Here at San Diego’s MCT Exchange 2026, one topic is, as it is at every mortgage conference, is AI. More specifically, using artificial intelligence to leverage the strengths of existing employees but certainly setting up “guard rails” in rolling it out, and in finite chunks rather than company-wide all at once. Another topic is the ramp up of non-QM in the primary and secondary markets. The book of business is performing well, although is definitely not “cookie cutter”: many

For decades, mortgage lending has operated with an artificial divide at its core. Agency lending lived in one world. Non-QM lived in another. Different guidelines, different systems, different mental models. That separation once made sense, largely because the agencies did not buy non-QM loans and had no reason to. But over time, what began as a structural distinction hardened into operational silos, and those silos quietly introduced real costs across the industry. The cost

Here at San Diego’s MCT Exchange 2026, the hallway chatter is varied. These are capital markets personnel, so things are pragmatic. One topic is Freddie Mac’s earnings : $2.8 billion in income for the fourth quarter of 2025 and $10.7 billion for 2025. Another is large companies becoming larger, exemplified by Tradeweb making an investment in MAXEX and by yesterday’s news of Pennymac entering into an agreement to acquire subservicer Cenlar (sponsor of this week’s podcasts wit

Anyone flying in or near El Paso, Texas, good luck: the FAA has shut down its airspace for 10 days! The government closing down travel… Conspiracy students, take note! Something else to take note of is… If you had something that earned you $3.5 billion in the last three months, would you get rid of it? Me neither. That’s what Fannie Mae earned in the fourth quarter of 2022. In 2025 Fannie earned over $14 billion. Remind me again… is the “system” so broken that the government

It is easy to look at the steady drumbeat of floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, and wildfires and ask whether something fundamentally different is happening or whether we are simply more aware of risks that have always existed. When people talk about once-in-a-century floods arriving every few years, the question is not really theological or political. It is about whether the data supports what our instincts are telling us. And in at least one important way, it does. If you step

The mortgage industry has always been cyclical, but what is unfolding now feels structurally different. Consolidation is no longer just a byproduct of downturns or margin compression; it has become a defining feature of an industry grappling with scale, technology, and shifting consumer expectations. In 2025, this reality became impossible to ignore. Despite a return to modest profitability, roughly 25 basis points for the average independent mortgage bank (IMB), merger and a

By Michele Bodda, President Employer Services, Verification Solutions and Housing at Experian Credit scores feel like a simple thing because we’ve been taught to treat them that way, a three-digit number that opens doors or closes them. But credit scores don’t exist on their own. They are downstream of something far more fundamental: credit data. Without the information in a credit report, there is no score at all. That distinction matters, especially now, as the mortgage ind

I have been in mortgage long enough to watch communication shift from a nice-to-have skill into a real competitive edge. Buyers today can shop lenders as easily as they shop homes, and many do. Not because the first loan officer failed them on rates or accuracy, but because the experience felt off. It felt pushy instead of helpful, scripted instead of conversational, more like being sold than being guided. That reaction matters, especially with Millennial buyers, who are not

“You are allowed to send e-mails to people in prison, as long as you don't attach a file.” I receive my share of emails every day… Let’s open up the mailbox and see what’s going on. “Rob, thank you for publishing Mike Simmons’ primer on UAD 3.6 . Right now, credit is a hot topic, but I am sure appraisals will ‘have their day in the sun’.” You’re welcome, and in fact tomorrow’s L1 show at 11AM PT features Caleb Stuemky with Connexions, a valuation platform designed for AMCs a

By Denny LeCompte, CEO of Portnox Money attracts attackers. And where money flows, personal data follows. The mortgage industry shares that risk profile in spades. Few industries combine such high-value transactions with such concentrated personally identifiable information. Examples include: an $800,000 wire transfer sent to the wrong account; a borrower's data set quietly exfiltrated over months. These are precisely the outcomes attackers design for. And unlike Hollywood-st

Two weeks ago, we talked about "vibe coding" as a mindset shift for loan officers. Not learning to code. Not becoming a software company. Simply using modern AI tools to turn plain-English ideas into live, useful resources faster than traditional marketing workflows allow. This week, I want to make it tangible. I built a live consumer-facing page using nothing more than an AI assistant and our CRM. No developer. No design sprint. No long intake process. The goal wasn't to cre

Late last week my daughter Marie, her two children, and I toured the Ballerina Farms dairy near Park City in Utah. My tech takeaway, as it relates to lenders: there are 150 cows, and two $250,000 robots do the milking machine duties of guiding Bessie, cleaning the udder, using lasers to attach the cups to the teats, pump the milk, weigh it, monitor the butterfat and protein, and bring up the next cow, day after day. That’s automation! Lenders are always analyzing automation f

“If at first you don't succeed, destroy all evidence that you tried.” Lenders can’t. They work with many loans that “try” but don’t work, and have historically unenviable position of passing along costs of loans that don’t fund onto those loans that do. The surest way to lower costs is to increase pull through, and increase fundings to spread out fixed costs. Efficiency! By informal chatter, 2026 is off to a decent start. Sure enough, according to  Curinos’  new proprietary a

For the past several years, housing affordability has been discussed as if it were a force of nature. Everyone agrees it is a problem, everyone studies it, and yet it often feels beyond reach, like something that can only be changed by sweeping legislation or a dramatic shift in interest rates. What feels different right now is that some of the most immediate levers are not theoretical at all. They are administrative. They do not require Congress, but rather decisions. And th

Few phrases are circulating the mortgage industry faster right now than “AI agents.” The promise is sweeping: autonomous systems that can talk to borrowers, take action, and materially change how lenders and servicers operate. But as with every major technology wave, the gap between hype and real impact is wide. What separates signal from noise is not ambition, but execution. An AI agent is not just a chatbot or a scripted workflow. It is a non-deterministic system powered by

“Going to bed early, not leaving my house, not going to a party… my childhood punishments have become my adult goals!” Is one of your goals to live to be 100 years old? Alan Greenspan, the 13th chairman of the Federal Reserve (1987 to 2006), turns 100 in a month. As we know, the Federal Reserve currently finds itself, and its independence from politics, in the crosshairs of legal and political maneuvering. The Trump Administration asked the Supreme Court to allow it to fire F

There is something uniquely clarifying about being on the ground at the Independent Mortgage Bankers Conference. IMB has always been a barometer for where this industry actually is, not where slide decks say it should be. This year, the signal was unmistakable. The mood is more optimistic than it has been in years, attendance is strong, and conversations have shifted from survival to execution. But that optimism is disciplined. Lenders are encouraged, not complacent, and the

For years, I have been asked the same question in different forms. Where does blockchain actually belong in mortgage and housing finance, and where is it being oversold? It is a fair question, especially in an industry that has seen waves of technology arrive with bold promises and limited practical impact. The short answer is this. Blockchain is not here to replace core mortgage systems, and it is not a consumer-facing product story. It is an infrastructure story. When appli

There is a tectonic shift that’s taking place in the appraisal space right now - and it promises to reverberate through every nook and cranny of the lending world. Mortgage brokers, direct lenders, independent mortgage bankers, banks, credit unions, investors, underwriters, reviewers, state review boards (and their investigators), amcs, appraisal educators, plus technology and software providers are all impacted in substantive ways.   On November 2 nd of 2026, all appraisals

For years, a lot of enterprise technology has been built around an idealized vision of how work should happen, not how it actually does. Nowhere is that gap clearer than in mortgage lending. Despite massive investment in software, productivity in core mortgage operations has barely improved over the last seven years. One simple data point says it all: the average fulfillment employee today closes roughly the same number of loans per month as they did in 2018. There was a brie