Nov. 8: Builders & unsold homes; high bal primer; vendor news; Saturday Spotlight: Foundation Mortgage; old person joke
“What did they say? Can you rewind it?” Let’s start with something totally non-mortgage-related but applies to nearly each and every one of us. A new survey found that 34 percent of U.S. adults (including, somewhat counterintuitively, 40 percent of those aged 18 to 44) always or often use closed captions when watching television shows or movies. The accessibility setting has gone thoroughly mainstream, and young people adopting subtitles as the norm is an interesting wrinkle. It seems the primary reason that 55 percent of subtitle-users cited is “wanting to catch every word,” which may be more difficult if people are watching something while also doing something else. About four out of 10 survey participants cited that they use them to watch a foreign movie or television show, which does make sense given the recent rise of both anime as well as foreign-language content from South Korea. Strange times…
Saturday Spotlight: Foundation Mortgage Corporation
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“Our mortgage solutions go beyond normal industry offerings.”
In 3-5 sentences, describe your company (when was it founded and why, what it does, where, recent growth and plans for near-term future growth).
Foundation Mortgage Corporation, an independently owned mortgage bank, was founded in 1998 and is headquartered in Miami Beach, FL. In October 2022, a new owner and executive management team joined, introducing a Wholesale channel in January 2023 and a Correspondent channel in April 2024. Leveraging the new leadership’s extensive experience in secondary markets, credit, and operations, the company transitioned from a retail mortgage banker to a rapidly expanding Non-QM Wholesale and Correspondent Lender. Over the past two years, Foundation has strategically refined its business model, achieving better execution and accelerated growth. In 2024, the company expanded its product offerings, including a portfolio Second Lien product developed through an agreement with one of the top 20 banks worldwide.
Tell us about what type of volunteer work employees are encouraged to engage in, or charities your company supports, and why.
Foundation Mortgage is deeply committed to the belief that education can transform lives. Over the years, the company has supported numerous educational initiatives, including helping gifted individuals access higher education and sponsoring schools in underprivileged areas of Central America to keep their facilities open during COVID. Additionally, Foundation sponsors children through Compassion International, actively promotes and supports foster homes and adoption services, and contributes to The Miami Project to Cure Paralysis. These efforts reflect the company’s dedication to creating opportunities and improving lives through education, healthcare, and community support.
What does your company do to help elevate your employees’ growth? Describe any mentoring programs, outside classes or training, in-house training. How does the company help people develop?
Foundation Mortgage values its employees as the cornerstone of its success and is dedicated to their growth and development. Each employee is paired with a senior mentor, independent of their manager, to provide personalized guidance and professional development opportunities. This mentorship program fosters skill enhancement, career advancement, and a supportive environment for employees to thrive.
Tell us how your company maintains its culture in a work-from-home environment, or how you plan on bringing employees back into the office, if applicable.
Foundation Mortgage operates as a 98 percent remote company with no plans to require employees to return to the office. The company believes exceptional talent often lies beyond its geographical boundaries and values enabling employees to remain rooted in their communities, where they have established lives, schools, and social connections. To maintain a strong culture, Foundation fosters online engagement through activities like virtual bingo, where numbers are emailed during the workday. The company thrives with self-starters and self-motivated employees, who often perform more efficiently in a remote environment.
Things you are most proud of that don’t have to do with sales.
At Foundation Mortgage, we take immense pride in our people, culture, and strong sense of community. Our "can-do" attitude and the way we support each other go beyond being colleagues: we truly operate as friends and family. This supportive environment is fostered from the top down, with senior leadership deeply committed to preserving this culture as we continue to grow.
(For more information on having your firm’s extracurricular activities, employee growth, and your charitable side featured, contact Chrisman LLC’s Anjelica Nixt.)
High balance loan pricing primer
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“Rob, do you know what happens behind the scenes with government high balance pricing loans? It comes and goes, but over time it seems like majority of lenders are capped at about 101.5 on the rate sheet leaving points to be paid by borrower for most lender paid comp plans. And in a retail environment like I’m in, where we can’t go borrower paid, there’s no way out other than try and sell an expensive loan. Hoping you can shine some light on this and better yet, what are some of the ways a lender can offer better price to the consumer on gov high balance loans?”
