“Where do you bring someone who has been injured playing Peek-a-Boo? The ICU.” Fortunately, all the recent mortgage conferences have kept injuries to a minimum […]
What’s striking about the current environment is just how many different forces are hitting the mortgage market at the same time, and how little room there is for clean, simple answers. You’ve got geopolitical tension driving energy prices, a pending Fed leadership transition that people keep trying to assign too much importance to, and ongoing shifts from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that directly impact execution. And through all of that, capital markets teams still have to do the same job:…
My cat Myrtle never made it to the Great River or Mortgage Innovator’s mortgage conferences, but plenty of people did. Between these May events, the TMBA Annual, the Gathering, Sagent Ignite, and the National Secondary coming up, there’s a lot of meetin’, talkin’, and educatin’. Talk in the halls, somewhat somber but hopeful, revolves around AI, Figure challenging Freddie and Fannie in the first-lien mortgage market by using its blockchain platform, UWM and TWO press releases going back and…
My cat Myrtle never made it to the Great River or Mortgage Innovator’s mortgage conferences, but plenty of people did. Between these May events, the […]
“What do you call an aging actor who has finally paid off his house? Mortgage freeman.” Servicing is a highly important component of that, and I was fortunate to attend Sagent Ignite in Phoenix yesterday; we have a special live podcast today that was recorded from the event. Mortgagees follow demographics, whether it be aging owners or aging houses. Lenders know that there are plenty of old homeowners who have plenty of equity. GreenPath Financial Wellness (a nonprofit approved by the U.S….
“What do you call an aging actor who has finally paid off his house? Mortgage freeman.” Servicing is a highly important component of that, and […]
Every mortgage cycle exposes the same structural tension in lending operations. When volume surges, systems strain. When volume collapses, capacity gets cut faster than it can be rebuilt. The result is a familiar pattern: bottlenecks at the worst possible moments, rising costs to originate, and a borrower experience that feels inconsistent precisely when consistency matters most. There is a sense in the industry right now that this last cycle, with its extreme volatility, has finally forced a…
Today is not the Mexican equivalent of the 4th of July. Today celebrates Mexico’s victory over France in the Battle of Puebla on May 5, 1862. (In this country, Hispanic home ownership rates are north of 10 million, which includes, of course, Mexicans. What lender is going to ignore that? In Mexico itself, mortgage rates are north of 10 percent and homeownership is less than 60 percent.) Returning to the note about today, it was a relatively minor battle (and the French reclaimed Puebla a year…
Today is not the Mexican equivalent of the 4th of July. Today celebrates Mexico’s victory over France in the Battle of Puebla on May 5, […]
On May 11, our industry begins its annual Advocacy Week. It’s an important moment, but also a reality check. Today, the Mortgage Action Alliance (MAA) has about 50,000 members. That may sound like a lot, until you compare it to the total size of our industry. There are between 300,000 and 350,000 professionals working in real estate finance. That means less than 15% of us are actively engaged in advocacy. That number should be much higher. Lawmakers and regulators pay attention to scale….
