Let’s take a look at the mail bag. “Rob, with the war in the Middle East pushing gas prices higher, and transportation costs impacting everything, […]
The mortgage industry loves to talk about the future. For at least a decade, that future has sounded the same: fully digital, end-to-end, frictionless. Every few years, we give it a new label: “digital mortgage,” “point-of-sale transformation,” “tip-to-tail.” Now it’s AI. Same promise, new packaging. And yet, here we are; still stitching together systems, still reconciling numbers between screens, still asking humans to interpret what machines should already know. The issue isn’t that the…
My cat Myrtle never had much use for a credit report. Nor credit scores, which came along in 1958, nor a FICO score (1989). Millions of borrowers were analyzed without them. Rumors swirl of the FHFA, overseer of Freddie and Fannie, “operationalizing” VantageScore any day now. VantageScore, created in 2006, is a joint venture by the three major credit bureaus (Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion). Will it change your lending process? Possibly. Do government regulations change your lending…
My cat Myrtle never had much use for a credit report. Nor credit scores, which came along in 1958, nor a FICO score (1989). Millions […]
After years as a housing economist, it becomes clear that the numbers only tell part of the housing story. On paper, it is straightforward. Prices, incomes, and interest rates interact to determine affordability. In practice, it is far more complicated because those numbers are filtered through human behavior, perception, and trust. That gap between what is true and what people believe to be true is at the crux of today’s housing market dynamics. Many borrowers are convinced affordability is…
My path into mortgage was not accidental, but it also was not linear. I was first exposed to the space as a student during the financial crisis, when I was studying real estate and working as a research assistant at a mortgage-focused research center. At that time, the work was closely tied to the government’s response to the crisis, which gave me an early appreciation for how central mortgage is to the broader economy. It is not just a financial product. It is a system that sits at the…
“You’ll never guess what this 1980’s actress looks like now !” Okay, that’s an example of a sensationalist click bait headline. Farce aside, nearly everyone changes in 40 years, anyway, as does the population. U.S. population growth slowed sharply between July 2024 and July 2025, rising just 1.8 million people (0.5 percent) to 341.8 million, the weakest growth since the early pandemic. This was driven primarily by a steep 54 percent drop in net international migration from 2.7 million to 1.3…
“You’ll never guess what this 1980’s actress looks like now!” Okay, that’s an example of a sensationalist click bait headline. Farce aside, nearly everyone changes […]
For much of the modern mortgage era, lenders have organized their businesses around clearly defined channels. Retail operated as one engine, consumer direct as another, wholesale in its own lane, and adjacent functions like real estate partnerships, servicing, and recapture often lived in separate silos. That structure made sense in a world where each function could stand on its own economically and operationally. But that is no longer the environment we are operating in today. What is…
“What is it called when an alligator has brain damage? A reptile disfunction.” On a more serious note, “ Cognitive Surrender ” is a new and useful term for how AI melts brains , although it can be a useful tool. Meanwhile, Microsoft tells us, “Copilot is for entertainment purposes only . It can make mistakes, and it may not work as intended. Don’t rely on Copilot for important advice. Use Copilot at your own risk.” Does it mean anything that software job postings are up 30 percent this year ?…
