Leading, Serving, Caring: Sheena, AHFC Mortgage Servicing Officer

Helping Alaskans achieve homeownership is at the heart of Alaska Housing Finance Corporation’s mission. From first time homebuyers to veterans, to Alaskans with non-traditional home constructions, AHFC provides a range of mortgage options designed to open doors to homeownership for more Alaskans.

Central to this work is Alaska Housing’s mortgage servicing team who develop relationships with loan servicers, borrowers, and handle the suite of administrative work on mortgages after they have been funded.

Since 2021, Sheena has been the Servicing Officer at Alaska Housing’s mortgage department, bringing fresh, innovative ideas into the department and focusing on building an independent, competent and cohesive team.

A Slice of Servicing

Sheena was only 21 when she began working in mortgage servicing. She was fresh off of her first full-time job -- where she started slinging pizzas and ended as the assistant manager – when she joined a bank’s national servicing department.

She remembers long days centered around customer service. “It was hard,” she recalls but it was the launching point of a career in servicing across a range of Alaskan banks.

By the time she applied to Alaska Housing she had more than a decade of experience but she still remembers her nerves from that first day at her new job: “It was scary in the beginning, but I was excited and ready for the new journey.”

It was a shift, moving from direct servicing of loans with her team to overseeing a team consisting of 12 mortgage loan servicers. She says she considers her previous roles as a strength: “I was able to use all of my experience from the past to make the changes that I wanted to make.”

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“Our mission really is to keep people in their home.” - Sheena, Servicing Officer, Alaska Housing

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“Everything Until the Loan is Done”

Sheena’s top priority as Servicing Officer is overseeing her team of seven, who are in charge of the servicing side of AHFC mortgages.

The Servicing team focuses on loan servicers and borrowers after a loan is purchased by Alaska Housing. “We handle everything until the loan is paid off,” she explains.

Servicing includes routine administrative work and responding to changes in a borrower’s life circumstances. Sheena and her team regularly provide guidance to AHFC’s servicing partners, capturing and accepting loan payments, name changes, changing a plat to subdivide land, assisting servicers working with borrowers who are struggling to make payments, and selling collateral after a foreclosure.

A ‘Think Outside the Box’ Team

As an AHFC leader, Sheena encourages her team to strive toward improvement. She emphasizes thinking outside of the box and asking questions: “Why do we do it?” and “How can we do better?”

More than six years after joining Alaska Housing, Sheena sees how her team has grown in trust and confidence. "I'm proud all the time,” Sheena says, “I feel like with the training and the changes that I've made since I started my team, they're more confident in the work that they do.”

As a servicer and a leader, Sheena has thrived at Alaska Housing and says she sees this as her forever-job. Behind the trainings, innovations and constant striving to improve is a simple, shared motivation to see borrowers succeed.

“We care about what happens to our borrowers. We care about how they're being treated. We just care what happens in the end.”