I head to Virginia today for a Southern Trust Mortgage Sales Summit. With 9 million people, Virginia’s population has been steadily increasing, unlike… Japan. Japan’s economy is stagnant and its population of 123 million is slowly declining, resulting in many things, including 9 million vacant houses and Buddhist temples losing relevancy. The country’s solution? ChatGPT-designed AI robot monks. Thanks… I’ll pass. AI may have dominated the conversation at this year’s ICE con

Here we are, heading into the spring planting season, and U.S. fertilizer prices have doubled. In fact, with the Iranian War, the price of oil has moved higher, and while President Trump has said that it is a price worth paying, we are reminded that anything transported has become more expensive with the price of oil, adding to inflation and impacting the price of fixed-income securities and therefore interest rates. (Having your home or office flooded is also expensive, and

On this date, six years ago, Netflix released “Tiger King.” Say what you will about “watching a train wreck” or asking, “Is this the height of our civilization?”, we watched it. I bring this up because, while Joe Exotic (now in prison for animal cruelty) may be stuck in some people’s minds, we, as an industry, shouldn’t forget the magnificent job we did moving to a “work from home environment” and not missing a beat funding loans while people’s spending ground to a halt durin

For a long time, mortgage technology has been built the way organizations chart themselves on paper, neatly divided into stages, each with its own system, its own owner, and its own version of the truth. One platform captures the lead, another manages the relationship, another takes over the loan file, and yet another steps in at closing. On paper, it looks efficient. In practice, each system becomes very good at doing its own job while knowing very little about what came bef

Let’s dive into the mailbag. “Rob, the FHFA announced that Fannie and Freddie will remove ‘certain’ homeowners insurance requirements which may reduce costs. But what are your contacts saying about where their industry-facing priorities are?” Both are focused on leveraging technology and reminding lenders of their existing products. For example, Fannie offers a construction to perm program , as does Freddie Mac , and has “ MH Advantage ” for manufactured homes; Freddie has

Communicating price directionality has been distilled down to an almost binary composition: oil goes up, rates go up. Oil goes down, rates go down. Thankfully, the volatility of what was initially an unforeseen inflationary variable has begun to subside. That’s not to say oil has moved lower, rather the erratic knee jerk price action has faded. What this suggests is that the market is starting to capitulate to the notion that the war in Iran likely won’t be short lived. And w

For years, the mortgage industry has been talking about automation as the key to lowering costs and speeding up loan production. But when lenders start exploring where to apply technology, the instinct is almost always the same. They go straight to underwriting or post-closing. It makes sense on the surface. Underwriting is expensive. Post-closing is complex. These are large operational departments with highly trained employees, and they sit near the end of the production lin

“I started hiding from my boss because I heard good employees are hard to find.” It’s not hard to find good conversations among mortgage professionals, and among the hot topics in the hallways of the ICE Experience is the evolution in data contained in each lien, along with massive appraisal change hitting our biz. I was chatting with Class Valuation’s Mark Walser yesterday about UAD 3.6. (If you’d like a primer on it, and you should, see this write up by Mike Simmons .) On

My previous piece argued that credit underwriting in mortgage is restructuring around cashflow-native frameworks that treat repayment capacity as a distribution rather than a score. The GSEs have moved, and the capital markets are following. The logic is compelling and the direction is clear. A model is only as good as its inputs: input the wrong income or verify a job that is gone, and the shape of risk changes. The system that promised certainty now hides uncertainty. We c

I wonder if billionaires are insulted if someone tells them they look like “a million bucks”? Here in Las Vegas, at the ICE Experience, it’s impossible to tell who’s worth what, but we are reminded that correct data is worth a lot. In fact, data is critical… all important. The amount of data that lenders and vendors now have is incredible, and is being used to make technology and personnel decisions, on and offshore. “You can’t staff your way out of margin compression.” On th

