Real Estate (Page 6)

The past week saw two companies traditionally associated with the real estate industry make a splash in the homebuilding space. 

Things kicked off on Friday with CoStar Group’s $800 million all-cash acquisition of Zonda, a data company that tracks land development, construction activity, home sales and builder operations in North America. The action continued over the weekend, with Berkshire Hathaway, the parent company of HomeServices of America, announcing an $8.5 billion all-cash deal to buy homebuilder Taylor Morrison. 

While some may have been surprised by these deals, analysts that cover the housing space, agree that these two deals make a lot of sense. 

Zonda fills “key gap” for CoStar

“We are familiar with Zonda’s business and have long thought that an acquisition could make strategic sense to fill out CoStar’s data and analytics capabilities in the $1 trillion new home construction market,” Ryan Tomasello and Jade Rahmani, two analysts at Keefe, Bruyette and Woods, wrote in a note published on Friday.

“Over the last 18-24 months, CoStar has been building out its own data and analytics solutions to serve the new home construction market, which management has characterized as an attractive source of future growth. So, this deal should accelerate those initiatives by consolidating the leading incumbent in the category while also providing an opportunity for meaningful cross-sell synergies.” 

According to Tomasello and Rahmani, Zonda will fill a “key gap” in CoStar’s existing data set “by adding forward-looking, supply-side housing insights across land development and construction activity.”

“The deal also strengthens CoStar’s marketplace strategy by adding builder-direct new construction inventory, complementing its existing resale-focused platforms,” Tomasello and Rahmani added. 

Russ Cofano, a co-founder of Alloy Advisors, agrees that this transaction makes sense as it extends CoStar’s core identity of data and analytics into the new construction space where it has yet to establish “deep roots.”

“CoStar has already demonstrated that it views real estate through various segments including information, traffic, workflow and monetizable marketplace activity,” Cofano said in an interview with HousingWire. “Zonda gives it a stronger position in a segment of residential real estate that has historically operated somewhat separately from resale brokerage.”

For Amit Kulkarni, another co-founder of Alloy Advisors, CoStar’s acquisition of Zonda is just the latest example of the Andy Florance-helmed firm’s tried and true playbook: “buy the dominant data player in a category, then own it outright.”

“That [strategy] didn’t work in resale because the category was already mature and the big digital players were entrenched — Zillow owned the consumer. New construction is different. It’s earlier, more fragmented, and it looks a lot more like commercial [real estate] did when CoStar started,” Kulkarni said. “That’s a category they can actually take. And Zonda’s a subscription business with 104% net retention, which is exactly what those activists want to see instead of more portal losses.”

Berkshire Hathaway acquisition a sound bet

Like the CoStar-Zonda deal, Alloy Advisor co-founders also feel that Berkshire Hathaway’s acquisition of Taylor Morrison, is logical. 

In Kulkarni’s view, Berkshire is known for “making sound bets based on economics, human nature, and real market dynamics.” 

“I think they fully understand that brokerage is a low-margin, mostly unprofitable business that needs ancillary attach to be profitable at scale,” he said. “They also know homebuilding is incredibly profitable if done right — Taylor Morrison earned $783 million last year in a down market, a 13% return on equity. And whoever builds and controls the inventory has a leg up for decades, not just years, because we’ve got an enormous shortage of homes — somewhere around 3 to 5 million. If they can marry that with brokerage ops, that could be an interesting long term play, and that’s what Berkshire might be better at than anybody.”

Cofano agrees, adding that this acquisition strengthens Berkshire’s position in the new construction space as it already owns manufactured home builder Clayton Homes.

“Strategically, that fills a gap and gives Berkshire a broader position across manufactured housing, site-built housing and the broader housing value chain,” Cofano said. 

Additionally, Cofano believes this acquisition signals that Berkshire sees “long-term value in homebuilding despite the current affordability headwinds, elevated mortgage rates and soft buyer demand.”

Strong signals for housing

“CoStar’s move into Zonda points in a similar direction: the company is making a long-term bet that new construction data, builder workflows and new-home consumer marketplaces will become increasingly valuable,” Cofano added. “While neither transaction proves that the new-home market has bottomed, taken together, they are a strong signal that two sophisticated, long-horizon buyers believe we may be closer to the trough.  If they are right, that is not just bullish for homebuilders. It is constructive for the broader residential real estate ecosystem, including brokerages, portals, mortgage, title, data providers and the many businesses tied to housing transaction volume.”

Looking ahead, John Lovallo, a stock analyst at UBS, told HousingWire he believes these acquisitions are a harbinger of what is to come across two related industries that have seen quite a bit of consolidation in recent years. 

“The top-16 builders in the U.S. have gone from 25% market share in 2013 to 50% market share today, so this consolidation of the industry has been happening for years. I think where you are going to find that this is becoming more and more challenging is for smaller builders, whether public or private, because they just can’t access capital, land, labor or materials like the bigger builders,” Lovallo said. “So, I think the bigger builders are going to continue to get bigger and I think you are going to see some non-traditional companies coming into this space and helping this consolidation process. So I think you are going to see a much more consolidated industry as we look forward.” 

So this may just be the start of traditionally real estate-focused firms attempting to make a play in the homebuilding space. 

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Gitcha and Momentum MLS have formed a strategic partnership to integrate Gitcha’s Buyer Listing Service into the MLS platform for real estate professionals in western Arizona, the companies announced Tuesday.

The integration is designed to evolve Momentum MLS — formerly the Western Arizona REALTOR Data Exchange (WARDEX) — from a listing-first system into a more dual-sided marketplace that displays both seller listings and verified buyer demand inside the MLS workflow.

Gitcha’s Buyer Listing Service allows agents to enter buyer needs within an MLS-licensed environment, including preferred property features, locations, budget ranges and financing timelines, according to the announcement. Momentum MLS subscribers will see the demand data alongside active listings, giving listing agents and brokerages more visibility into where qualified buyers are searching and how they are positioned to transact.

“Momentum MLS remains dedicated to delivering real differentiation for our agents,” Kim Everett, CEO of Momentum MLS, said in a statement. “In an industry where buyer support is increasingly under pressure, we believe it’s more important than ever to champion both sides of the transaction.”

Gitcha CEO Dan Cooper said in the announcement that the integration is focused less on additional features and more on reinforcing agents’ role with clients by “letting serious buyers broadcast what they need, allowing the full market to respond and serve them.”

For brokers and agents, the companies say the integration could help surface off-market or soon-to-list opportunities, support more targeted outreach and improve conversations with sellers by pairing listing decisions with real-time buyer data.

As commission rules shift and buyer representation agreements gain prominence, tools that document and expose buyer demand are drawing increased interest from MLSs and brokerage leaders looking to demonstrate the value of the buy side.

Based in Arizona, Momentum MLS rebranded from WARDEX during its 20th anniversary year to reflect a broader strategy focused on data accuracy, practical technology and business-building resources for members across the state. The organization positions itself as a partner to brokers and agents navigating a fast-moving regulatory and sales market environment.

Gitcha operates a demand-based real estate platform that aims to give buyer agents visibility closer to that of listing agents. In addition to MLS-embedded tools, the company syndicates buyer criteria to its public site, where demand information can be searched and shared.

