Feb. 28: The Fed can't control the weather; vendor news; deals in the secondary markets; Saturday Spotlight: Prajna.ai

Chairman Powell and the Fed, tame inflation! But can you? Since the pandemic began, grocery prices have gone up about 30 percent. You can blame a slew of factors, including supply chain disruptions and tariffs. Egg prices spiked last year due to bird flu but fortunately have come down. 90 percent of U.S. bananas come from out of the country, and prices are up 7 percent over the last year due to tariffs. Coffee prices are up nearly 20 percent due to droughts in Brazil and Vietnam. Climate change is largely to thank for the scarcity of cocoa beans that led prices in 2025 to peak at more than $10,000 per ton, almost five times what the price was in the summer of 2022. The climate “vector” in cocoa is easy to understand. Longer droughts, extreme heat, unpredictable rainfall, and insect-driven infection amplified by climate change have all played a part in decimating cocoa yields, with one nonprofit research group’s 2025 study finding that most of West Africa’s cocoa-growing regions now experience six additional weeks of extreme heat per year over the last decade. Do you prefer protein to sweets walking through Costco? A series of fires across the U.S. Plains has delivered a blow to cattle ranchers as what is already a smaller-than-usual herd faces new challenges on the range. Recently the Ranger Road Fire has burned an estimated 283,283 acres and is just 65 percent contained. That’s only the largest of the fires that have burned thousands more acres in Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas. Beyond the direct cattle losses, hundreds of thousands of acres of grass that would ordinarily feed the cattle were burned off the plains. Beef prices are already at record highs, notching $6.75 per pound in January, up 22 percent from a year ago.

Saturday Spotlight: Prajna.ai

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“AI-powered texting that turns stale leads into funded loans.”

In 3–5 sentences, describe your company

Prajna.ai is an AI platform built specifically for mortgage lenders and financial institutions to scale customer engagement using intelligent SMS and voice agents. Retail loan officers, consumer-direct teams, and marketing groups rely on Prajna to revive expired pre-approvals, re-engage past borrowers, and qualify HELOC opportunities at scale.

Founded in 2023, Prajna is a member of the NVIDIA Inception and Google for Startups AI programs, giving it access to advanced AI infrastructure and technical expertise that accelerate innovation. Since launch, Prajna has powered thousands of campaigns and handled tens of thousands of borrower conversations, consistently moving borrowers from first text → application → funded loan.

Lenders are deploying Prajna’s AI-assisted texting for appointment scheduling, borrower qualification, and compliant outreach at scale. Campaigns include automated STOP/DNC management, opt-out handling, and positive-response detection, ensuring safe and effective engagement. Results have shown strong borrower response rates across nurture, refinance, and pre-approval campaigns, converting dormant databases into meaningful loan opportunities.

Tell us about your employee growth

Prajna fosters a hands-on innovation culture where product and engineering teams experiment with new AI tools and workflows in collaboration with clients. Employees benefit from access to cutting-edge training and resources through NVIDIA and Google partnerships, with internal projects often becoming production features — from multilingual service agents to compliance automation. This approach ensures employees are continually developing while directly shaping client outcomes.

How do you contribute to culture?

Prajna is a hybrid-first company with hubs in Chicago and distributed team members nationwide. Regular offsites and summits bring employees together to strengthen relationships and align around the mission. What Prajna is most proud of is the depth of its customer partnerships. The company works shoulder-to-shoulder with lenders to launch new AI campaigns, embedding as an extension of client teams and aligning around borrower outcomes.

If you’re ready to turn stale pipelines into funded business, connect with Prajna.ai to design your first AI-assisted texting campaign.

(For more information on having your firm’s extracurricular activities, employee growth, and your charitable side featured, contact Chrisman LLC’s Anjelica Nixt.) 

Third party provider morsels

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There are lots of wiz-bang products out there. Let’s take a snapshot of who’s doing what.

Newrez announced a partnership with Valon to bring their industry-first, AI-native mortgage servicing operating system to the Newrez platform. This move will enhance customer experience for more than 4 million Newrez homeowners. Read the Press Release for complete details.

As more than 50 percent of Google searches now end without a click, and AI tools like ChatGPT reshape how borrowers find lenders, RankWriters released The Great Equalizer: The AI & Search Engine Optimization Playbook for Borrower Acquisition, a comprehensive guide that shows mortgage lenders how to capture demand across traditional search, AI overviews, and generative engines. The 49-page guide addresses a critical gap: while organic search generates 2.7x more mortgage traffic than paid search, most lenders still rely on tactics built for keyword-stuffed content rather than AI-readable, intent-driven pages that answer actual borrower questions.

