Tomorrow, I head to Las Vegas, NV for the ACUMA event. There are plenty of jokes about Las Vegas, but having a city this size (2 million plus 42 million visitors a year) in the desert is no laughing matter. Stories about Las Vegas real estate values have been all over the place: increasing, falling, staying steady, depending on who you ask. LV receives about 4 inches of rain a year, and receives nearly all its water from the Colorado River and Lake Mead. It doesn’t quite sync with the fact/theory that people only live where there’s water. Half of the United States’ 90,000 reservoirs are more than a quarter filled with sediment, with the country having lost eight percent of its water storage capacity, according to a new study. The capacity of the nation’s reservoirs peaked in the 1970s, and slowly diminished thanks to sediment buildup. It’s a problem not just for storage capacity (huge water reservoir investments by definition get worse every year) but also for hydroelectric components in dams since the sediment can cause damage.
Saturday Spotlight: Finance of America
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Business growth is harder when you’re missing half the pie
Purchase and refinance lending aren’t going anywhere. But waiting for those markets to fully rebound isn’t much of a growth strategy. Not when there’s a massive slice of opportunity among the growing senior demographic.
Consider the scale: U.S. homeowners hold approximately $34.9 trillion in real estate equity1, with more than $14.5 trillion held by homeowners age 62+2. But the size of home equity isn’t the whole story for seniors.
As homeowners enter retirement, their income, liquidity, and financial priorities may change. Meeting those needs might require rethinking your strategy. Serving older clients throughout the homeowner lifecycle requires a broader toolkit, including products like reverse mortgages.
Building that expertise takes work. Reverse mortgages come with new rules, processes, and borrower conversations. But growth doesn’t come from standing still. And the learning curve could become your advantage. Mortgage professionals who start now have time to develop capabilities that could set them apart as competition grows.
If you’re ready to grab a bigger slice of the pie, you don’t have to do it alone. Finance of America, one of America’s largest senior home equity lenders, brings more than 20 years of experience helping traditional mortgage professionals enter the category with education, tools, and operational support.
Its new white paper with HousingWire, “Growth is hard: why standing still is the biggest risk facing mortgage originators,” lays out the business case for building expertise now—before market pressure forces your hand. Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:
Why waiting for “normal” is a risky strategy: Purchase and refi remain foundational, but relying on their recovery leaves your growth tied to rates, inventory, and other factors you can’t control.
Why the learning curve is a competitive advantage: Building product knowledge, referral relationships, and operational fluency now could help you stay ahead as demand grows.
Why your client relationships shouldn’t end at purchase: A broader home equity strategy could help you remain relevant as clients’ needs evolve, from buying and improving a home to preparing for retirement and funding later-life priorities.
You could wait for the familiar market to get easier. But first, ask yourself: Are you missing half the pie?
(For more information on having your firm’s extracurricular activities, employee growth, and your charitable side featured, contact Chrisman LLC’s Anjelica Nixt.)
It’s conference season: don’t panic
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Heading to a conference to represent your company? STRATMOR’s David Hrobon has some thoughts. “A mortgage conference is an expensive place to simply show up and hope something valuable happens. A full calendar is not necessarily a productive calendar, and badge scans, business cards, and cocktail conversations are activity metrics, not business outcomes. The real value starts before the conference, with a clear understanding of what you want to learn, who you want to meet, and which relationships you want to strengthen.
“I believe companies should involve a broader group of their teams in that planning, even if only a handful of people are attending, because the people back home may have insights into customers, competitors, technology, or market developments that should shape what the attendees focus on. And once you are there, be intentional, but stay open. Have questions prepared for the people you meet, understand the exhibitors you want to visit, protect time for your most important clients and partners, and do not be afraid to explore something you did not have on your original agenda.
“But the biggest mistake companies make is treating the conference as the end of the process rather than the beginning of the work that comes afterward. It is rare that you “get married” to a new vendor at a conference. More often, you gather information, bring it back to your team, determine what is actually relevant, and then decide which conversations deserve a deeper follow-up. That is why the post-conference debrief is so important. Attendees should be accountable for distilling the noise from the value, identifying what they learned, connecting it back to the objectives they established beforehand, and establishing clear next steps.