This announcement comes a little over a month after Gitcha announced similar partnerships with Indianapolis-based MIBOR Broker Listing Cooperative and the Lubbock Association of Realtors. 

This article was written by Brooklee Han and generated with the assistance of HousingWire Automation. It was reviewed by a HousingWire editor before publication.

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Rates for 30-year conforming mortgages stayed above 6.7% this week, but housing market activity has been resilient as weekly pending sales and purchase loan demand are up slightly compared to this time last year.

At HousingWire’s Mortgage Rates Center on Tuesday, 30-year conforming loan rates averaged 6.71%, while rates for 30-year jumbo loans averaged 6.73% and rates for 30-year loans backed by the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) were at 6.29%.

Purchase climate warms even as refis cool

Kyle Bass, production business manager at Refi.com — an affiliate of Veterans United Home Loans — said last week after Freddie Mac rates rose that consumers are showing extra sensitivity to small rate moves. This is having “an outsized impact on refinance activity,” he said, pointing to weekly application data from the Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA).

“That sensitivity appears to be tied not just to affordability, but also to growing uncertainty around timing and whether refinancing will ultimately be worth it,” Bass said.

“A recent Veterans United refinance sentiment study found that 37% of refinance prospects experience stress or anxiety about making the wrong refinancing decision, while 29% say they’re confused by closing costs, points and lender credits,” he added. “Another 23% reported difficulty timing the market correctly. Those findings help explain why many homeowners remain hesitant, especially when rates aren’t showing many signs of improvement in the near future.”

Mat Ishbia, president and CEO of United Wholesale Mortgage (UWM), said this week that he’s bullish on the current status of the purchase market as home price growth, inventory growth and Federal Reserve interest rate projections are in a healthy place.

“I actually think it’s an LO market, a loan officer market, because it’s hot right now,” Ishbia said in a monthly video post. “Don’t get confused — it’s a purchase market right now.”

Case-Shiller home price data for March showed that prices rose 0.7% on an annualized basis, down from 0.8% in February. And price growth has slipped into negative territory in several major metros — including Seattle, Denver, Dallas, Phoenix and Las Vegas.

“Buyers are rejecting current price tags, but sellers refuse to offer steep discounts. The result is in a standoff,” said Thom Malone, principal economist at Cotality.

“Monthly price growth in March was the slowest since 2019. Sales were also low, indicating that sellers are still waiting for the rest of the economy to catch up with the housing market. Still, the modest appreciation points away from any immediate price drops and signals that buyers might be the ones who end up giving the most ground.”

What will the Fed do next?

Benchmark interest rates, which don’t directly impact rates for home loans, aren’t likely to move in the short term. The CME Group’s FedWatch tool shows that 98% of interest rate traders believe the federal funds rate will remain untouched after the next Federal Open Market Committee meeting concludes June 17.

That meeting will be Kevin Warsh’s first as Fed chair after he was recently confirmed by the Senate. Outgoing chair Jerome Powell, who was frequently criticized by President Donald Trump for not lowering rates quickly enough, remains on the Fed board. While Warsh has been described as less hawkish than Powell, there’s little evidence to suggest he’ll sway other officials into lowering rates anytime soon.

According to the CME Group’s survey, benchmark rates (currently at a range of 3.5% to 3.75%) are more likely to move higher than lower by the end of 2026. Interest rate traders placed 92% odds on no change in July, 75% odds of no change in September and 40% odds of a 25 basis-point increase by December.

Bose George, an analyst for Keefe, Bruyette & Woods (KBW), said in a note to investors last week that mortgage spreads are likely to remain beneficial for the near future. He wrote that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac continue to purchase mortgage-backed securities, but the combined $317 billion value of their retained portfolios shows “meaningful room” for growth based on their $500 billion statutory cap.

“The spread between primary mortgage rates and the 10yr UST is now 208 bp, modestly above the long-run average of 192 bp,” George wrote. “Both spreads are also fairly close to the post-GFC averages. … So we think further spread tightening is likely limited (as is further downside to mortgage rates unless the 10-yr UST declines).”

Inflation is top of mind

At an economic conference in Iceland last week, Fed officials Michelle Bowman and Jeffrey Schmid offered public remarks on monetary policy influences.

“One straightforward case that would call for raising the policy rate reflects elevated inflation that is likely to continue to move higher, with the labor market showing no sign of slack and GDP rising much faster than its potential,” Bowman said. “The question would be by how much and how quickly to increase the policy rate. If the existing monetary policy stance is accommodative or close to neutral, in my view, it would be appropriate to withdraw any remaining accommodation by raising the policy rate deliberately or even expeditiously.”

“With inflation running above the Fed’s 2% definition of price stability for over five years, now is not the time to let down our guard,” Schmid added. “We must continue to signal our commitment to price stability and our willingness to take the actions necessary to achieve our mandate.”

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Onity Group Inc. won regulatory approval for a revised sale of most of its reverse mortgage servicing rights to Finance of America (FOA), the company said Tuesday.

Under the new agreement, Onity will sell MSRs on about 20,000 Home Equity Conversion Mortgages (HECMs) with an unpaid principal balance of $5.1 billion as of March 31. The initial deal included roughly 40,000 loans with $9.6 billion in UPB. Onity will subservice the transferred loans under a three-year agreement with FOA.

FOA will also acquire Onity’s pipeline of reverse mortgage loans, and Onity will exit the reverse mortgage origination business. The company expects total proceeds of $70 million to $80 million from the transaction, based on the book value of the assets as of April 30.

HMBS concentration

Ginnie Mae did not approve the original terms of the transaction, the companies said, although no additional details were provided.

But Ginnie Mae data on Home Equity Conversion Mortgage-backed Securities (HMBS) compiled by New View Advisors show that FOA and Onity together account for about 48% of the HMBS market by unpaid principal balance. Ginnie Mae requires that the HMBS issuer also be the servicer of record.

FOA is currently the largest HMBS issuer of record by unpaid principal balance, with about $18.1 billion in UPB across 3,163 issuances, or roughly 32.2% of HMBS outstanding, according to New View’s data. Onity holds about $8.9 billion in UPB across 5,378 issuances, representing a 15.9% share of outstanding HMBS before the transaction.

Among other major issuers, Longbridge Financial has about $10.3 billion of HMBS UPB (18.3% share), while Mutual of Omaha Mortgage holds about $4.1 billion (7.3% share).

Shift toward subservicing

The sale covers about 57% of Onity’s reverse servicing portfolio and about 77% of its reverse MSR investment. About 70% of Onity’s remaining reverse servicing portfolio is expected to run off within four years, the company said.

Glen A. Messina, Onity’s chair, president and CEO, said the deal repositions the company in the reverse mortgage market. It will “establish a significant subservicing relationship with FAR, a reverse market leader, help simplify our business, and enable increased focus on more substantial growth and earnings opportunities,” Messina said in a statement. 

The transaction remains subject to customary closing conditions. Onity said it will provide an update on the anticipated closing date at a later time.

Onity’s board also authorized a share repurchase program of up to $20 million of the company’s common stock. The authorization “reflects our intent to deploy capital in a disciplined and strategic manner with the goal of delivering meaningful returns to our shareholders,” Messina said.

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The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) on Monday finalized updates to its loss mitigation and partial claim policies, creating a new foreclosure prevention option for struggling borrowers with VA-backed mortgages and setting the stage for implementation later this year.

