wasn’t the only one. The large corporation had in 2012 just gotten out of the banking sector and sold its mortgage portfolio to JPMorganChase Bank.

“It was obviously disappointing that, once they made a strategic decision, we were no longer required,” Corn said. “But it gave us the opportunity to ask ourselves something that executives should on a regular basis — what do we really want to do and how do we want to do it?”

Corn and other former MetLife Bank executives decided to start their own business in the area they had built up at MetLife, reverse mortgages. It’s a form of loan that allows senior citizens to tap into the equity of their home for cash payments, to be repaid when the borrower dies or moves away.

Their business, Bloomfield-based Reverse Mortgage Funding, within just four years has become the leading originator of these types of loans in the country.

“It has been very satisfying to have come out of an unfortunate situation to emerge as a leading player in this space — all at the hands of some executives who wanted to build the company the way we wanted to,” Corn said.

The company grew from almost no employees in 2012 to just under 400 today, with about a quarter of those employees being based in New Jersey.

“When you set out to do something from scratch with a team of industry experts, that’s seen as very exciting, and it makes for a recruiting environment that is robust,” Corn said. “People want to come back and work for you.”

And doing reverse mortgages right takes a good team, Corn said.

They’re dealing with customers who are 62 years of age and older — perhaps widows who weren’t involved in the family’s finances for many years or people who scared by the challenges of retirement.

But despite having people on board with decades of experience in the space, the firm itself has the benefit of not having baggage from the financial crisis.

“It means that we could point all our attention to the future, as opposed to allocating our focus to what happened in the past and fixing those issues,” Corn said. “That’s a significant juxtaposition to some competitors in our space. It’s an advantage.”

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