CMG's Chris Bedard and Randy Forcier
- Brick + Tides
- Feb 4
- 15 min read
The CMG Home Loans office on Beach Street is quiet in the way a busy place gets when it’s between waves.
A couple chairs are pushed in like someone tried to be tidy before the next appointment. A conference room sits ready—four walls, a table, a few pens that don’t belong to anyone in particular. Downstairs, there’s coffee and movement at Social House Kitchen, the kind of place where you can walk in for a pastry and accidentally run into three people you know.
Up here, though, the work is mostly invisible until it isn’t.
On a winter morning in Saco, Randy Forcier starts talking the way locals do when they’re explaining themselves and not selling anything: where they’re from, who their people are, what street they grew up on, what they still call certain buildings even after the signs change.
“I was born in Biddeford, raised in Biddeford,” he says. “We’re a French-Canadian family, third generation in Biddeford.”
It’s the kind of sentence that lands softly, but it carries weight. In Southern Maine, “from here” doesn’t just mean a birthplace. It means you’ve been seen. It means your last name has been said by someone who isn’t you.
Randy is a Biddeford guy in the way that includes sports, family, and the habit of showing up. He’s the president of Biddeford Little League Softball. He spent six years on the Biddeford School Committee. He’s the person who starts something like a networking chapter and then, eleven years later, it’s still meeting every Wednesday morning at Run of the Mill at 8:15.
If you only knew that part, you’d assume the path was straight.
It wasn’t.
The part that changed the map
Randy graduated from Biddeford High School in 2000, went to St. Anselm College in Manchester, New Hampshire, and studied financial economics. In the spring of his senior year—March 2004—he was almost done. He was in that stretch where the next part of life is already taking shape, where interviews and possibilities start calling you by name.
Then the car accident happened.
“I got into a pretty serious car accident,” he says, and then he repeats it, as if the first version doesn’t quite cover the scope. “Like a very, very serious car accident.”
He came home. He was in a wheelchair. He was in the hospital. He was out for a long time. The plans he’d been quietly building—California, Florida, New York—got replaced by rehab schedules and the logistics of simply getting through the day.
He still graduated on time. That part matters to him.
“My dad would drive me back and forth from Biddeford to school,” he says. “My friends would push me around in a wheelchair. My professors would come up and tutor me.”
After graduation, he went straight into rehab. He missed job interviews. He missed job opportunities. He stayed.
“I think ultimately that's what led to me being in Southern Maine,” he says. “Because otherwise I was ready to take off.”
There are moments in a life where the future narrows without asking permission. You can feel it in the way Randy talks about that spring: he doesn’t linger there, but he doesn’t step around it either. It’s just part of the foundation now.
He chose a job path that fit the realities of recovery. Financial services. Licensing exams he could study for while he rebuilt himself. “Rehab, study, rehab, study,” he says. He got licensed, worked in the industry for four or five years, and figured out, with time, that it wasn’t where he wanted to stay.
He wasn’t chasing a title. He was learning where he belonged.
Two sides of a closing table
Before mortgages, Randy did title work—closings, paperwork, the end of the transaction where everyone is tired and trying to be polite.
He tells a story he’s clearly told before, because it still makes him smile.
He remembers being at a closing in Kennebunkport, watching commission checks slide across the table to loan officers and Realtors, and realizing there was a side of the transaction he hadn’t tried yet.
“I remember just doing a closing… and handing some big commission checks over,” he says. “And I was like, I probably should try to get on that side of the table.”
That’s how people talk when they’re being honest about money. No speeches. Just a moment that clicked.
The other detail he drops almost casually is the one that matters more than the check: the work is people. Not spreadsheets.
“People are always like, you do mortgages, so you must be really good with numbers,” Randy says. “Computers do the numbers for us. What we do is we talk to people.”
A mortgage loan officer isn’t behind the scenes. Not if they’re doing it the way Randy and Chris Bedard do it. They’re on the phone when a buyer is panicking. They’re explaining the same thing three different ways because it’s the first time someone has ever tried to buy a house. They’re reading between the lines when a file is “fine” but the timeline is about to break.
They’re also the ones who don’t get paid until the end. No closing, no paycheck. That does something to a person over twenty years. It either makes you resentful or it makes you relentless. Most clients never see that part; they just feel it.
“Beds is the guy that got me into this business.”
Randy calls Chris “Beds,” the way men do when they’ve known each other long enough to skip formality without thinking about it.
