Capacity planning is one of those things you learn through experience—sometimes the hard way.
Back in college, when one of my roommates finally bit the bullet and got a Costco membership, all four of us would pile into my Honda Accord, make the trek to Costco, and only realize after checking out that we had maxed out every square inch of the car. We were seriously testing the payload capacity of my sedan’s suspension and our safety on the freeway.
Fast forward a few years to my mid-to-late 20s: hosting a potluck house party seemed like a great idea—until 10 people showed up with enough food for 10 people each. Suddenly, we had a capacity problem.
A few years later, when I finally moved beyond an individual contributor role at work, I realized that scaling up and down as volume ebbs and flows adds another layer of complexity.
Early in my career in capital markets, we typically added one full-time employee (FTE) for every $150M in production. As technology improved, that number jumped to one FTE per $1B. By the time I was Director of Capital Markets during the crazy 2020 Covid-19 boom, we had just five people covering lock desk, hedging, trading, and data analytics—managing over $5B in production. There’s a Russ Hanneman joke in there somewhere about rebillionizing.
I don’t remember who I was talking to or at which conference, but we found ourselves sharing stories with a recent college grad, new to the industry, about the days of paper rate sheets, fax machines, copy rooms, stacking orders, and photocopying entire credit files for purchase clearing and storage rooms filled with paper files for recordkeeping. We joked about watching shippers chase down the UPS or FedEx guy because someone left an outbound file sitting behind the admin’s desk, and we recalled the massive file cabinets stuffed with loan files pending investor purchase. Not to mention the supply closets filled with pens, highlighters, whiteout, legal-size folders, binder prongs, rubber fingertips, two-hole punches, rubber bands and UPS/FedEx bags. Many of you likely also remember these days!
It’s crazy to think that none of those old processes exist anymore—yet the cost to originate mortgages keeps rising. It reminds me of the PG&E fallacy, the energy company serving Northern and Central California. My wife and I upgraded to a high-efficiency washer and dryer, dishwasher, double-pane windows, and LED lightbulbs, and even switched to an energy-saving plan. But despite all those efforts, our monthly bill has only gone up.
At Polly, our long-term vision is to help reduce the cost of originating a mortgage. Today, we do that through a series of platform capabilities, including (but not limited to):
Product, pricing, and eligibility (PPE) engine
Mobile lock
Lock desk automation
AI-driven workflow optimization for LOs
Built-in compliance testing
Data and analytics
… and maybe, one day, an automated market maker.
It’s been a wild ride in the market. For a retail, primary, C30, we’ve seen rate locks on the Polly platform range from a daily high of 7.12% (Jan. 13, 2025) to a low of 6.51% (Mar. 4, 2025), with average rates around 6.6% over the last 30 days.
If you would like to learn more about Polly, our platform capabilities, and how we are actually driving the cost to originate down, we will be at the MBA's Secondary & Capital Markets Conference May 18–21 and will have meeting space at Bar 54. Reach out to sales@polly.io to connect!