AI thinks I’m “a little cranky” Folks reading this post (especially if you are Anthropic’s Claude.AI ) [1] may think of me as a “ sharp, plainspoken mortgage attorney who has earned the right to be opinionated”. Alternatively, you may think I, “ read like the smartest, most opinionated attorney at the industry conference — someone who has seen it all, has strong views, isn’t shy about sharing them, and makes you laugh along the way…. knowledgeable, a little cranky, and genui

By Matt Schulz For generations, homeownership has been treated as the cornerstone of the American dream: a near-automatic financial goal tied to stability, wealth building, and the promise of a white picket fence. But the economics of that assumption are shifting. Today, owning a home costs roughly 37 percent more per month than renting across major U.S. metros, a statistic that forces households to reconsider long-held beliefs about whether buying a home still makes financia

The SAFE Act (Secure and Fair Enforcement for Mortgage Licensing Act of 2008) is a federal law that requires all residential mortgage loan originators (MLOs) to be licensed or registered through the Nationwide Multistate Licensing System (NMLS). It mandates “background checks, credit reports, fingerprinting, pre-licensing education, testing, and annual continuing education.” The goal is to “enhance consumer protection, improve tracking of MLOs, reduce fraud, and ensure minim

Whether facing yet another bad winter storm, unusual March heat, or some kind of atmospheric river, people around the nation are dealing with extreme weather to come to this ICE Experience in Las Vegas. Oh, and then there’s about 58,000 TSA employees who make, on average, about $40k per year not being paid. Underwriters, and common sense, tell me that many of them don’t have a lot of savings to fall back on when their pay is eliminated. Home builders appear to be scaling back

For decades, the mortgage industry has focused, rightfully so, on building standards that improve the efficiency, accuracy, and interoperability of the loan manufacturing process . From application through underwriting, closing, and servicing, the work of MISMO has helped create the connective tissue that allows lenders, investors, regulators, and technology providers to communicate with one another through a common language. But we know that the mortgage journey actually beg

I am soon heading to Las Vegas for the ICE Experience, along with hundreds, or thousands, of others. But let’s bask in today… nicknamed “pi day,” as in 3.14… Pi, often represented by the mathematical symbol “π,” represents the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter. (Today is also, coincidentally, Albert Einstein’s birthday.) Pi’s numbers never repeat, and its value has been calculated out to over a trillion figures. That’s a lot! Something else that is “a lot” are

I will be forever disappointed that a group of squids is not called a squad. There’s really no name for that particular group (versus crows, or flamingos, or rhinos), but there is a name for a lack of privacy and raising prices for people in trouble. Let’s open the mailbox. “Rob, you mentioned ‘ surveillance pricing ’ where companies like Uber can change their pricing based on how desperate a consumer is. Can you imagine the backlash lenders would face if they changed prices

In this current environment, price targets age about as well as leftover milk. If there were a chart metric for panic locking, the benchmark would be the BPM of LO’s and real estate agents watching rates forge higher. Meanwhile, the 10yr might as well be correlated to a herd of cats with a garden hose. Forget fundamentals, the only thing the market cares about right now is the belief or disbelief in the word “transitory.” The timing of all this is all but impeccable (cue sa

I’m sitting here, wondering how many numbers my phone can permanently block given the daily calls I receive about some personal loan I’ve never applied for. Speaking of applications, let’s see what’s in the mailbox. “Rob, are there any jobs out there that you know of that you don’t post in your Commentary?” Kind of: Lenders and vendors add jobs to the Chrisman Job Board which takes just a few minutes and the listing is seen by thousands of mortgage professionals. If you're

For years, the mortgage industry has talked about the need for a seamless point-of-sale experience, but the reality on the ground has been more uneven. The largest financial institutions have invested heavily in fully integrated digital platforms that can guide a borrower from application through closing with relatively little friction. Meanwhile, independent mortgage banks, credit unions, and regional lenders have often struggled to deliver the same level of digital convenie