In the office, Chris is the one waiting his turn, listening, tossing in a comment now and then. There’s an easy rhythm between them—familiar, competitive in a friendly way, and protective in the way good partners are. They do the same job for different people, but they’re not trying to outshine each other.
They’re trying to keep each other sharp.
Randy says it plainly: “Chris is… the guy that got me into this business.”
Chris saw Randy again when Randy was learning how to walk after the accident.
“I had heard his story because it’s Biddeford,” Chris says.
Later, they became direct neighbors. Next-door neighbors. The kind where you can’t avoid each other even if you try. And over time, the professional paths overlapped in a way that felt almost inevitable: Randy tried financial advising and called on Chris for business. Randy did title work and took Chris’ orders. Then one day it tipped into mortgages.
Seventeen or eighteen years later, they’re sitting in an office in Saco, still doing it.
The work that doesn’t look like work
Randy’s version of networking is not flashy. It’s consistent.
In 2015, he started a BNI chapter that still meets weekly at Run of the Mill in Saco. Twenty-five people in the group now, he says, but “there’s probably been 200 people in that group that have kind of come and gone.”
That number lands because it explains the scale of his relationships. It’s not just who he knows. It’s who he’s stayed in touch with. It’s who he can call when a buyer needs an electrician, a plumber, an insurance agent, a contractor who actually shows up.
He lists the organizations the way someone lists responsibilities: Rotary for about ten years. Chamber of Commerce. Then kids arrived, and time got rationed.
“As I had kids and had to pick and choose where I dedicated my time, that kind of got back-burnered,” he says.
He didn’t stop serving. He shifted it. School committee for six years. President of Biddeford Little League Softball. Three daughters—eight, eleven, and thirteen—and the everyday sprint of practices, games, and being present.
“Life is crazy with them,” he says.
He has been married to his wife, Tara, for nineteen years. Their twentieth anniversary is this August. They’ve lived in Biddeford for the past twenty years, which is a sentence that sounds simple until you remember the accident, the plans that almost sent him away, and the fact that he came back to the same place and built a life that’s layered now.
There’s a creative thread in Randy too. He hosts a podcast—a hobby, he calls it—that has turned into a kind of informal oral history of the area. He’s interviewed local politicians, people he grew up with, people who impacted him, and people he didn’t know until he invited them into the conversation. He did “110 straight weeks of interviews” at one point before changing the cadence.
It’s the same tone he uses about starting BNI: this is what it takes to build something that lasts.
When a deal looks bleak
Randy doesn’t talk about heroics. He talks about timelines.
He tells a story from last summer: a buyer was about two weeks from closing, but their lender was non-communicative. Ghosting. The Realtor called Randy and asked him to take a look.
“I’m like, I don’t even know what the problem is,” he says. “We can do this.”
The appraisal was already done, which is one of those details that means everything inside the industry and nothing outside it. Randy transferred it, moved fast, and they closed in two weeks.
“It was no big deal,” he says, and then he pauses. “I got a chance to play the hero.”
He doesn’t linger on that part. He shifts to what actually matters to him: the longer stories. The people whose credit is in disrepair. The ones who disappear when you tell them they’re not ready. The ones who don’t disappear.
“There’s other people that work with me that say 'If it takes me a year, I’m going to do the things that you tell me.'”
That’s the work that doesn’t photograph easily: one-year relationships built on small actions, steady communication, and the kind of trust that has to be earned, not promised.
He tells another story that’s harder to explain cleanly because mortgage guidelines are a maze, and the emotional center of the story isn’t the paperwork. It’s the person.
A man wanted to buy the condo he was living in. Randy worked with him for years—hesitant, careful, not wanting to get into a bad situation. The file pivoted once, then again. A condo issue derailed it. They found a third path through Maine State Housing and needed an exception.
They got it.
“He was a first-generation buyer,” Randy says. “He grew up in an apartment his whole life. His parents didn’t have a home.”
They closed. The man got a large credit toward closing costs and down payment. Later, long after the transaction was done, he sent Randy a Christmas text—no reason except that he still felt it.
“It was one of those deals that I’ll never forget,” Randy says.
In the room, Chris doesn’t let it pass quietly.
“Those are the cool stories,” he says.
Chris Bedard’s first clients
Chris grew up around here too, but his origin story has a different shape. His parents met in the service. His father was in Germany. His mother is German.
“My mom’s German,” he says. He tells it with respect, like he’s still slightly amazed by the route that brought them to Maine: Germany to Texas to Massachusetts to Buxton. He’s the oldest of three—Michael and Jennifer are his siblings—and he talks about the way some families in this area are “layers deep” while his felt smaller, more scattered.
