Sukesh Shekar is the Founder and CEO of Altgage, a mortgage company he built in Boston after a $1 million home purchase of his own turned into an education in everything wrong with the mortgage process.
Before mortgage, Sukesh was a junior partner at McKinsey & Company — a Ph.D. and Notre Dame alum who assumed a home purchase would be straightforward given his own financial background. Watching how opaque and frustrating it was, even for a high-income household with a physician wife, is what pulled him fully into the industry roughly three to four years ago.
Altgage's approach leans on details most brokers skip: watching the 10-year treasury for the right moment to lock a rate, waiving escrow where it genuinely helps a borrower, and structuring loans around how a client's income actually qualifies — all sped up by AI tools Sukesh uses to learn faster and analyze deals. His take on where the industry is headed: as AI takes over more of the mortgage process, the brokers who stay curious and keep the human guidance sharp are the ones borrowers will still need.
🔑 What You'll Learn:
- Why Sukesh believes human guidance becomes more valuable, not less, as AI advances
- How watching the 10-year treasury can help time a rate lock
- Why "insanely curious" is his #1 trait for new loan originators
- What his own home-buying experience taught him about fixing the mortgage process
Connect with Sukesh Shekar: https://www.altgage.com/ | https://www.linkedin.com/in/sukesh-shekar/
Subscribe to Chasing Excellence for more conversations with the mortgage industry's top producers and broker-owners.
