Page 22 - BusinessWest August 18, 2025

WOMEN IN BUSINESS >>
Lessons
Learned
at Home
Lindsay LaBonte Wants to Help Clients —
and the Community — Thrive
BY JOSEPH BEDNAR
[email protected]
ing up, watching her father, who owned an
Lindsay LaBonte recalls how she felt grow-
independent mortgage broker company, help
people get into homes.
“He always came home from work so sat-
isfied with being able to help people reach the Ameri-
can dream and own a house,” she said, adding that
she decided early on that she wanted to do the same.
“I knew I had to go to school and get that done, but I
really wanted to work. So when I was 16, I started as
an intern with him, and the rest is history. I worked my
way up, got licensed as a loan officer, happened to be
good at it — and I enjoy it.”
These days, LaBonte enjoys that work as branch
manager of the Applied Mortgage team at the
Northampton branch of HMA Mortgage, the most
recent national company Applied Mortgage has been
affiliated with.
“We’ve had different parent companies. In the mort-
gage world, it’s a franchise model, where branches
often run as a team name and feed up to a larger par-
ent company,” she explained. “So we’ve had different
parent companies over the decades, but always the
same Northampton-based Applied Mortgage team.”
Her father entered the business in 1987, and
LaBonte’s success over the past two decades — she’s
one of the top loan originators in Western Mass. — has
turned this family success story into a multi-genera-
tional one.
“A lot of family businesses don’t work out, but I’m
really fortunate — my dad is an awesome dad, an awe-
some mentor, an awesome boss at the time. I ended
up being his boss. Now he’s retired, so it’s been a good
run.”
That run continues with LaBonte and her team
serving a variety of clients in Western Mass.; the busi-
ness is licensed in more than 30 states, but about 99%
of its business is centered in Hampshire, Franklin, and
Hampden counties.
The focus is residential mortgages, she explained
— purchases, refinances, and renovations of primary
“For people who are
buying a home, no
one’s process is the
same as the next person
because everybody’s
got different goals,
different financials. We
take those goals and
financials and put them
together, figure out the
mortgage that’s going
to work, and get them
into that home.”
22 AUGUST 18, 2025
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