It seems like the only constant in this industry is change. In my almost 40 years within this industry (yes I started when I was seven years old), I have seen plenty of change. But what strikes me is that the pace of change accelerates more quickly every day. It took sixty years for records to become obsolete. It took only twenty years for cassettes to fall by the wayside. Now we have the successor to CDs—DVDs and they are becoming obsolete as well. The power of computing doubles every eighteen months. Interest rates and the stock markets are more volatile each year.
And all of this was true before the pandemic hit. Nothing changed our business more suddenly than COVID. It accelerated technological change as we had to adjust to doing business remotely. But it also charged us into the biggest refinance market of them all and a real estate market like no other as well. Never before could we not find enough homes for sale for our borrowers and never before have prices risen so drastically—even during the real estate boom of fifteen years ago.
As the refinance boom fades, we are likely to see even more mergers and acquisitions, which points to even more change. Nothing is more daunting than working for an independent mortgage banker for ten years and then being part of a huge bank overnight (or the opposite).