Innovation… Did you know that the moon landing happened before wheeled suitcases were invented? The Apollo 11 moon landing occurred on July 20, 1969, while the first commercial rolling luggage with a patent application by Bernard Sadow was introduced in 1970 and patented in 1972. Innovation, compliance, and affordability were key themes at this week’s Western Secondary. At the state level, for example, Kinder Institute report shows homeowners insurance has become a growing barrier to housing affordability across Texas. As Texas leaders search for ways to rein in soaring homeowner insurance costs, new research suggests premiums are playing an increasingly important role in housing affordability across the state. When homeowners’ insurance is factored into the cost of homeownership, nearly two-thirds of Texas households can no longer afford the median-priced home in their county. Nationwide, condominiums and townhomes have long served as the affordable entry point into homeownership, but rising HOA dues, higher insurance costs, stricter lending requirements, and mortgage rates are making attached homes less attractive to buyers. As affordability erodes, these properties are taking considerably longer to sell than detached homes. (Today’s podcast can be found here. This week’s ‘casts are sponsored by Optimal Blue. Optimal Blue’s Profitability Center unifies pricing, hedge performance, pipeline activity, profitability, and market intelligence into one personalized dashboard, giving mortgage lenders faster, more complete insights to make better capital markets decisions. Today’s has an interview with Hometap’s Jeff Glass on the latest and greatest from the home equity space.)
Employment
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“It’s easy to get caught in the business of the day and let long-term planning slide. At Churchill we believe in building customers for life, outlasting every market cycle. We offer big-lender capabilities alongside entrepreneurial agility. You can grow your business your way, controlling your P&L. Our in-house marketing agency helps elevate your brand. Our industry-leading operations team helps you close loans early or on time, delivering client experiences that earn top-rated reviews that win more business. We focus on educating our customers on their options and work alongside them to determine the best route for their financial picture. The work doesn’t stop after the house purchase! We shift our focus to helping customers achieve the real American dream, debt-free home ownership! Putting customers’ needs first forms a relationship built on trust, which outlasts market cycles. Churchill Mortgage, a debt-free company of over 30 years, has a sound leadership team and is an E.S.O.P! With employees as owners, we’re a company of leaders, laser-focused on the success of our team & customers. If our type of customer service and mentality interests you, learn more about us here.”
Loan originators are quietly exploring their options on mLOOP anonymously. See which lenders you match with, and reveal your name only when you’re ready. Join them on mLOOP.
The Chrisman Job Board is the go-to platform for employment opportunities across the mortgage industry. For employers, adding a job listing is easy. Simply create an account and drop in your existing application link, or forward the details to our team and we’ll take care of it for you. For job seekers, joining our Talent Community is completely free. Upload your resume to be visible to hiring companies across the industry and stay connected to new opportunities as they go live.
Lender and broker software, products, and services
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Borrower trust is up. Keeping it is another story. J.D. Power’s 2026 U.S. Mortgage Servicer Satisfaction Study found that 86 percent of borrowers are likely to use their current servicer again. That’s good news, but it comes as financial stress rises and borrower needs become more complex. The challenge for servicers is turning today’s trust into tomorrow’s retention. That means using technology to recognize when a borrower’s situation changes, communicate before confusion sets in, and display the results that matter, giving the right people the right information to act, not days or weeks later, but at the right time. Clarifire CEO Jane Mason breaks down the J.D. Power findings and the opportunity they reveal for servicers. Find out what it takes to turn trust into retention in her latest blog, “Borrower Trust Is Up. Here’s How Servicers Can Keep It.”
Most AI tools can generate answers, yet few can explain how they arrived at them. For lenders operating in a regulated environment, that’s a problem. JazzX AI was built with governance at its core: Every decision follows a traceable chain of policy, evidence, reasoning, and outcome. Investor overlays, lending guidelines, SOPs, authority matrices, and compliance requirements become part of the decision-making process. Schedule a call with our team to learn how JazzX helps lenders build governed AI for mortgage execution.
With 46 percent of Google searches focused on local information, mortgage lenders have a significant opportunity to make their LOs the experts borrowers find first. CANDID’s new AI Blogs automatically researches, writes, optimizes, and publishes hyper-local mortgage content for every LO, combining timely market intelligence with CANDID data to build visibility across Google and next-generation AI search. Each post is published directly to the LO’s CANDID site and optimized for traditional search engines and Large Language Models (LLMs), positioning lenders to capture more local search visibility and put their LOs in front of borrowers at the moment they are looking for mortgage expertise. Built-in lead capture turns that visibility into prospects, while marketing teams can scale localized content across hundreds or thousands of LOs without creating it market by market. Schedule a discovery call.
