The national home price index has become one of those gauges everybody watches even while knowing full well that real estate is local. One metro can be surging while another is rolling over, and sometimes that divergence exists within the same state. But the broader national trend right now is unmistakable. The market is weakening and continuing to weaken. Year-over-year appreciation has steadily decelerated, with really only one bright patch left in the country, the Midwest.

For much of the past two years, the mortgage industry has operated with one eye on the present and the other fixed firmly on the hope of a return to the market conditions that defined the post pandemic boom. The assumption underneath many strategic decisions was that lower rates would eventually arrive, refinance activity would reappear, margins would recover, and the industry could resume operating under a familiar playbook. Increasingly, however, that assumption is giving w

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 d

Q: With midterms approaching and housing affordability still a major concern, do you expect the Trump administration to step up its focus on the mortgage market? A: There’s already a noticeable push from Washington, and not just from one party. Policymakers across the aisle are trying to address affordability, which is encouraging. The recent executive actions and announcements from the Federal Housing Finance Agency are part of that effort, and they’re tackling substantive i

For much of the past century, the concept of the “starter home” served as the foundational entry point into homeownership, offering a predictable path in which households could save, purchase modestly, and gradually trade up over time. That model relied on a housing market where entry-level inventory was abundant and prices moved in relative alignment with income growth. Today, those conditions no longer hold. Home prices have persistently outpaced wages, supply remains struc

At first glance, “lender choice” sounds like an unambiguously positive development. More choice typically implies more competition resulting in better pricing and improved outcomes for borrowers. In the context of mortgage credit, however, the reality is more complex. What appears to be a straightforward modernization of credit scoring may, in practice, introduce inefficiencies, shift risk in unintended ways, and ultimately increase borrower costs. For more than two decades,

The rush to embrace and adopt artificial intelligence technology solutions to make mortgage operations faster, better and leaner has primarily focused on operational cost savings. Some lenders are entranced by the vision of the promise of reduced labor costs, increased operational efficiency, and modernization. There is also an inherent concern about competitive disadvantage as lenders see their peers adopting new AI tools where they have none. I have addressed AI regulatory

The F-16 was designed to be aerodynamically unstable. Without fly-by-wire systems making continuous corrections, the aircraft literally could not fly. This instability was not a flaw but a deliberate design choice. An unstable airframe, properly controlled, is extraordinarily agile, always on the edge of chaos, continuously caught by a system that manages motion, not state. The instability is the feature, and it shows. Over half a century since entering service, the F-16 rema

Walk through enough mortgage operations and a pattern emerges: lenders have applied automation with considerable sophistication to the tasks that needed it least, and left the moments that matter most to chance. The result is an experience that feels seamless until it suddenly doesn't. And when it breaks, it breaks at exactly the wrong time. This is not an argument against automation. Under sustained margin compression and declining origination volumes, cost discipline is not

“Friction” has quickly become the mortgage industry’s favorite word, but like most buzzwords, it risks being overused and under examined. Everyone wants to remove it, from origination to capital markets to post-closing, but few stop to ask where it actually lives or why it persists. The reality is that friction is not a singular flaw; it’s the visible output of deeper design issues. It shows up in rising costs to originate, in employee frustration, and in the quiet inefficien

For years, mortgage lenders have optimized the wrong end of the funnel. Entire operating models are built around application-to-submission ratios, pull-through rates, lock efficiency, and funding velocity. The industry has become exceptionally good at measuring what happens after a borrower is “in.” But the uncomfortable truth is this: most of the damage is already done before the application ever exists. The real leakage point -- the one that quietly drains revenue, distorts

For lenders, the most important metric is often the one they do not measure. For all the dashboards tracking pull-through, pipeline conversion, lock fallout, and funded loan volume, there is a gap at the very beginning of the mortgage funnel that continues to erode performance in ways most organizations do not fully see. That gap is application abandonment: the borrowers who start an application with intent, engage just enough to indicate demand, and then disappear before eve

For nearly anyone working in the residential mortgage industry since the mid-1980s, our industry has been shaped by a single, powerful force: the refinance cycle. Rates fell, borrowers refinanced, volumes surged, and the system reset. That pattern repeated itself as the ten-year treasury rate consistently and repetitively fell during a 40-year cycle becoming so ingrained that it came to define how lenders built their businesses, how capital flowed through the system, and how

The mortgage industry has long been defined by the paradox of being both highly standardized and deeply manual, governed by rigid guidelines yet executed through labor-intensive processes that leave ample room for inconsistency and friction. This is most evident in underwriting, where highly trained professionals sift through stacks of borrower documents (i.e., pay stubs, tax returns, bank statements) reconciling data and translating findings into conditions that drive the lo

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 i

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

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

There’s a moment most mornings, when it’s just me, a cup of coffee that’s already going cold, and a screen full of loans, emails, and conversations that need to be turned into something coherent before the rest of the industry wakes up. It’s not glamorous. No one is posting about it. But that hour tells you almost everything you need to know about this market. The people still doing the work, still refining their process, still picking up the phone when it would be easier not

My dad had a paper route growing up. Rain, fog, cold, it didn’t matter. He showed up, threw the papers, moved on. No audience, no applause, just consistency. He’s told that story more times than I can count, and for a long time I didn’t think much of it. Somewhere along the way (probably around 4:00 a.m. staring at a screen editing a podcast for the thousandth time), it clicked. That’s the whole business, and its blueprint. Show up, deliver, do it again tomorrow. If you do th

March is the only month this industry feels bad about what it does to women. The other 11, it doesn't think about us at all. I've been in mortgage long enough to know the calendar, long enough to smile in the right photos and say the right things and be visible enough to matter and small enough not to threaten anyone. I learned that early. Every woman in this industry does, because the alternative has a cost and we aren't the ones who decide when it gets paid. It was March, a