The updated guidance, available on the VA’s website, implements provisions of the 2025 VA Home Loan Program Reform Act, which authorized the agency to establish a partial claim option for delinquent borrowers with VA-guaranteed mortgages.

The law was enacted after the wind-down of the Veterans Affairs Servicing Purchase (VASP) program left the agency without a permanent foreclosure prevention alternative for financially distressed homeowners.

Under the program, the VA can cover a portion of a delinquent borrower’s missed mortgage payments to bring the loan current. The amount, generally capped at 25% of the unpaid principal balance, is placed in a subordinate lien that does not require monthly payments and is repaid when the home is sold, refinanced or the mortgage is otherwise paid off.

The final policy follows months of industry feedback on draft guidance released in March. One notable change removes language from the proposal that would have allowed certain loan modifications tied to a partial claim to increase a borrower’s monthly payment by as much as 15%. That provision drew criticism from mortgage industry groups, which said that higher payments could undermine foreclosure prevention efforts.

The removal of the provision was welcomed by industry trade groups, including the Mortgage Bankers Association.

“MBA applauds the VA’s release of its partial claim program and updated loss mitigation waterfall, following a collaborative stakeholder feedback process that helped strengthen the proposed policies,” said Bob Broeksmit, the trade group’s president and CEO.

“We are pleased to see that veteran homeowners will have access to a key loss mitigation option available to other borrowers with government-backed mortgages, that can allow veterans to remain in their homes without increasing their monthly payments.”

Broeksmit said the association will continue to work with the VA and its servicer members to support the implementation of the program, adding that servicers will need time to update systems and train staff before the program takes effect.

The VA also finalized revisions to its loss mitigation waterfall, the sequence of foreclosure avoidance options servicers must evaluate before initiating foreclosure proceedings. Under the updated framework, the partial claim becomes a new retention option available to eligible borrowers who have resolved the hardship that caused their delinquency and can successfully complete a three-month trial payment plan.

Borrowers generally will be limited to one partial claim per loan, although a second may be available in certain disaster-related circumstances. Loans that previously received a VA partial claim or COVID-era refund modification may face additional restrictions.

Mortgage servicers may begin submitting trial payment plans for loan modifications and partial claims on June 15. The VA has provided a 180-day implementation period, giving servicers until Nov. 28 to update systems and operational processes before the program is fully implemented.

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loanDepot has promoted chief risk officer Joseph Grassi to the role of chief legal and risk officer, the company announced on Tuesday.

Per loanDepot‘s release, the expanded role “consolidates oversight of loanDepot’s legal, compliance, corporate governance and enterprise risk management functions.”

In the new role, Grassi will oversee loanDepot’s legal strategy, corporate governance and legal affairs, as well as regulatory compliance, loan quality and enterprise risk management. He reports directly to founder and CEO Anthony Hsieh.

Grassi has served as the company’s chief risk officer since 2022 and brings more than 35 years of experience in consumer lending law, mortgage regulation, compliance and risk oversight. The California-based lender said he has played a central role in strengthening its risk and regulatory compliance functions.

“Joe has been an exceptional leader for loanDepot,” Hsieh said in a statement. “His strategic mindset, industry credibility and proven leadership make him the right leader for this expanded role. As we continue our work to transform the company, this structure will help simplify the organization, strengthen our foundation, and support our return to profitable market share growth.”

Key initiatives under Grassi’s risk leadership, loanDepot said, have included strengthening relationships with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac; enhancing loan quality and risk management processes; and increasing engagement with policymakers, regulators and government agencies in Washington, D.C.

Beyond his role at loanDepot, Grassi is co-chair of the Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA)’s Legal Issues and Regulatory Compliance Committee. He previously co-chaired the MBA’s Independent Mortgage Bankers Executive Committee.

Before joining loanDepot, Grassi held leadership positions at Celebrity Home Loans, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), Rate and Prospect Mortgage. He also previously worked at Freddie Mac.

Grassi spent 20 years at Fannie Mae as a senior attorney, including serving as lead counsel for its multifamily and single-family businesses. Grassi ultimately served as interim general counsel and corporate secretary, overseeing Fannie Mae’s legal, government and industry relations departments and advising the CEO and board of directors.

Grassi began his career at Philadelphia-based law firm Obermayer, Rebmann, Maxwell & Hippel. He holds both a J.D. and a bachelor’s degree in business administration from Villanova University.

This article was generated using HousingWire Automation and reviewed by a HousingWire editor before publication. 

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Century 21 Americana has expanded into Montana through the addition of Century 21 Hometown Brokers, a leading brokerage in Billings and the top-performing Century 21 affiliate in the state.

The move marks Century 21 Americana’s first entry into Montana and extends its footprint beyond Arizona and Nevada as part of a broader growth strategy across the western U.S.

The Billings office will now operate as a branch of Century 21 Americana.

“Yellowstone County continues to emerge as a dynamic and expanding market, with steady residential demand, a strong business community and significant new developments shaping the city’s future,” said Juan Martinez, president of Century 21 Americana. “Expanding into Montana allows us to continue building a stronger presence across the West while connecting more communities with the experience, tools and support that define our brokerage.”

As part of the transition, longtime Hometown Brokers owner Mark Dawson will remain as principal broker and assume the role of president of Montana operations. Todd Harp, a 25-year veteran of the company, will serve as supervising broker.

“Mark is one of the primary reasons we made the decision to expand into Montana,” Martinez said. “Mark and Todd are incredible leaders with a proven track record, and nobody understands the Billings market better. We are confident in their leadership.”

Century 21 Americana — which recorded more than $325 in transaction volume last year, according to RealTrends Verified rankings — said it plans to pursue additional growth opportunities throughout Montana, including future acquisitions and brokerage partnerships.

“This transition allows us to bring the strength, technology and scale of Century 21 Americana to Montana while maintaining the local relationships and leadership that built our success,” said Dawson. “We are proud to remain rooted in Billings while positioning ourselves for the next chapter of growth. We have so many great people working here, and we’re excited for the next 25 years.”

Agents in the Billings office will gain access to Century 21 Americana’s training programs, marketing resources, technology platform and broader support network.

Century 21 Americana, owned by Juan and Elizabeth Martinez, operates offices across Nevada, Arizona and Montana and has more than 450 sales associates. It has been affiliated with the Century 21 brand since 2012.

This article was generated using HousingWire Automation and reviewed by a HousingWire editor before publication.

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Connecticut is adding its name to the list of states that have passed laws governing the use of private listing networks by home sellers. 

Last Wednesday, Connecticut governor Ned Lamont signed Senate Bill 340 into law. Under the law, any real estate agent representing a seller or a landlord involving the seller or landlord’s residential property containing one to four units must “publicly advertise or market the seller’s or landlord’s property for sale or lease, unless the seller or landlord completes and signs the Seller/Landlord Opt-Out of Real Estate Public Marketing form.”

According to the law, public marketing includes publication of the listing through any medium that is “reasonably accessible to the general public and real estate licensees, that provides open and nondiscriminatory access to property information.” Additionally, the law states that if a property is marketed through a private or limited access channel, concurrent marketing through a public channel must also occur. 

The bill was introduced into the state legislature in February and is slated to go into effect on Oct. 1, 2026. 