Most mortgage lenders have made the move to digital closing, yet many aren’t capturing the time and cost savings it is designed to deliver. The reason usually comes down to one architectural decision. Is your eClose solution built into your loan origination system (LOS), or just attached? When eClose is built into your LOS, your team works from a system they already know, and adoption follows naturally. Your closing team spends less time managing the technology and more time managing the transaction. Read ICE’s blog to see what that architectural decision could be costing you.
Luck Isn’t a Business Strategy. In today’s unpredictable market, it’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking, “We’ll deal with challenges when they arise.” But successful organizations know that waiting for events to unfold is not a strategy. Most companies don’t prepare to fail; they fail to prepare. While no one can accurately predict interest rates, home prices, inflation, or economic shifts, businesses can prepare for changing conditions. Whether volume increases or decreases, organizations that anticipate potential market changes and align resources accordingly are better positioned to succeed. Consistent success doesn’t come from luck. It comes from proactive planning, strategic anticipation, and the flexibility to respond quickly when opportunities emerge. That’s where Agility 360 makes a difference: From deploying technology solutions and expanding capabilities to improving workforce flexibility, Agility 360 helps organizations prepare for a range of future scenarios and stay ready for what’s next. Don’t leave your future to chance. Start preparing today. To learn more, contact Annabeth Kline or Rajeev Sharma.
Zillow’s July Market Report reveals a tale of two signals: home sales surged 7 percent year over year, the strongest gain of 2026, yet newly pending listings rose just 0.3 percent. Rising mortgage rates, now at their highest point in a year, threaten to erase the affordability edge buyers have held over the past year. Zillow Home Loans built BuyAbility℠ to help buyers track these shifts in affordability. The tool runs on real rates from Zillow Home Loans that update daily, so a buyer’s affordability estimate moves with the market instead of freezing at a one-time calculator result. Across Zillow listings, buyers can see personalized monthly payments, a label for how each home fits their budget, and recommendations based on what they can afford. When rates shift, their buying power updates automatically. (Equal Housing Lender, NMLS #10287)
Affordability pressure doesn’t disappear when the loan closes. It comes back later as repurchase risk. Your borrowers are stretched, leaving less room for errors in the file. Truework, a Checkr Company, verifies income, employment, and assets before you close, replacing error-prone processes with fast, automated reports pulled directly from sources. Lenders see up to 50 percent cost savings on verifications, with faster turn times and higher accuracy. Learn more.
Chrisman Demo Day is a free perk for all Chrisman Marketplace members. If you’re a technology or service provider and haven’t joined the Marketplace yet, reach out to info@chrismancommentary.com to learn more.
The Chrisman Marketplace is a centralized hub for vendors and service providers across the industry to be viewed by lenders in a very cost-effective manner. We’re adding new providers daily, so check back often to see what’s new. To reserve your place or learn more, contact us at info@chrismancommentary.com.
Webinars and webcasts fast approaching
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Builder-subsidized lending has introduced substantial inaccuracies into legacy rate surveys. Buydowns on builder-affiliated loans pull the blended weekly average down, obscuring the typical borrower average. MCT’s new Live Mortgage Rate Lock Index reports on builder and non-builder 30-year conventional and FHA purchase rates separately. Unlike figures averaged and released after the week has closed, the index is built from actual borrower note-rate locks submitted through MCTlive!, updated throughout the business day, and drawn from lenders originating a combined $9.4 billion in monthly volume across all 50 states. To put that same secondary market data to work in your own pricing decisions, register for MCT’s Lender Analytics Advanced webinar on August 20. You’ll learn how to benchmark your front-end pricing against the market and your peers.
The Big Picture is today at noon PT. This week on The Big Picture, Mike Yu of Vesta and Mitch Kider of Weiner Brodsky Kider PC are joined by Samir Sen, CEO of Flair Labs, for a conversation on how artificial intelligence is transforming mortgage operations. The discussion explores practical AI applications, intelligent automation, and the opportunities for lenders to improve efficiency, enhance decision making, and deliver better outcomes as AI adoption continues to accelerate across the industry.
Last Word is tomorrow at 10AM PT. Brian Vieaux, Kevin Peranio, Christy Soukhamneut, and Coby Hakalir break down the week’s biggest market signals, agency developments, and industry storylines. The discussion focuses on what the industry got right, what it missed, and what lenders should be watching next.