Maestro AI, a vertical artificial intelligence (AI)-powered platform built for mortgage origination, announced it has raised $1.2 million in pre-seed funding. The round was led by New Stack Ventures, with participation from Family VC, ZFO, Roark's Drift, and a group of local angel investors. The capital will accelerate go-to-market efforts, expand platform capabilities, and scale adoption across the mortgage industry. Maestro AI was founded and is led by mortgage industry veteran and serial founder David Rogove, who previously built and sold mortgage fintech company Wemlo to RE/MAX Holdings, Inc. The leadership team includes Chief Technology Officer Sugi Venugeethan, who brings deep expertise in AI agent frameworks, Chief Operating Officer Chelsea Balak, who previously worked alongside Rogove at Wemlo, and Joe Roos, a local angel investor and family office CIO at ZFO, who provides strategic finance support.

MAXEX announced a strategic investment and commercial partnership with Tradeweb, a leading global operator of electronic marketplaces across fixed income. Together, they are advancing the institutional market for non-agency residential mortgage loans. This collaboration brings together MAXEX’s centralized digital mortgage exchange and clearinghouse with Tradeweb’s global electronic trading network, representing a meaningful step toward a more institutional, transparent, and scalable market structure for residential private credit.

WFG National Title Insurance Company has launched a comprehensive, technology-enabled FinCEN reporting solution powered by FinCENRealEstateReport.com to help title agents, attorneys, and settlement partners comply with the new nationwide requirements for certain all-cash residential transactions involving legal entities and trusts. For details, view this article.

Borrower Relationship Management is a new addition to Vertyx’s end-to-end mortgage servicing platform that enables servicers and investors to identify and track retention and recapture opportunities earlier. Using those opportunities, servicing and retention teams can then run outreach campaigns promoting engagement across all borrower touchpoints, including within the borrower portal. Investors using Borrower Relationship Management are able to surface data insights to help provide a clear view of each mortgage’s return and risk profile, enabling well-informed investment decisions to boost returns across their portfolios. 

MISMO announced complimentary Beta access to Model Explorer, a key feature of MISMO Link, a brand-new, web-based platform designed to modernize how MISMO standards are explored, developed, validated, and implemented across the mortgage ecosystem.

Deals in the secondary markets

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Is any company going to manufacture something that has no buyer? Deals in the secondary market happen every day in the mortgage world and help determine rates that borrowers see. Who’s doing what?

Angel Oak Mortgage Solutions is bringing AOMT 2026-2 Mortgage Trust, a $272.2 million RMBS transaction backed by 584 primarily fixed-rate home loans, to market, with closing expected February 27 and final maturity in 2071. The deal features roughly 10 tranches across classes A, M, and B, with AAA coupons around 4.83 percent to 5.04 percent, AA near 5.19 percent, and A-rated at 5.52 percent; Fitch and KBRA assign ratings down the stack to BBB/BB/B categories. Goldman Sachs leads the transaction alongside Bank of America, Deutsche Bank, and JPMorgan. The collateral pool reflects moderate leverage with a 70.6 percent weighted average LTV, strong borrower credit quality with a 757 WA FICO and substantial reserves, and is fully current with third-party reviews graded A or B. About 52 percent of the loans are non-QM, with the remainder exempt from ability-to-repay rules, and servicing will be handled by Select Portfolio Servicing with Newrez as master servicer.

Freddie Mac announced its 2026 issuance plans for its Single-Family credit risk transfer programs after completing nearly $5.1 billion of STACR and ACIS issuance in 2025, which provided credit protection on $163 billion of single-family mortgage balances and brought total portfolio credit enhancement coverage to about 62 percent. During 2025, Freddie Mac also executed tender offers and calls on seasoned STACR and ACIS transactions that had largely deleveraged and no longer provided capital relief, while reaffirming its commitment to evolving the CRT market through broader investor participation and improved data transparency. Since launching the first agency CRT transaction in 2013, Freddie Mac has transferred roughly $118 billion of credit risk on more than $3.6 trillion of mortgages, and it plans to issue one to two STACR and ACIS transactions per quarter in 2026 while continuing tenders and evaluating calls as eligible.