A similar bill is on the New York governor’s desk

Just one state over in New York, a similar bill, known as the “Fair and Transparent Real Estate Listings Act,” was passed by the state legislature on Monday and it has been delivered to Governor Kathy Hochul for her signature. 

If the bill is signed into law, it would require real estate professionals to publicly advertise or market a residential property they list on platforms accessible to the general public. 

The bill defines a private listing network as a system or platform operated on behalf of a brokerage, franchise, MLS or group of licensees that restricts access to some or all listing information to a definite subset of brokers, licensees or buyers and that is not “broadly accessible” to the general public and all licensees representing the prospective buyers. 

According to the bill, within one calendar day of the start date of a written listing agreement, a listing agent must publicly advertise or market the listing for sale in or on a publication, platform or website “that is broadly accessible to the general public and any real estate licensees representing prospective buyers and shall not satisfy this requirement by advertising or marketing solely through a private listing network or other restricted-access platform.”

However, listings could be non-publicly marketed if the seller “gives informed, written direction after receiving a standardized state disclosure that clearly explains the risks and tradeoffs of withholding a listing from public marketing.” Additionally, the bill allows the listing agent to restrict public marketing if the seller has a “bona fide private, safety or similar need” where any public marketing would be “reasonably likely” endanger their health or safety.

Other legislation

The progress of these two bills come as a similar law is slated to go into effect in Washington on June 11. The bill was signed into law by Washington Governor Bob Furgeson in March. In December 2025, Wisconsin Governor Anthony Evers signed a bill into law making the public marketing of a property the accepted default. This law will not go into effect until January 1, 2027. In addition to these two laws, there are bills pending in Illinois and Hawaii seeking to regulate private listing networks.

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Rocket Pro is continuing its promise to deliver a monthly “Power Play” announcement on the first Tuesday of every month by introducing three new broker-focused incentives, one of which will lead to a $100,000 prize.

Part of Rocket Pro’s June Power Play, the third month of the initiative, includes the launch of “The Big Pitch,” described as “a broker-driven tech innovation contest” that invites mortgage brokers to submit ideas aimed at solving industry pain points through technology.

The contest is open to all wholesale mortgage professionals with active NMLS licenses, not just Rocket partners. Submissions will be accepted through the end of June, after which Rocket leaders will select three finalists. Online voting will begin in early July, and Rocket Pro will develop working prototypes based on the finalists’ ideas.

The prototypes will be demonstrated live during the Rocket Pro Experience conference in Detroit on Sept. 1, where the winner will be determined through a combination of online voting and votes cast by conference attendees. A $100,000 grand prize will be awarded at the event.

“When you sit down with savvy brokers and pick their brains, it’s unbelievable what you can learn and unbelievable the solutions they already have. They just need folks to go out and build it,” Austin Niemiec, chief revenue officer of Rocket Mortgage, said during a conversation with HousingWire ahead of the announcement.

Niemiec continued, “A lot of what we’ve rolled out over the last decade started as brokers coming to us and saying, ‘Solve this problem. I have an idea.’ This is really taking that to the next level.”

Rocket extends its purchase credit program

In addition to the contest, the wholesale lending division of Rocket Mortgage said it is yet again extending its 60-basis-point purchase credit and a 40-basis-point Compass credit as part of a partnership with the real estate broker.

Rocket Pro said broker partners can qualify for the full 100-basis-point credit when assisting clients who are working with agents affiliated with participating real estate brands, including @properties, Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate, CENTURY 21, Christie’s International Real Estate, Coldwell Banker, Compass, Corcoran, ERA and Sotheby’s International Realty.

Niemiec said the continuation of the Compass credit is in part due to how “significant” the credit has been in helping brokers’ businesses.

“Everyone’s talking about how tough this market is right now, and we’re focused on helping brokers win right here, right now, while also investing in helping brokers win deep into the future,” Niemiec said. “That’s what partnership is all about.”

Incentives to encourage cash-out refis

The company also announced a temporary pricing incentive to encourage cash-out refinances. Through July 6, brokers can receive a 20-basis-point loan-level price adjustment credit on conventional and government-backed cash-out refinance loans.

Niemiec added, “Rate-and-term refis have gotten a little more difficult, but who cares? There’s so much cash-out business out there to be won with how much equity is in Americans’ homes—but brokers have to go get it.”

The credit can be combined with Rocket Pro’s existing 40-basis-point refinance incentive, resulting in up to 60 basis points in savings.

“We’re coming with real solutions, real plays to help brokers win, and this is just another example of that,” Niemiec said. “What I love about this power play is its serious value this month in a tough market to help brokers win purchase and refi business…we’re committing serious resources to building real technology solutions to help brokers win deep into the future…this power play shows that.”

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President Donald Trump has appointed Bill Pulte as the Acting Director of National Intelligence (DNI). Pulte will also remain in his current roles as Director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) and chairman of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

“William has deep experience managing the most sensitive matters in America, the safety and soundness of the markets, and over 10 Trillion Dollars at Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac, a substantial increase from where it was just 12 months ago,” Trump said in a Truth Social post announcing the appointment on Tuesday.

Pulte will succeed Tulsi Gabbard, a politician and U.S. military office, who announced she is stepping down from the role this month.

Pulte is seen as a staunch Trump ally, though his appointment is notable given his lack of a traditional military or intelligence background. The DNI is the top official responsible for coordinating the U.S. intelligence agencies and advising senior government leaders on critical issues, including terrorism, espionage, cyberattacks and foreign government activities.

Should the president formally nominate him to hold the position full-time, Pulte would need to be confirmed by the U.S. Senate. The Senate previously confirmed Pulte — grandson of the founder of the homebuilding giant PulteGroup — to the FHFA position in March 2025.

Within months of taking the helm at the FHFA, Pulte initiated sweeping leadership changes at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. He moved to terminate Special Purpose Credit Programs (SPCPs), cut DEI budgets, and rescinded various fair lending and climate-risk advisory bulletins. Pulte also targeted credit-scoring companies, applying pressure on Fair Isaac Corp. (FICO) while clearing the enterprises to accept the VantageScore 4.0 credit model.

Pulte established a dedicated mortgage fraud tip line and issued criminal referrals to the Department of Justice regarding occupancy fraud. His efforts led to high-profile criminal referrals against Trump adversaries, including New York Attorney General Letitia James and Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook. He was a vocal participant in the administration’s pressure campaign against Fed Chair Jerome Powell to cut interest rates.

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Realtor.com has launched RealAssist AI, a new artificial intelligence (AI)-driven home search experience developed in collaboration with Google, allowing consumers to search for homes using natural language conversations rather than traditional filters and search fields.

Currently available in beta to a select group of logged-in users across desktop, mobile web and the Realtor.com app, RealAssist AI is designed to assist buyers with early research, affordability questions, property discovery, neighborhood analysis and agent connections.

“Realtor.com is positioned to lead the AI era in real estate — and the data already points that way,” said Damian Eales, CEO at Realtor.com. “We lead our competitors in AI brand favorability. We are the most trusted brand among real estate professionals and the No. 1 real estate news publisher in the country. Our collaboration with News Corp and deep industry roots give us an authority in this space that others simply cannot replicate.”

The platform enables users to ask detailed, conversational questions about affordability, neighborhoods, commute times, property characteristics and lifestyle preferences.

