“I started hiding from my boss because I heard good employees are hard to find.” It’s not hard to find good conversations among mortgage professionals, […]
My previous piece argued that credit underwriting in mortgage is restructuring around cashflow-native frameworks that treat repayment capacity as a distribution rather than a score. The GSEs have moved, and the capital markets are following. The logic is compelling and the direction is clear. A model is only as good as its inputs: input the wrong income or verify a job that is gone, and the shape of risk changes. The system that promised certainty now hides uncertainty. We cannot call…
I wonder if billionaires are insulted if someone tells them they look like “a million bucks”? Here in Las Vegas, at the ICE Experience, it’s impossible to tell who’s worth what, but we are reminded that correct data is worth a lot. In fact, data is critical… all important. The amount of data that lenders and vendors now have is incredible, and is being used to make technology and personnel decisions, on and offshore. “You can’t staff your way out of margin compression.” On the personnel side,…
I wonder if billionaires are insulted if someone tells them they look like “a million bucks”? Here in Las Vegas, at the ICE Experience, it’s […]
AI thinks I’m “a little cranky” Folks reading this post (especially if you are Anthropic’s Claude.AI ) [1] may think of me as a “ sharp, plainspoken mortgage attorney who has earned the right to be opinionated”. Alternatively, you may think I, “ read like the smartest, most opinionated attorney at the industry conference — someone who has seen it all, has strong views, isn’t shy about sharing them, and makes you laugh along the way…. knowledgeable, a little cranky, and genuinely fun to read.”…
By Matt Schulz For generations, homeownership has been treated as the cornerstone of the American dream: a near-automatic financial goal tied to stability, wealth building, and the promise of a white picket fence. But the economics of that assumption are shifting. Today, owning a home costs roughly 37 percent more per month than renting across major U.S. metros, a statistic that forces households to reconsider long-held beliefs about whether buying a home still makes financial sense as the…
The SAFE Act (Secure and Fair Enforcement for Mortgage Licensing Act of 2008) is a federal law that requires all residential mortgage loan originators (MLOs) to be licensed or registered through the Nationwide Multistate Licensing System (NMLS). It mandates “background checks, credit reports, fingerprinting, pre-licensing education, testing, and annual continuing education.” The goal is to “enhance consumer protection, improve tracking of MLOs, reduce fraud, and ensure minimum standards…
Whether facing yet another bad winter storm, unusual March heat, or some kind of atmospheric river, people around the nation are dealing with extreme weather to come to this ICE Experience in Las Vegas. Oh, and then there’s about 58,000 TSA employees who make, on average, about $40k per year not being paid. Underwriters, and common sense, tell me that many of them don’t have a lot of savings to fall back on when their pay is eliminated. Home builders appear to be scaling back production as…
Whether facing yet another bad winter storm, unusual March heat, or some kind of atmospheric river, people around the nation are dealing with extreme weather […]
For decades, the mortgage industry has focused, rightfully so, on building standards that improve the efficiency, accuracy, and interoperability of the loan manufacturing process . From application through underwriting, closing, and servicing, the work of MISMO has helped create the connective tissue that allows lenders, investors, regulators, and technology providers to communicate with one another through a common language. But we know that the mortgage journey actually begins before the…