Basically, you’re absolutely right, there is a huge price disparity on government high bal, particularly VA. You just have to put yourself in the investor’s shoes. High bal loans typically prepay (in this case refinance) much faster than smaller loans amounts, so if a loan is only going to be around for 6-12 months why would an investor pay more than what they expect to recoup in payments made by the borrower. The longer it’s going to be around the more they pay. With the different things going on in the market the odds of a VA high bal refinancing quickly are pretty high.
There is also still a lot of uncertainty with furloughed and unemployed borrowers. With VA in particular the seller/servicer of the loan is only reimbursed 25 percent of the unpaid balance if the borrower goes into default and the servicer has to foreclose. That’s a lot of money to pony up, especially when most VAs are at 100 percent LTV. And overall, from an investor’s perspective, if you’re an investor, why would you take on more risk if you don’t have to? I know it’s not always easy to tell a borrower that, but this is the case more often than not.
Transcript data update
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Thank you to Curt K. who points out that, “I’ve seen notes in your commentary during the shutdown that infers IRS responsiveness to 4506-C or 8821 transcript requests is now delayed. That is not the case. All transcript data is being processed in normal turn-times.” Thank you!
Builders have too much inventory
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The Wall Street Journal reports that “Builders Are Offering Mortgage-Rate Discounts. Home Buyers Aren’t Biting…. New homes are sitting unsold, despite builders using sweeteners to shift inventory. America’s biggest builders are struggling to sell homes even when they offer buyers a 4% mortgage. Their experience suggests rate cuts alone won’t be enough to boost weak sales in the wider housing market.
“The number of completed but unsold new homes has reached levels last seen in the summer of 2009, data from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis shows. At the end of last year, builders were confident that sales would recover in 2025 and built tens of thousands of units to have enough supply for the spring-buying season. But demand didn’t pick up, and more homes sat unsold.
Service provider/vendor products
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There are some snazzy programs and software for lenders in both the primary (dealing with borrowers) and secondary (dealing with investors) markets. Let’s take a random look at who’s doing what out there, in no particular order.
By the way, the Chrisman Marketplace has become the centralized hub for vendors and service providers across the mortgage industry to be viewed by lenders in a very cost-effective manner. To reserve your place or learn more, contact Jake at info@chrismancommentary.com.
Argyle announced the launch of Doc VOI, a new paystub and W-2-based income verification report integrated with Freddie Mac’s AIM Check API. When direct payroll or banking connections aren’t available to verify a loan applicant's income, Doc VOI (verification of income) replaces manual review with a fast, automated process that cuts costs, expands rep and warrant relief, and speeds up loan decisions. Doc VOI automates income verification from uploaded paystubs and W-2s, using optimal character recognition to extract key income data, then submits that data to Freddie Mac’s Loan Product Advisor® AIM Check for assessment. Results return within minutes and flow directly into the lender’s loan origination system.
FirstClose™, Inc. announced the completion of an additional round of equity funding, which was led by existing investor Lateral Investment Management, based in San Mateo, California. The latest round builds on Lateral’s initial 2022 investment and underscores continued investor confidence in FirstClose’s strategy, technology, and leadership team. The funds will support ongoing product development and strategic initiatives as the company strengthens its position within the home equity and mortgage lending markets.
Dark Matter Technologies just announced a new integration that brings full-scale eClosing capabilities into its Empower LOS through Wolters Kluwer’s eOriginal® ClosingCenter and eAsset® Management Platform. It’s a meaningful move for lenders because it closes the loop on digital mortgage closings giving them a single, streamlined system for managing everything from hybrid to fully remote closings, while maintaining compliance and accelerating secondary market delivery. For borrowers, it means faster, more transparent experiences from start to finish.
AI-powered platform, Friday Harbor announced that its AI Originator Assistant can now evaluate loan files against not only baseline program guidelines, but also the lender and investor overlays that ultimately shape salability and risk. By embedding these requirements directly into the workflow of frontline originators, the platform gives lenders greater control over credit quality and secondary market execution. Importantly, Friday Harbor’s team configures and maintains each lender’s overlays for them, free of charge, ensuring ongoing accuracy without adding staff workload.