“A conference can also be an opportunity to develop the next generation of leadership by giving emerging leaders a chance to attend alongside experienced executives and learn how to navigate the industry. Face-to-face interaction still has enormous value in a digital world, but companies only capture that value when they approach conferences as a strategic investment with a purpose, not simply another event on the calendar.” Thank you, David.
The anatomy of a JV
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Many vendors, aka third-party providers, are joining forces for greater efficiency. Being able to work together is important, as show in the recent monthly Chrisman LLC Demo Day. (Fast forward to two minutes.) Let’s take a recent sample and see how it is structured.
“Secure Insight, the market-leading fintech providing plug-and-play solutions to manage mortgage fraud, vendor risk compliance, and wire fraud prevention, has entered into an integration agreement with OptiFunder, the leading provider of warehouse management solutions for mortgage originators and warehouse lenders and creator of the OptiExchange Partner Network.
“The integration will further drive ROIs to independent mortgage bank and warehouse lending clients that OptiFunder and Secure Insight serve delivering on their common goals of lender and consumer fraud prevention surrounding mortgage closing transactions. Secure Insight’s unmatched track record of supervising over 60 million closings with zero wire fraud losses at a transaction cost under ten dollars allows OptiFunder’s clients the ultimate protection from fraud losses on a single platform and at a transaction cost that make adoption seamless and affordable.
“Secure Insight was the first company to address closing table risk in the mortgage industry promoting third party vendor vetting before the term became accepted as an industry standard and practice. Founded, managed, and operated by industry insiders and not tech specialists, Secure Insight recognizes the real and impactful stress points and workflow issues that make risk management necessary and manageable for lenders. Its faster, cheaper, and better approach has gained nationwide recognition from mortgage banks, credit unions, and warehouse banks as a leader in fintech fraud solutions, customer services, and audit-proof reporting.
“Through a unique API integration with OptFunder, Secure Insight will make its Closing Guard solution combining funding wire validation and agent risk assessments (monitored in real time) available as a direct access on OptiFunder’s platforms both as raw data and PDF reports.
“’Closing agent risk and wire fraud prevention are top priorities for lenders as payment-related fraud grows. Our integration with Secure Insight offers integrated and automated fraud prevention solutions to address the evolving threats,’ said Michael McFadden, CEO of OptiFunder.
“’Secure Insight is proud to partner with OptiFunder because it has demonstrated a proven solution to streamline mortgage workflow tasks which lenders need to gain competitive advantages while reducing overall operating costs. The ability for lenders to easily turn on the Closing Guard solution gives them peace of mind, clear and recognized regulatory compliance, and an affordable and easy to use technology platform to help prevent mortgage related fraud,’ said Andrew Liput, CEO of Secure Insight.”
There’s too much reward in our system for inaction
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Corbin Trent has some thoughts about the United States… doing nothing.
“In the summer of 2018 twelve boys and their soccer coach got caught in a cave in Thailand. Everybody followed it at the time. They’d walked in after practice, the monsoon rains followed, coming in earlier than predicted. The rising water cut them off two and a half miles inside a mountain.
“It was nine days before they were found. Until then nobody knew if they were alive or dead. Divers found all thirteen sitting on a ledge in the dark, and then came the harder problem, which was getting them out. Now, it may sound simple. You just give the boys scuba equipment, and they swim out, but that simply wasn’t possible. Of all the things that people debated when it came to solutions, there was 100 percent certainty that they were going to be incapable of swimming out.
“The dive, in or out, was hours long through pitch black passages so tight the rescue divers had to pull their tanks off to fit, and these were kids who’d never worn a scuba mask. Zero diving experience. To give you an idea of how dangerous this dive was, ultimately two Thai Navy SEALs died: one while they were diving and the other from complications.