RealAssist AI then generates personalized recommendations and insights based on those criteria.

“Buying a home is one of the biggest financial decisions most people will ever make, and most buyers start the process feeling overwhelmed and underprepared,” said Mickey Neuberger, chief consumer and marketing officer at Realtor.com. “RealAssist AI removes the uncertainty and builds confidence at every step, from early research to connecting with a local agent, because the insight behind it is real. Every buyer deserves that.”

A key feature of the platform is its ability to maintain context across sessions, remembering user preferences, budgets and priorities so conversations can continue without restarting the search process, leaders added.

Powered by Google technology, RealAssist AI also incorporates mapping and neighborhood exploration tools, allowing buyers to evaluate commute routes, nearby amenities, schools, parks and local businesses.

According to Realtor.com, RealAssist AI includes safeguards intended to support Fair Housing compliance and protect MLS data integrity.

Realtor.com said the platform is designed to improve the quality of client interactions by handling much of the preliminary research and discovery work before consumers connect with a real estate professional.

The company plans a broader rollout of RealAssist AI following the current beta testing period.

This article was generated using HousingWire Automation and reviewed by a HousingWire editor before publication.

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There is an ongoing debate in mortgage lending about whether the industry is fundamentally broken or simply experiencing another cycle of technological evolution. Over the past decade, lenders have invested heavily in automation, OCR, verification services, title integrations and income validation tools. Artificial intelligence is now emerging as the next expected leap in efficiency.

Yet despite this sustained investment, core operating metrics have not moved in the direction many expected. The cost to originate a mortgage has increased from approximately $8,300 per loan to more than $11,300 in recent years. At the same time, loans continue to require multiple handoffs and repeated “touches” before reaching closing.

This raises a fundamental question: Has technology meaningfully improved mortgage manufacturing efficiency—or has it simply added layers of complexity to an unchanged operational model?

Efficiency gains or structural constraints?

Speed is often cited as a defining competitive advantage in mortgage lending. Faster cycle times, quicker underwriting decisions and accelerated closings are frequently positioned as evidence of operational improvement.

However, speed alone does not necessarily reflect efficiency. In many cases, faster processing simply shifts complexity downstream, where loans require additional effort to resolve data gaps, clear conditions and correct inconsistencies introduced earlier in the process.

A significant portion of operational capacity in many lending organizations is still dedicated to exception handling rather than true straight-through processing. When headcount is primarily used to “repair” loans instead of originating clean ones, the cost structure inevitably expands.

As margins continue to compress, this model becomes increasingly difficult to sustain. Efficiency gains achieved through front-end technology investment are often offset by back-end rework, limiting the industry’s ability to realize meaningful cost reduction.

The submit-to-close gap as a structural signal

One of the clearest indicators of this imbalance is the submit-to-close ratio. Historically, the industry operated near a 65% conversion benchmark. More recent data, including Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) reporting, indicates that national averages have declined to approximately 53%.

While often attributed to market cycles or temporary conditions, this decline may also reflect a deeper structural issue in how loans are originated and qualified.

If nearly half of submitted loans do not reach closing, the inefficiency cannot be isolated to underwriting or secondary review. It suggests that a significant portion of breakdowns are occurring before the loan is fully validated for submission.

Despite this, many performance frameworks continue to prioritize application volume and pipeline growth over funded outcomes or loan quality. This creates a misalignment between activity-based metrics and actual operational performance.

Over time, this structure reinforces a “submit first, resolve later” mentality, increasing downstream workload, elevating costs and placing sustained pressure on operations teams.

The front-end problem in loan manufacturing

The most persistent inefficiencies in mortgage lending often originate at the earliest stage of the process: the borrower–loan officer interaction.

This initial engagement establishes the foundation for the entire loan lifecycle. When information is incomplete, inconsistently gathered or not fully validated, the impact compounds through underwriting, processing, and closing.

In many organizations, the emphasis on speed to submission reduces the depth of this initial analysis. Loan officers are often encouraged to secure commitments quickly and move files into the system, with the expectation that downstream teams will resolve any issues.

This approach does not eliminate complexity—it redistributes it.

Yet the loan officer remains the closest point of contact to both borrower intent and property-specific realities. As such, they are the most critical control point in determining whether a loan is structurally sound at inception.

Improving outcomes at this stage requires more than process discipline. It requires a consistent framework for borrower engagement, structured data capture and disciplined qualification standards applied before submission—not after.

Reframing mortgage lending around loan quality

Addressing these challenges does not require a complete reinvention of mortgage lending, but it does require a reorientation of where quality is established in the process.

The most meaningful operational improvements are unlikely to come from additional layers of back-office automation. Instead, they will come from improving the consistency, completeness and accuracy of loans at the point of origination.

When the front end of the process is strengthened, the downstream impact is immediate and measurable: fewer underwriting conditions, reduced file touches, lower operational cost per loan and improved pull-through performance. This shift also requires a change in how success is measured. Volume-driven metrics alone are insufficient if they are not paired with meaningful indicators of loan quality and funded performance.

Technology will continue to play an important role in this evolution, particularly in standardizing intake, supporting compliance and guiding decision-making at the point of sale. However, its effectiveness will depend less on sophistication and more on how directly it improves borrower engagement and data integrity at the earliest stage of the process.

Conclusion: Fix the source, not the symptoms

The mortgage industry does not necessarily need to be rebuilt—but it does need to be rebalanced.

For decades, operational models have focused on moving loans through the system rather than ensuring they are structurally complete when they enter it. As a result, inefficiencies have been managed rather than eliminated.

In a market defined by rising origination costs, compressed margins and declining pull-through rates, the most durable advantage will not come from faster processing. It will come from originating cleaner loans from the start.

The opportunity ahead is not to add more complexity to an already layered system—but to rethink how the system is designed, measured and executed.

Fix the front end, and the rest of the process becomes materially more efficient.

Randy Senzig is the CEO of The LANIS Group, LLC
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of HousingWire’s editorial department and its owners. To contact the editor responsible for this piece: zeb@hwmedia.com.

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When an industry’s incumbents can’t win on merit, they stop competing and start restricting. The MLS feed cutoffs to Zillow are the latest version of this pattern.

Taxi commissions tried to slow Uber in 2014. They didn’t fight on product. They couldn’t. Uber was easier, cheaper and the cars were cleaner. So they pushed regulators to restrict licensing, restrict pickups and restrict pricing.

The legacy taxi cab structure kept shrinking anyway. The restrictions may have actually hastened the collapse.

And this is a pattern that repeats whenever incumbents stop being able to compete.

Residential real estate is in that moment now. Two large companies — Compass and Zillow — are fighting over the future, and the cooperative MLS is being asked to choose a side.

Both have market power. Both are running playbooks that serve their own interests. But the one forcing the cooperative into the fight is Compass.

And Compass can’t win on the merits of its own business.

Compass’ strategy rests on three premises:

1. That walled gardens beat open portals.
2. That private listings serve sellers better than public ones.
3. That consumers will follow brokerage-controlled distribution.

None of those is true.