It gave him a particular vantage point in Biddeford. He knows a lot of people because he’s been around—sports, work, years of being in front of clients—but he doesn’t describe it as being inside the old roots. He describes it as being close enough to see them clearly.
And he remembers exactly what it felt like to be a kid trying to make money.
He was nine years old when he delivered the Journal Tribune.
“Thirty-five, forty papers,” he says. Six days a week. No Sunday edition. He ran routes near Biddeford High School and around Mount Pleasant Street.
He loved collecting the cash. He loved the small strategy in it too—showing up with energy so someone tipped two dollars instead of one.
“I remember wanting to make sure that every customer saw me with a smile,” he says.
That route funded his first obsession: sports cards.
His family went to flea markets, Scarborough Downs, the Expo in Portland. Chris walked table to table—Larry Bird, Kevin McHale, Robert Parish—and learned how to negotiate without realizing he was learning how to negotiate.
“I would offer money for cards,” he says. “I would buy those cards. And I still have a lot of those cards.”
He has a bonus room at home where he keeps his sports collection, and he describes it like a personal archive.
“Everything in there has a timeline for me,” he says. “I remember a negotiation. I remember doing the paper route to get the money for it.”
He still owns packs, cards, pieces of that childhood. Some are now worth money. One graded unopened pack sits in his memory like a marker: not because of what it’s worth, but because of what it connects back to.
The mill years
Chris graduated from Biddeford High School in 1996 and ended up working at West Point Stevens—Pepperell Mill—loading trailers, lugging materials, taking the kind of ribbing young guys take from older guys.
“It taught me that I never want to work in the mill full time,” he says. “Not that it was a bad job.”
The work was cold and physical. The lesson arrived early: if he wanted something different, he had to push for it while he was still tired. So he took classes at night at USM's Saco campus. He went to University of Maine at Farmington for a year. He took an economics class with a professor named Roy Van Til and heard the phrase “opportunity cost” in a way that stuck.
He came home and took a sales job at Fisher James Company in Biddeford—business furniture and office supplies—and started making money in his early twenties.
Then he did what people here do when they’re watching the next rung up: he noticed who was doing well, what industries were growing, and what kind of shoes showed up in which offices.
He was calling on mortgage companies as a furniture salesman. He saw the cars, the confidence, the volume of the business. He asked for a job at Lenders Network.
The owner, Frank Watson, didn’t want to hire rookies anymore. Chris asked anyway. Frank paused and said, “I’ll talk to him,” meaning his business partner. He made Chris wait a week. Then he hired him.
Chris still talks about those first months like they’re electric: a bullpen, a computer, five seconds of training, and the expectation that you’d figure it out.
“If you want a job, you’re going to learn on your own,” he says.
He did.
And weeks after he started, he found out he was going to be a father.
“My mortgage career spans basically when I found out I was going to be a father,” he says. “Out of everything I’ve done… the greatest thing I’ve ever done is become a father.”
His daughter Hailey is twenty-one now and finishing college. His stepson Mason just graduated from UMaine Orono and surprised Chris by how much he grew—quiet kid to social chair, a shift that made Chris proud in a way he doesn’t hide.
He talks about family without trying to make it neat. There was a divorce. There were hard years. There were people who took him in when he needed it: the Lagasse's and the Petit's, friends who became aunts and uncles “not by blood.”
“I actually think I’m very lucky to be where I am because of a couple people,” he says.
He’s been with his wife, Ali, for seventeen years. He mentions his ex-wife Liz without bitterness. They raised a daughter together. They stayed functional to do the job.
“It wasn’t always easy,” he says.
He doesn’t finish the sentence with a moral. He doesn’t need to. The proof is the adult daughter, the continued contact, the lack of spectacle.
2009, when everything shook
Chris opened his own brokerage—Assured Mortgage Solutions—in 2009, when the market was collapsing. He says it the way you’d describe starting a boat in rough water: you don’t fully know how you did it, but you remember the feeling.
“The sky is falling,” he says. “We have so many foreclosures and short sales.”
He remembers driving streets where tall grass and overgrown yards became a kind of neighborhood language. He remembers prices that now sound unreal: a home for $90,000 to $180,000. He doesn’t romanticize it. He points out what it cost.
“It would take something catastrophic,” he says, for that to return.
Years later, in 2017, he, Randy, and a third partner affiliated with Norcom Mortgage on Main Street in Saco, then moved their operation in 2020 to the building they’re in now—Beach Street, visible, parking included, the kind of commercial building that changes your daily life.
