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

The mortgage process still treats key parts of homeownership as separate conversations: borrowers focus on interest rates and monthly payments, while insurance, taxes, and other costs often appear later as surprises that reshape the true cost of owning a home. Yet the economics of homeownership have shifted dramatically in recent years, and that fragmentation is becoming harder for consumers to navigate. One solution is to integrate related financial products like insurance d

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

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

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

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