• Zillow has 235 million monthly unique users. Consumers picked that audience.
• A Drexel University study of Bright MLS data found homes marketed through the MLS sold for 17.5% more than homes marketed off it. Sellers lose money on private listings.
• The publicly traded brokerage sector did $15 to $19 billion in revenue last year. Almost none of them made money. eXp lost $22.7 million. Real lost $8.1 million. Douglas Elliman is at $1.80. Anywhere sold itself to Compass. Compass lost $58 million on $7 billion in revenue. Q1 2026 showed a $22 million GAAP profit, but the actual business lost $351 million — the headline came from a tax accounting move, not from selling houses.

The whole brokerage model is broken. And Compass, the one running the private listing playbook hardest, hasn’t been profitable in 14 years.

So what do you do when you’ve run a playbook for years that isn’t profitable for your business, goes against consumer preference and doesn’t make a whole lot of sense for standard seller economics?

You start restricting access.

When you can’t beat the competition on the product, you try to change the rules of the game. Compass’ move is to restrict Zillow’s access to the listings consumers actually want to find.

To pull that off, you need a new plan and a “useful idiot.”

The mechanism Compass is using to implement its new plan is the cooperative MLS. The cooperatives hold the rule-making authority and the feed contracts.

If Compass can get the cooperatives to cut Zillow’s feeds, Compass doesn’t have to outcompete Zillow on anything. The MLSs do the work Compass can’t do on its own. Compass spends nothing. The MLSs take the political and legal exposure.

Before you say, “but Zillow.”

Zillow is no white knight. It’s a public company with market power, and the Listing Access Standards serve Zillow’s interests. 

Both companies are self-interested, but the difference lies in what each strategy does downstream.

Zillow’s standards push toward transparency. Listings that are publicly marketed have to be displayed publicly. Consumers find inventory in one place. Smaller brokerages get parity with bigger ones. That said, transparency doesn’t fix brokerage profitability, but it preserves the public market and consumer access.

Compass’ strategy pushes toward fragmentation. Listings split between the public market and the private network. Consumers without the right relationships can’t see all the inventory. The strategy serves Compass’ profitability at the expense of transparency and consumer access.

The MLSs are choosing to enforce the strategy that fragments the market and harms consumers.

The Soviets coined “useful idiot” for unwitting adversaries who advance the manipulator’s interests while believing they’re acting on their own principles. The MLSs threatening or executing feed cutoffs fit the definition.

MLSs believe they’re enforcing rules and protecting member equity. In reality, they’re being used to attack the cooperative’s own purpose by one member who benefits most when the cooperative model breaks down.

The receipts.

In October 2025, Robert Reffkin sent messages to at least eight MLSs, according to Zillow’s federal antitrust complaint filed May 12, 2026, in the Northern District of Illinois. The complaint alleges Reffkin urged the MLSs to “discipline” Zillow for its Listing Access Standards and to block Zillow from IDX and VOW feeds if those standards remained in place.

MRED was one of the recipients, and within weeks, it changed its rules in ways that mirrored what Compass had asked for.

Fran Broude is a Compass vice president and the president of Compass Illinois. She also sits on MRED’s board.

According to Zillow’s filings, Broude called a Compass agent on May 11 to tell him MRED was going to ban Zillow from all listing feeds. MRED hadn’t formally voted yet. A Compass executive on the MRED board was telling Compass agents about MRED decisions before MRED had made them.

And then:

• Bright MLS adopted similar rule language and announced a direct Compass feed deal.
• Realtracs in Nashville signed with Compass on April 30, then threatened to cut Zillow’s feed on June 1.
• California’s MLS/CLAW signed one on May 6.
• Hive MLS received a Compass demand letter on May 11.

The pattern was undeniable enough that on May 22, Judge John Tharp granted Zillow’s preliminary injunction, requiring MRED to restore Zillow’s feed access while the antitrust case proceeds.

Compass wins if this strategy works. But a lot of folks get harmed as a result:

1. Other brokers in the cooperative. Their listings disappear from the portal where their buyers are searching, while those same listings keep appearing on Compass-owned and Compass-adjacent properties.
2. Consumers. Buyers who can’t find homes and sellers whose listings are hidden from the largest audience available. And it goes both ways; a chunk of buyers will be locked out of participating in the market at all unless they happen to know a Compass agent who happens to like them.
3. The MLSs lose the most. The behavior alienates every other broker in their cooperative and gives them real reasons not just to consider an alternative to the MLS, but to act on one.

Every feed cutoff makes the cooperative model look less worth participating in.

Zillow Preview signed nearly 60 brokerages and franchisors in the first six weeks after launch, including Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices, SERHANT., Engel & Völkers, Samson Properties and The Keyes Family of Companies.

Those brokerages are now doing listing input directly on Zillow, routing around the MLS. The brokers are voting with their feet.

And the MLSs? The ones running the Compass playbook are just accelerating the pace at which they’re putting themselves out of business.

The choice.

The taxi companies chose restriction; they’re significantly smaller now than they were.

The MLSs picking the same play get the same outcome. The brokers leave, and the consumers route around.

But let’s be clear: The taxi commissions ran their own restriction strategy because their own incumbents picked it.

The MLSs are running someone else’s strategy.

They’re doing the work of dismantling the cooperative for a single brokerage that benefits when the cooperative breaks down. The institution that exists to keep the market open is being used to close it off, and the people running the institution don’t see it yet.

This is one of the most thorough self-owns in modern industry history. 

The MLSs are alienating the brokers who provide the data, hurting the consumers their members serve and helping put themselves out of business. 

All to satisfy one brokerage’s strategy. 

A brokerage that, on the merits, can’t beat the competition without their help. 

The cooperative MLS wasn’t founded to serve consumers. It was a broker cooperative for cooperation on listing access and commissions. 

But the role has changed. MLS data feeds the portals consumers use. MLS rules shape what’s visible in the market. 

As a result, the MLS became consumer-critical by function, whether the founders intended it or not.

Every MLS executive in the country knows what’s happening. Each one has a choice.

The cooperative as it exists today is being used against itself. The MLSs that figure that out get to be part of what comes next. The ones that don’t get to explain, in five years, why they spent the most important window of their careers running someone else’s playbook.

Amit Kulkarni is the interim CEO of Homes for Heroes and a co-founder of Alloy Advisors

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Dream Finders Homes has appointed homebuilding executive Clint Szubinski as chief operating officer, the company said June 01. Szubinski joins the Jacksonville, Florida based builder as it expands across the Southeast, Mid-Atlantic and Midwest.

Szubinski will work alongside national president Doug Moran, who previously served as COO, as the company transitions teams and responsibilities. Moran will remain in a support role, providing guidance as Dream Finders Homes continues its growth strategy. In the COO role, Szubinski will be responsible for the company’s strategic vision and operational performance.

Szubinski most recently served as executive vice president and chief operating officer at Meritage Homes, where he oversaw enterprise-wide operations and supported the builder’s national growth strategy. Prior to that, he led Meritage’s East Region, overseeing operations across Georgia, Tennessee, North Carolina, and South Carolina.

His prior leadership roles also include Southeast Region president at CalAtlantic Group, group president at K. Hovnanian Homes, Florida region president and Orlando division president at Meritage Homes, and division president for the Gulf Coast at KB Home. He began his career in homebuilding at Centex and holds degrees in political science, business administration, and law from Louisiana State University.

Founder and CEO Patrick Zalupski said Szubinski’s experience across large public builders positions him to lead Dream Finders Homes divisions as the company pursues continued national expansion. Szubinski said the company’s asset-light model, along with its focus on quality and affordability, supports its outlook as it scales.