Tavant issued a press release launching their new end-to-end Agentic AI platform, TOUCHLESS. The mortgage origination platform features intelligent AI Agents, including MAYA, which provide borrowers real-time feedback during the application process, communicates with other AI Agents to ensure forms are completed accurately and supplemental materials are collected immediately, as well as provide guidance on loan products and services. Tavant’s new platform, TOUCHLESS featuring MAYA, compresses cycle times, automates the entire process from lead to funded loan, improves the borrower experience, drives lead conversion, and reduces origination cost.
Movement Mortgage, a top 10 national retail lender, has completed a sweeping three-year transformation of its technology stack, culminating in the successful launch of its loan origination system (LOS). The milestone marks the final phase of a multi-year initiative to re-platform and unify the company’s core systems, including all data and infrastructure, cyber security, finance, capital markets, customer service, marketing automation, CRM, point of sale, and finally LOS. The new system for sales and operations, branded MORE LOS, is powered by Blue Sage and tightly integrated with key partners, including Salesforce, Polly, and Docutech. The new platform, which replaces a patchwork of legacy tools, was designed on a scalable data and AI enablement framework to accelerate efficiency and collaboration to deliver a seamless experience for loan officers, operations teams, and borrowers.
iEmergent has released three new market intelligence dashboards that give lenders immediate visibility into competitive benchmarking, market trends and broker performance. The HMDA Analysis, Market Analysis and Broker Profile dashboards turn vast mortgage and housing data into clear, actionable insights. Designed with intuitive filters and built-in collaboration tools, they empower banks, credit unions, and independent mortgage banks to identify growth opportunities and build stronger partnerships without technical complexity.
Alpha7X, the mortgage industry’s first agentic AI utility infrastructure that announced its official launch. The patent-pending platform empowers lenders, servicers, custodians, and investors to orchestrate and execute data reviews up to seven times faster, turning fragmented information into a single, intelligent source of truth. Alpha7X’s agentic AI platform eliminates manual “stare and compare” work by autonomously reconciling data and documents at the field level. The system establishes a verifiable source of truth, issues audit logs and compliance scores, and reruns checks automatically whenever data changes. The platform keeps human reviewers in the loop for exceptions while handling the bulk of the execution work itself.
(No, I didn’t overhear this at a mortgage conference.)
I’m so tired of hearing "Our grandparents could buy a house on one salary, but now we can’t even afford rent on two!”
Yeah, because Grandma wasn’t blowin’ half her paycheck on $12 iced coffee and avocado toast, that’s why!
Back then, if they wanted coffee, they made it at home. With grounds so strong it could remove rust. You didn’t drink it… you survived it.
And Grandma wasn’t out there “brunchin’.” You think she had time for brunch? No! She was at home, cooking something called whatever’s left in the house.
And don’t even bring up Uber Eats.
These people today are crying about money while living in a 4-bedroom house with two SUVs, six streaming services, and matching sleeve tattoos. You think Grandpa had a tattoo? Yeah, it said “Korea, 1951.” And it came with nightmares, not realistic shading.
Oh, don’t even get me started on the kids. “We can’t make ends meet, but Brayden needs the new iPhone!” No, he doesn’t! You’re giving a $1100 phone to a kid who still eats glue and boogers.
When we were kids, the family phone hung on the wall. It had a cord long enough to jump rope with, and if you wanted privacy, you had to go stand in the pantry. And somehow, we survived.
And the TV? There was one. One. It was in the living room, and Dad controlled it. If he wanted to watch bowling, guess what? You liked bowling. Now every room’s got a 65-inch screen, the baby’s got an iPad, and you’re sitting there wondering why you can’t afford rent. Because you’re living like rappers, that’s why!
Grandpa wasn’t out here leasing Teslas and buying $12 smoothies called “Detox Sunrise.” He was driving a truck that sounded like thunder and smelled like oil and cigarettes.
They lived within their means. Whatever Grandpa’s paycheck bought, that’s what they had. They didn’t try to keep up with the Joneses. They were just trying to keep the kids fed and a roof over their heads.
So yeah, Grandpa could buy a house on one salary. But he also didn’t have 47 subscriptions and emotional-support crystals. He had one support system, Grandma, who told him to suck it up and mow the yard.
Now folks are broke, tired, and stressed… and it’s not because of inflation… it’s because y’all keep ordering tacos from DoorDash like you’re royalty.
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, “Rates Drop, Pipelines Pop: Don’t Let Fulfillment Flop.” 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 2025 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.)