Downstairs, tenants add foot traffic, a natural meeting place, a built-in reason for clients to feel comfortable. In small towns, that matters. It’s not a perk. It’s part of the ecosystem.
The moment Chris learned from Randy
Late in the interview, Chris admits something that lands because it’s not what you’d assume about a guy who talks easily.
“Believe it or not, I am actually a very nervous person,” he says.
He describes how his early career was built on organic relationships—he had connections in real estate, and those relationships fed his mortgage business for years. Then the landscape changed. People aged out, moved, left the industry.
“My field was already grown,” he says, “and then all of a sudden, we hit a drought.”
He watched Randy for years—BNI, meetings, coffee-shop conversations, the steady grind of planting seeds—and didn’t fully understand the scale of it until he needed it.
“Randy… had a whole field of seeds going,” he says.
So Chris did what he does when he decides something matters: he built new structure. He got more involved. Biddeford-Saco Country Club. Rotary—Saco Bay Rotary, meeting weekly. TBD Connections, a networking group that meets in the same room we’re sitting in, Wednesday mornings, fifteen to twenty people, small business owners and founders cycling through leadership so everyone learns how to run a room.
He tells a specific story that shows what he values: a younger guy in payroll services shows up consistently. Chris connects him with a consultant. The consultant refers him to an employer with 300 employees.
“That’s the best part,” Chris says. “It was a life-changing account.”
He says it like someone who knows what it costs to show up week after week before anything happens.
What they really do
At some point, you realize the job title “loan officer” doesn’t cover what happens in this office.
Randy and Chris help people finance the most expensive thing they’ll ever buy, but the work isn’t just money. It’s timing, fear management, relationship repair, and the ability to find a path through guidelines without pretending the guidelines aren’t real.
Chris explains it the way he sees it: the difference between average and above average is recognizing angles, knowing the rules, knowing where there’s room to interpret, and having the curiosity to go down the rabbit hole when someone else would rather move on.
He tells one story: a forensic professional switched from W-2 to 1099 and technically should have had to wait two years to qualify. Chris pushed, asked, found a product that required strong credit and 20% down, and got it done.
“These loans didn’t exist just a few short years ago,” he says.
In the room, it feels less like two salespeople talking and more like two men describing a trade they’ve practiced long enough to respect it.
Randy puts it in plain terms earlier: “We… know how to solve problems, overcome hurdles… and manage all of those things to get people to the finish line.”
Finish line is an interesting phrase in a business where the finish line isn’t a trophy. It’s keys. It’s relief. It’s someone texting you on Christmas because they’re still thinking about the day they stopped being a renter.
Back where we started
As the morning winds down, there’s a small interruption—a knock, a quick hello, a reminder that this office isn’t a set. People come and go. Meetings happen. Someone has somewhere to be.
Randy steps out first, heading downstairs because he’s got another conversation lined up—another relationship, another piece of the week that will never show up on a spreadsheet.
In a few minutes, Chris will do the same. Another call. Another file. Another anxious buyer staring at a portal and wondering why the word “underwriting” sounds like a threat.
Upstairs, the conference room goes quiet again.
And if you look at the place the way these two men look at it, you can see the loop.
Randy’s life was rerouted in March 2004, and the reroute kept him here—kept him close to the streets and names that raised him, kept him in the same orbit long enough to become the kind of person other people trust with the largest purchase of their lives.
Chris started collecting cash door-to-door at nine years old, learning how to be memorable, learning how to organize, learning how to ask for what he wanted without apologizing. He kept the cards. He kept the timeline. He built a career where the work is still, in a different form, a route—stops to make, people to see, promises to keep.
This morning, in a Saco office above a coffee shop, the two of them sit at the same table and talk about mortgages, but what you’re really hearing is how a place holds onto people—and how, sometimes, people hold onto a place right back.
The building waits for the next wave. The chairs stay pushed in. Downstairs, the coffee keeps moving.
And somewhere in town, somebody is about to pick up the phone for the first time and say they’re thinking about buying a home—half excited, half terrified—without knowing yet who is going to answer, or how many years of small-town history will be sitting on the other end of the line.
Many thanks to Randy Forcier and Chris Bedard for their time on Friday, January 23, 2026.
BRICK+TIDES is a weekly digital magazine based in York County, Maine. We share positive and inspiring stories about local businesses, people, and places that make Southern Maine special. If you'd like to be first to read our free weekly email, we'd love for you to subscribe!
Miss a feature from York County, Maine? Head to our homepage to see our recent features.
Thank you to local tshirt sponsor Wood Island Studio