Dream Finders Homes currently builds single-family homes and communities in Florida, Texas, Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Colorado, Arizona, and the Washington, D.C. metro area.

This post was originally published on here. 

When one of the world’s most respected investment companies makes an $8.5 billion move during a challenging housing market, people tend to pay attention.

Berkshire Hathaway‘s agreement to acquire Taylor Morrison Home Corp. has sparked conversations throughout the real estate industry — with many viewing the deal as more than just another corporate acquisition.

HousingWire Lead Analyst Logan Mohtashami characterized the move as another chapter in sweeping consolidation across the real estate, mortgage and construction sectors.

“There’s mass consolidation in the real estate industry when valuations are low, then you’re just kind of building your army chest for the next cycle,” he said. “There’s fewer and fewer players out there, and not a lot of people know this, but Japanese companies have been buying a lot of homebuilders recently as well.”

Overall, Mohtashami believes the Berkshire Hathaway deal is more about capital deployment than a sudden shift in housing fundamentals.

“I think they saw a valuation opportunity good enough for them to use their cash,” he said. “They have a pile of cash that they have not been using.”

Real estate coach Darryl Davis views the move as a strong directional signal of confidence in housing over the long run.

“I would categorize Berkshire as the smartest, most patient money in America,” Davis told HousingWire. “They just made a 20-year bet on housing and they made it during a down cycle — so that tells you everything about where they think the industry is going. So I think it’s a really positive, forward-looking thing.”

How agents should view the deal

Mohtashami said direct housing market effects stemming from the acquisition might be hard to notice in the short term. He pointed out that interest rates remain the most important variable for new construction.

“When you think of the new home sales sector, it’s really gone nowhere for many years,” Mohtashami said. “If you believe that the next move in rates is [to go] lower, then you could probably get more new home sales, just like you would get more existing home sales.”

Even so, he noted that new home sales have held up better than resale activity in relative terms.

“New home sales, unlike the existing home sales market, is at 2019 levels, so it is clearly outperforming the existing home sales market,” Mohtashami said. “I think agents should try to not read too much into this, because I think [Berkshire CEO Greg Abel] just needed something to do with the cash.”

Davis said large acquisitions often highlight what agents control in the home transaction — relationships and client trust — even in a consolidating industry.

“I think it’s telling that this is the first major deal for Greg Abel as the CEO, and I think for the agents, they should be watching for the vertical integration,” he said. “When one parent company owns the building, the brokerage, the mortgage, the title, the insurance, the one asset nobody else can acquire is the relationship and trusted advice.

“No matter what’s happening at this higher level, it’s not going to impact the agents on that level.”

Mohtashami said Berkshire Hathaway’s move is consistent with long-standing housing cycle dynamics.

“The history of housing economics teach us this,” he said. “If agents are trying to take something away from [the acquisition], I think this is more of a matter of there are a lot of homebuilders that are being bought, there are a lot of homebuilders that people are attempting to buy, and they found a good enough valuation for their cash.”

Getting ready for the next cycle

Mohtashami said the biggest mistake in interpreting the Berkshire acquisition is assuming it signals stress in housing.

“Everyone’s gearing up for the next cycle to happen. And that, to me, is the main story here,” he said. “It’s not so much just about this purchase, but the whole of what all these mergers and buyouts and everything represent. It’s all getting ready for the next cycle. Agents can take this; the worst is over.

“Now, housing is about who’s going to have the best war chest coming into the new cycle. That’s what the last 12 to 18 months have shown us.”

For Davis, the Taylor Morrison sale price was as much of a positive housing indicator as the purchase itself.

“[Berkshire] paid a 24% premium, which is huge,” he said. “To me, that says that real estate is a buy for them and they buy low when opportunity is there. That’s their model. It’s a loud statement of Berkshire’s trust and belief in the future of the housing industry across the board. That’s just a great thing for everybody in the industry.”

Even in a less-than-ideal market, major capital is flowing toward homebuilding.

For agents and other industry professionals, the message is less about disruption and more about resilience as housing remains a foundational asset class entering what could be the next expansion cycle.

This post was originally published on here. 

Realtor.com has integrated Agoyu’s AI-driven moving quote platform into select rental and for-sale listings, giving consumers access to instant estimates from vetted movers without an in-home visit, the companies announced on Monday.

Within their home-search experience on Realtor.com, users can now record a short video of their belongings. Agoyu’s patented AI technology identifies items in the video and calculates weight and volume to generate real-time moving quotes from a network of licensed movers, according to the announcement.

The tool is positioned as a replacement for traditional, time-consuming in-home estimates. In addition to pricing, consumers receive detailed mover profiles intended to reduce surprise fees and increase transparency around the relocation process.

“Moving is one of life’s most stressful experiences, largely due to a historical lack of pricing clarity and trust,” Bill Mulholland, founder and CEO of Agoyu, said in the release. “By partnering with Realtor.com, we are putting our technology in the hands of millions of consumers at the exact moment they need it most.”

Tricia Smith, senior vice president of ancillary products at Realtor.com, said the integration aligns with Realtor.com’s strategy to support homebuyers and renters beyond the search and transaction stage, extending into move-in logistics.

The Agoyu integration is currently live on select Realtor.com rental and for-sale property listings. Consumers can also access the service via the Agoyu website or the Agoyu Moving app for iOS and Android, the company said.

This article was generated using HousingWire Automation and reviewed by a HousingWire editor before publication.

This post was originally published on here. 

Berkshire Hathaway Inc.’s acquisition of Taylor Morrison Home Corp. is more than just a homebuilder buyout — it brings two mortgage operations under one umbrella. Together, these units originated nearly $8.2 billion in 2025, serving homebuyers across the income spectrum.

On Sunday, Berkshire Hathaway announced a definitive agreement to acquire Taylor Morrison in an all-cash deal. It values the national homebuilder at an $8.5 billion enterprise value (and approximately $6.8 billion in equity), taking the seller private at a 24% premium. Taylor Morrison’s management team, including chairman and CEO Sheryl Palmer, will remain in place.

Berkshire previously acquired Clayton Homes in 2003, transforming it into a subsidiary focused on manufactured and modular homes. Its mortgage arm, Vanderbilt Mortgage, originated roughly $4.2 billion in 2025, up about 5% year over year. This positioned it as the 73rd-largest mortgage lender in the nation, according to Inside Mortgage Finance (IMF).

Meanwhile, Taylor Morrison — a builder operating more than 350 communities across 21 markets in 12 states — owns Taylor Morrison Home Funding. Last year, the unit originated $4 billion in loans, unchanged from the prior year and ranking 76th nationally.

Combined, the two entities would rank among the top 50 largest mortgage lenders, with $8.2 billion in volume last year, per IMF data. 

Looking at personnel, Vanderbilt had 287 sponsored loan officers across 39 active branches as of Monday, compared to 99 loan officers in 16 locations for Taylor Morrison, according to the Nationwide Multistate Licensing System (NMLS).

In February 2025, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) voluntarily dismissed a lawsuit against Vanderbilt that accused the lender of pushing borrowers into “unaffordable loans” that, in some cases, caused them to lose their homes.