Capital markets: spec pool pricing volatility makes things tough
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Mortgage secondary execution is increasingly a value-optimization exercise rather than a simple Agency versus non-Agency decision, as growing non-Agency investor demand can make private execution more attractive even for loans that qualify for Agency delivery, while expanding non-QM demand creates additional outlets for high-yielding, well-performing assets.
This is amplified in specified pools, where investor appetite and premiums can shift quickly, forcing secondary teams to constantly balance execution value against rate-sheet competitiveness, hedge performance, and the risk that a premium disappears before the loan is sold. The competitive advantage belongs to those who understand who values the loan the most, why they value it, and how much of that value the lender can capture without compromising economics. It is hard to pass a price advantage on to borrowers when it can vanish tomorrow.
It was a mixed day in the bond market yesterday despite a market-friendly July CPI report that came in as expected and showed slight year-over-year disinflation, pushing the implied probability of a September 25-basis point hike down to 40 percent. July CPI was broadly in line with expectations, reinforcing the view that fears of significant inflationary pass-through from the Middle East conflict may have been overstated and giving the Fed more room to defer a September rate hike, although the inflation debate is far from settled.
July’s data strengthens the case for patience from the Fed but is unlikely to settle the September decision, with August consumer prices and employment data still to come and potentially carrying greater weight. Much of the headline pressure continues to reflect supply-driven factors (i.e., energy costs) rather than a demand-driven resurgence; potential AI-driven increases in consumer electronics prices offer a new concern for policymakers.
Any disinflation rally ultimately stalled as investors looked ahead to today’s Producer Price Index (PPI) report and remained wary of elevated oil prices and a $432 billion July Treasury deficit, the largest monthly shortfall since October 2021. Technically, the Treasury rally following the weak payrolls report and benign CPI reading still has room to run. The 2-year, 3-year, and 5-year sectors show the clearest momentum toward lower yields, while the 10-year faces initial resistance around 4.60 percent and subsequently the 4.53 percent area.
The more important story remains the persistent yield curve slope, although it is not as steep as its been in the past. The long end has been remarkably resistant to the rally: 30-year yields remain near 5.20 percent, with 5.10 percent representing the key technical threshold before a more meaningful move lower. In other words, the front end is increasingly pricing out the prospect of a September hike, but the long end is demanding more evidence before following, making the 2s/10s curve arguably more informative than any single yield level.
Today’s economic calendar kicked off with July PPI (unchanged, lower than expected, but +4.7 Y-o-Y) and Core PPI (+.2 percent; +4.2 percent Y-o-Y). We’ve also received weekly Initial Jobless Claims (209k) and Continuing Jobless Claims. Later today brings a Treasury auction of $25 billion 30-year bonds. With plenty of reasons to remain cautious despite the softer inflation signals, we begin Thursday with Agency MBS prices roughly unchanged from Wednesday’s close, the 2-year yielding 4.18, and the 10-year yielding 4.67 after closing yesterday at 4.68 percent.
Two little kids are in a hospital, lying on stretchers next to each other outside the operating room, the first surgeries of the day.
The first kid leans over and asks, “What are you in here for?”
The second kid says, “I’m getting my tonsils out, and I’m afraid.”
The first kid says, “You’ve got nothing to worry about. I had that done when I was four. They put you to sleep, and when you wake up they give you lots of Jell-O and ice cream. It’s a breeze.”
The second kid then asks, “What are you here for?”
The first kid says, “Circumcision.”
“Whoa!” the second kid replies, “Good luck, buddy. I had that done when I was born. Couldn’t walk for a year.”
Visit www.ChrismanCommentary.com for more information on our industry partners, access archived commentaries, or subscribe to the Daily Mortgage News and Commentary. You can also explore the Chrisman Marketplace, a centralized hub connecting mortgage professionals with trusted vendors and solutions. If you’re interested, check out my periodic blog on the STRATMOR Group website. STRATMOR’s current blog is “Pricing That Can Help Borrowers.” The Commentary’s podcast is available on all major platforms, including Apple and Spotify.
qoɹ & ǝᴉqqoɹ
(Market data provided in partnership with MBS Live. For free job postings and to view candidate resumes, visit the Chrisman Job Board. This newsletter is intended for sophisticated mortgage professionals only. There are no paid endorsements by me. For the latest mortgage news, visit Mortgage News Daily. For archived commentaries, or to subscribe, go to www.ChrismanCommentary.com. Copyright 2026 Chrisman LLC. All rights reserved. Paid job & product listings do appear. This report or any portion hereof may not be reprinted, sold, or redistributed without the written consent of Rob Chrisman. The views and opinions in this newsletter are mine alone unless otherwise specifically stated herein.)
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