Freddie Mac issued $68 billion in multifamily securities in 2025, transferring interest rate, liquidity and credit risk from U.S. taxpayers to private investors while providing critical liquidity to support affordable rental housing nationwide. The year included $32.6 billion in K-Deals and a record $28.1 billion in Multi PC issuances, alongside strong activity across SB-Deals, M- and ML-Deals, Q-Deals, and record volumes of structured credit risk notes and insurance policies, reflecting a focus on flexibility, efficiency, and market responsiveness. Since 2009, Freddie Mac has settled $805 billion in multifamily securities, securitizing more than 90 percent of the loans it purchases and reinforcing its role as a leading, safety-focused provider of capital to the multifamily housing market, where the vast majority of funded units remain affordable to low- and moderate-income households.

Morgan Stanley's non-QM RMBS raised $397.5 million. Morgan Stanley's latest non-prime residential mortgage-backed securities (RMBS) will raise $397.5 million through the Morgan Stanley Residential Mortgage Loan Trust, 2026-NQM1. The transaction issued the debt through a mixed, pro-rata and sequential structure of about 11 tranches of class A, M and B notes, according to Kroll Bond Rating Agency. Senior notes will repay investors on a pro rata basis, while the mezzanine and subordinate classes will follow a sequential structure, KBRA said. All the notes, which are fixed, are slated to mature in December 2070.

Various lenders, which include many small and unrated entities, originated the 832 underlying loans in the collateral pool, and underwrote them using non-traditional income verification, KBRA said. The non-traditional underwriting was applied to 79 percent of the loans in the pool, the rating agency said.

Morgan Stanley Mortgage Capital Holdings aggregated the loans, however, and sold them to the pool. Also, all the loans also underwent third-party due diligence reviews, KBRA said.

All the loans are first lien and primarily (78.6%) finance single-family homes and planned unit developments. Condominiums and two- to four-unit multifamily properties. On average, they have an average balance of $477,834, KBRA said.

On a weighted average (WA) basis, the loans have a term of 362 months, and a coupon of 7.21 percent. Just 9.9 percent of the loans in the pool have an interest-only period. Borrowers have a FICO credit score of 747, and an original loan-to-value ratio of 71.5 percent.

That moderate leverage reflects the quality of RMBS pools from recent issuance years. Borrowers have a non-zero WA annual income of $1 million, with liquid reserves of $594,348.

The pool has a debt service coverage ratio of 1.21 percent, KBRA said.

Years ago, a New Orleans lawyer sought an FHA loan for a client. He was told the loan would be granted if he could prove satisfactory title to the parcel of property being offered as collateral. The title to the property dated back to 1803, which took the Lawyer three months to track down. After sending the information to the FHA, he received the following reply:

(Actual letter): “Upon review of your letter adjoining your client’s loan application, we note that the request is supported by an Abstract of Title. While we compliment the able manner in which you have prepared and presented the application, we must point out that you have only cleared title to the proposed collateral property back to 1803. Before final approval can be accorded, it will be necessary to clear the title back to its origin.”

Annoyed, the lawyer responded as follows:

(Actual Letter): "Your letter regarding title in Case No. 189156 has been received. I note that you wish to have title extended further than the 194 years covered by the present application.

I was unaware that any educated person in this country, particularly those working in the property area, would not know that Louisiana was purchased, by the U.S., from France in 1803, the year of origin identified in our application. For the edification of uninformed FHA bureaucrats, the title to the land prior to U.S. ownership was obtained from France, which had acquired it by Right of Conquest from Spain. The land came into the possession of Spain by Right of Discovery made in the year 1492 by a sea captain named Christopher Columbus, who had been granted the privilege of seeking a new route to India by the Spanish monarch, Isabella.

The good queen, Isabella, being a pious woman and almost as careful about titles as the FHA, took the precaution of securing the blessing of the Pope before she sold her jewels to finance Columbus’ expedition. Now the Pope, as I’m sure you may know, is the emissary of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, and God, it is commonly accepted, created this world. Therefore, I believe it is safe to presume that God also made that part of the world called Louisiana.

God, therefore, would be the owner of origin and His origins date back to before the beginning of time, the world as we know it AND the FHA. I hope you find God’s original claim to be satisfactory. Now, may we have our damned loan?"

He got the loan.

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. This month’s piece is titled, “Helping Borrowers in a Market Defined by Complexity and Change.” 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.)