“The water didn’t care. It was rising and the air on that ledge was running out. The governor running that operation and the government of Thailand made a decision to do something that was considered extremely controversial, unethical, even illegal. They sedated those boys, strapped each one to a diver, and swam them out unconscious through the flooded dark, for maybe a fifty percent chance of saving them.
“In retrospect it seems obvious that was the decision to make. It’s not controversial after the fact. All thirteen boys came out alive. Good call.
“The outcome makes it seem noncontroversial. But the decision itself was brutal. You’re flipping a coin. A thirty to fifty percent chance some or all the boys die trying to save them, versus a hundred percent chance they all die if you do nothing. I know it seems like an obvious choice. The problem is it’s not. Taking risks is never, ever easy, even when the math is that clear. And too often, people, families, alcoholics, and entire societies wait until they’re near a hundred percent chance of failure before they’ll take the steps necessary for recovery.
“I tell this story because it reminds of where we are as a country. You can see it damn near everywhere. Our health care system. Our industrial capacity, our democracy. Our ability to generate power, to have control over our own lives and bodies, to participate in our economy on fair terms. Our ability to provide safe communities without death and carnage.
“I zoom in on health care a lot because it so emblematic of the other crises. The system is obviously dysfunctional. It’s massively unaffordable, and it’s clearly unsustainable. There is a cliff, a point at which it will no longer be possible to even pretend that we have a functional healthcare system, and yet we persisted. Anytime somebody brings up Medicare for All or a national health system, you know what you’ll hear. How are we gonna pay for it? How can we afford this? Everybody with their hair on fire, all over TV, all over radio, because that becomes the narrative. How in the hell are we gonna pay for it????
“The system we have right now, the one that doesn’t cover everyone. The one that leaves eighty percent of our counties in health care deserts and delivers some of the worst life expectancy, infant mortality, and maternal mortality numbers in the developed world. It is the most expensive on the planet projected to cost us more than $72T-trillion dollars over the next ten years. Seventy-two trillion. And nobody’s hair is on fire. Nobody is on TV demanding to know how we’re gonna pay for that.
“So that tells you something. The fear was never about the money. The fear is about the change. The fear is the risk of doing something different, something bold enough to have a chance of saving us. If we put the government back in the business of owning hospitals, if we get rid of the insurance companies, then what happens to the insurance workers? How will it work? We know the system is fundamentally broken. We know it doesn’t work for us. But the fear of doing something else is so strong that we’re stuck in place.
“And it’s not just health care. You hear everybody freak out when the DSA folks say defund the police or abolish ICE or abolish prisons. I think those are stupid slogans, just from a communication standpoint. But look at what we’re doing instead.
“I live in Lenoir City, Tennessee, a little bitty town in the Appalachian foothills, and this place has a police force armed with AR-15s and an armored personnel carrier and all kinds of ‘stuff’, like we’re getting ready for a ground invasion from the Chinese. What we don’t have are well-funded schools, ones where kids can play sports. It costs thousands of dollars for a kid to play in a sporting club here. Thousands of dollars. We don’t have ways to make sure people are housed and healthy.
“And we know there are ways to reduce crime and make communities safer, and it turns out it’s not more policing and more armaments and more violence from our state. It’s more joy. More opportunity. More happiness, more pleasure. Kids with something to do and families that are okay.
“But that idea is scary because we think we have to approach fear with fear. We believe the only way to keep the thing we’re afraid of at bay is to make it more afraid of us than we are of it. That’s the hundred percent option. That’s sitting in the cave while the water comes up because the swim out is risky. In Thailand they had the nerve to flip the coin, and every one of those boys is alive today, and now the whole world calls it obvious. It’ll be obvious what we should’ve done, too. It always is, after.” Thank you, Corbin Trent
Why does Humpty Dumpty love autumn?
Because Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
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, “Those Monthly Payments Go Somewhere.” “Pricing That Can Help Borrowers.” The Commentary’s podcast is available on all major platforms, including Apple and Spotify.
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(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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