For close to a decade, Mark Pearce fought to help poor people buy homes, battling predatory lending and lenders' bias against some neighborhoods.

He loved the sound of keys jingling when he dropped them in the hands of a new homeowner.

Now, as deputy commissioner of the N.C. Banking Commission, he has been fighting to help people keep their homes. This time he has battled mortgage fraud, subprime lending and a foreclosure epidemic.

Hired by Banking Commissioner Joseph Smith in 2006, Pearce, 38, quickly set an agenda:

* Craft stricter laws and guidelines for nontraditional loans such as "interest-only" loans.

* Hire more investigators to combat mortgage fraud.

* Pay closer attention to lenders with high rates of foreclosures.

* Enforce current mortgage laws more strictly.

In less than two years, Pearce has checked all those items off his list.

"He has been instrumental in better protecting home buyers from the problems we have seen in the mortgage industry," says Al Ripley, a lawyer with the N.C. Justice Center, a Raleigh nonprofit watchdog for low-income people.

Last year, Pearce played a key role in pushing mortgage fraud legislation through the General Assembly. The new laws toughened mortgage fraud penalties and made it easier for local prosecutors to bring charges against mortgage sellers who lie or intentionally leave out information.

In the past 15 months, 31 mortgage loan officers have surrendered their licenses or lost their licenses because of the closer scrutiny.

Smith, the banking commissioner, created Pearce's position when mortgage complaints swamped his office.

"I realized that I was spending half my time on mortgage issues and half on banking. I needed a stronger pair of hands to guide the mortgage cases," Smith says.

He knew the hands he wanted.

"Mark was my first, second and third choice," Smith says.

Self-Help Credit Union

Smith had met Pearce about 10 years before, when Pearce was working for Self-Help Credit Union, a Durham credit union that helps low-income and first-time home buyers, and Smith was general counsel for Centura Bank.

"He has an incredible amount of energy and capacity to get a whole lot done quickly," Smith says. "He had been advocating for fair housing, and he was prepared to go to the next step to implement and make policy."

Besides, "I thought I could trust him." That was critical because, as deputy commissioner, Pearce would act on behalf of the commissioner. "When he speaks, I speak," Smith says.

Pearce has testified before the Federal Reserve Board and Congress about how to deal with the problems in the mortgage industry.

State officials from across the country call on him to get advice on how to write their own mortgage-protection legislation.

"So many people want a piece of him," Smith says.

Learning every angle

Pearce, who grew up in Raleigh's Starmount neighborhood just off Capital Boulevard, studied political science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His introduction to the mortgage industry came while in college; he worked for GE Mortgage during summer breaks. There he saw the early effort by lenders to approve loans to minorities and those with low incomes. After graduating, Pearce signed up to serve a year in the VISTA program, working for the N.C. Low Income Housing Coalition in rural Tyrrell and Hyde counties. When his tour was over, Pearce went to Harvard Law School.

At graduation, he had the chance to work for a big law firm. He also got a call from Self-Help. He went for the lower-paying job.

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