How could it be that there was no one from the federal government attending the 2025 Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA) Annual Convention and Expo, an event featuring possibly the most highly regulated business in America?
This became a reality when the government closed as of Oct. 1 until further notice, or until lawmakers get their collective acts together and find a way to reopen the doors and turn the lights back on. So this year, nobody from the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) was in Las Vegas to discuss the White House’s plan to cut the government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) loose from under Uncle Sam’s thumb.
There wasn’t anyone from Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac on hand, nor anyone from the U.S. Department of Housing & Urban Development (HUD), Federal Housing Administration (FHA), Ginnie Mae, the Department of Veteran’s Affairs (VA), or USDA's Rural Housing Service. All are generally regular participants at the annual gathering … but not this year.
Some brokerage firms are becoming larger, “almost like giant mortgage bankers,” noted Mike Fontaine of Plaza Home Mortgage.
Years ago, the typical broker was a one or may two or three-man shop. Now, says Fontaine, “there are a lot more mega brokers” 一 firms like NEXA, C-2, and Barrett 一 who aren’t stuck offering the products of a single lender.
“They have access to a lot more correspondents; they think that gets them a lot more clout when their teams calls on real estate agents,” adds Fontaine.
It’s a different business model, he says, for a changing environment.
The Deluxe Corporation doesn’t just sell checks anymore. Besides still selling checks to both consumers and banks, the company has morphed into a credit solutions firm, one aspect of which is selling pre-screened credit triggers.
For the most part, of course, trigger leads are about to be banned, but while Deluxe and other sellers are awaiting guidance from the credit bureaus as to how to proceed under the new law, Deluxe has quietly built a model that helps predict the likelihood that people will be in the market for a mortgage within the next three or four-months.
The model, said Deluxe Corporation Strategic Sales Executive Adria Liss, is built on a database the company calls a “data lake.”
It takes longer than you might think to get technology platforms up and running to the point where they can be rolled out to paying clients.
When Larry Huff and John Benjamin founded Wilqo five years ago, they figured it would take three years tops to get into the market.
“We were grotesquely wrong,” said Huff.
Now, their POS/LOS platform is just coming to market, and their first customer will go live in January. Pilgrim Mortgage, which serves borrowers throughout Texas, is adopting Wilqo’s Charlie system to replace its existing LOS and POS systems.
With a unified, AI-driven platform, Pilgrim aims to eliminate workflow inefficiencies and accelerate cycle times.
“Mortgage lending shouldn’t be held hostage by outdated systems,” said Benjamin, explaining that Charlie combines loan origination, point-of-sale automation, and analytics into one seamless platform.
Jeremy Davis’s first job was as a “gofer” for a loan officer when he was in college, but he was hooked on the mortgage business.
Now he is president of mortgage at Southern Bancorp in Nashville, where he devotes his career to serving underserved markets in mostly rural Southern cities and towns.
At one time, he would pick up documents for the lender and take “drive-by” polaroid pictures of houses. When he was a sophomore in college, he became a loan officer himself, and a year after he graduated, he opened his own branch office.
Now, he runs a 40-person team, two-thirds of whom are women or people of color.
Credit reporting re-seller NCS/Service 1st is taking a “wait and see” approach when it comes to the looming battle over whether or not three credit scores are required for every borrower.
“We want to be like Switzerland … neutral,” said CEO Curtis R. Knuth, whose father launched the firm years ago.
Still, Knuth does have an opinion.
“We’re such a tiny, iddy-biddy piece of the overall settlement cost,” Knuth said, “but here we are gobbling up all the air in the room.”
As far as he’s concerned, the Federal Housing Finance Agency’s (FHFA) decision to allow lenders to use two or three credit scores “came out of left field,” and was not particularly well thought out. “It didn’t say how to chose between” the two options, he said.
BREAKING NEWS … No announcement has been made as of yet, but the MBA is in the process of creating a non-agency loan committee and has asked Tom Davis, chief sales officer at Deephaven Mortgage to be its first chairman.
Talia Ramirez, president of property preservation firm Spectrum Solutions, reports that there are roughly 10,000 vacant houses under the watchful eyes of companies like hers in any given month. Approximately 75% are dilapidated, but “not many are trashed.”
“It’s heartbreaking to see how some people live,” Ramirez said. “But if they cannot pay their mortgage, they cannot pay to keep their places up. And some have nowhere else to go.”
The first job of firms like Spectrum is to determine if anyone still lives in the house. If not, they quickly change the locks. But sometimes they err and have to go back and install new locks for angry homeowners.
Now that top 10 lender Movement Mortgage has adopted Blue Sage Solutions’ LOS program, Blue Sage has smaller fish to fry.
Now, the firm is going after mid-tier lenders who are demanding the same operational abilities as their larger counterparts.
With a volume of roughly 5,000 per month, Movement isn’t Blue Sage’s largest catch to date. It “is a significant achievement for us,” says Joey McDuffee, Blue Sage’s vice president of sales and marketing. “But it’s not our largest customer.”
Since Valligent launched a warranty program to protect mortgage investors against potential inaccurate valuations two years ago, there have been few takers, according to Robert Walker, vice president of sales at parent firm Veros Real Estate Solutions.
The company thought the warranty 一 up to $50,000 一 would keep investors happy and well-protected. But usage has been “astonishingly low,” he admitted.
“Innovation is something investors don’t like,” Walker added.