New conglomerate

But the two entities operate distinctly. Jennifer McGuinness, CEO of Pivot Financial, said that Clayton Homes has a “portfolio hold-and-service” model through Vanderbilt, targeting lower- and middle-income borrowers and occasionally the subprime market. 

Taylor Morrison, on the other hand, deals largely with highly qualified conventional and government mortgage customers. It frequently taps into the secondary market and generally retains servicing rights. 

“Together they cover the ‘full lifecycle’ for the buyer/borrower and they also own title and escrow companies,” McGuinness said in a social media post. “But that’s not it — they also have a real estate brokerage, with a network of over 45,000 local real estate agents and if that’s not enough they also own a home owners insurance company, a home warranty business and a relocation company.”

McGuinness estimates the newly expanded conglomerate can capture revenue from the entire life cycle of a home sale and its financing, collecting five to six separate revenue streams per transaction across every life event of a homebuyer.

Housing supply issues

Coby Hakalir, who leads the mortgage banking division at real estate consultancy firm T3 Sixty, views the blockbuster deal as a distinct “volume play” for Berkshire.

“Builders are giving away more in pricing now than they ever have. It’s not an easy market for them, but for the builders that have a mortgage arm, that’s how they are shoring that up: That money they’re giving in pricing concessions are being made back on the mortgage side,” Hakalir said.

“They’re fighting for market share; they’re fighting for every dollar. Is that necessarily good long term for real estate to be giving that much away in pricing concessions, sometimes as much as 20%? It remains to be seen. It seems to be hurting some of the low down payment borrowers, the FHA borrowers, particularly.”

Hakalir also believes the deal represents a “bet on the fact that we need to and will solve the housing supply issue.”

“The timing of this bet is interesting, because right now we are seeing lack of demand from buyers, elevated interest rates, higher cost of materials to build, regulatory costs to build with zoning and permitting that can get to $100,000 on a house. To make a big bet on a builder right now is vivacious,” he added.

Michael Linger, director of Houlihan Lokey‘s financial services group, sees the deal primarily as a “purchase market-heavy, new build play” rather than one with massive mortgage implications.

While he doesn’t expect the companies to experience rapid mortgage growth, he recognizes the broader strategy at play. “The theme here is a housing market supply shortage,” he added.

This post was originally published on here. 

M/I Homes Inc. has partnered with Prophetic, a land acquisition technology provider, to support key parts of its land evaluation process across multiple markets, the companies announced on Monday. 

The rollout brings parcel discovery, regulatory and environmental review, competitive and market intelligence, yield estimates and pipeline management into a single AI-native system used across M/I Homes’ divisions.

For large public builders, the core land challenge is volume and speed: evaluating more potential sites while reaching confident yes-or-no decisions faster, without adding headcount. The M/I Homes deployment is designed to increase the number of opportunities its teams can realistically vet and to shorten the diligence cycle.

“At the end of the day, this is about how quickly we can turn data into a confident decision,” said Ron Frissora, chief information officer at M/I Homes, in a statement. “Being able to evaluate more sites, eliminate dead ends earlier, and focus our teams on the right opportunities has a direct impact on how we grow.”

The announcement comes after Prophetic announced an organization-wide partnership with D.R. Horton in November. As more homebuilders embrace AI to streamline operations and boost efficiency, those that don’t implement it risk falling behind their competitors. For regional private builders competing with public operators, leveraging technology to gain a competitive advantage could prove to be crucial. 

Why this matters for homebuilders

For builders under pressure to grow while managing risk, land is often the scarcest internal resource. Tools that compress weeks of zoning and feasibility work into minutes and increase the number of sites a team can screen may influence how aggressively builders can pursue new communities and respond to changing market conditions.

Land acquisition has become a gating constraint on adding new housing supply. Much of the work still relies on manual checks of zoning codes, parcel records across multiple counties and information scattered among disconnected internal systems. That limits how many deals a local or national land team can realistically evaluate in a given month, and the constraint compounds across every division and market.

Prophetic enables land teams to search by intended development type, surface-qualified parcels, and off-market opportunities across entire markets in seconds, instead of relying solely on broker networks and county GIS portals.

For diligence and feasibility, the platform consolidates work that is typically spread across multiple tools. Land staff can interpret local zoning rules, generate preliminary site plans and track surrounding development activity. The platform is designed so that every value is verified and tied back to a source, supporting a defensible go/no-go decision without leaving the platform.

Prophetic also centralizes deal tracking, analysis, and collaboration, including an executive dashboard with AI-enabled insights to enable quicker corporate-level decisions. As more parcels are evaluated and more decisions are logged, Prophetic builds an internal intelligence layer intended to make future evaluations more efficient.

This article was written by Tyler Williams and generated with the assistance of HousingWire Automation, then reviewed by a HousingWire editor before publication.

This post was originally published on here. 

A new analysis from Investopedia found that a single American who retires at 65 needs roughly $898,000 in savings to fund a comfortable retirement. But the required nest egg varies sharply — from about $644,000 in North Dakota to more than $1 million in New Jersey, Hawaii, California and Washington, D.C.

An individual age 65 or older who lives alone spends about $59,600 a year on average, according to 2024 Consumer Expenditure Survey data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics cited in the Investopedia report. Of that total, Social Security covers roughly $23,700, based on the average retired-worker benefit. This leaves a gap of about $35,900 that must be filled by retirement savings.

Using a 4% annual withdrawal rate, a common rule of thumb, the analysis translates the income gap into a required nest egg of roughly $898,000. That is considerably lower than the $1.5 million target cited by respondents as necessary for a comfortable retirement in Northwestern Mutual’s 2026 Planning & Progress Study — but it still represents a substantial hurdle for many households.

Location is a major driver of how much a single retiree needs.

Investopedia’s state-level estimates, based on 2024 federal data, show required savings ranging from about $644,000 in North Dakota to more than $1 million in the highest-cost locations. New Jersey, Hawaii, California and the District of Columbia all top $1 million in required savings, while New York, Washington, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Maryland and New Hampshire fall between roughly $915,000 and $950,000.

The least expensive states for single retirees are concentrated in the Plains and Appalachia. After North Dakota, Arkansas ($648,000), Mississippi ($653,000), West Virginia ($658,000) and Iowa ($667,000) have the lowest required nest eggs under the methodology.

Housing is the main factor behind the wide gap in costs. For Americans 65 and older living alone, housing expenses — including mortgage or rent, insurance, property taxes and utilities — accounts for about 27% of annual spending on average. State-level costs for this category range from roughly $7,000 a year in West Virginia to more than $19,000 in California, according to the analysis.

Prices for other goods and services vary less than housing but still influence the totals. Using regional price parity data from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, the report notes that prices are about 6% above the national average in Hawaii and about 7% below in South Dakota.

The analysis defines a “comfortable” retirement as average spending for Americans 65 and older living alone — but is not a bare-bones budget. The total includes discretionary items, allocating about $3,000 $3,000 a year on entertainment, $2,800 on dining out and additional travel costs. Retirees spending at the median level typically need 15% to 20% less than the reported amounts.

Investopedia’s methodology combines four federal datasets from 2024 for all 50 states and the District of Columbia. It layers census data on housing tenure and median monthly costs, along with federal expenditure data for single-person retiree households, regional price parities for non-housing expenses, and Social Security Administration figures on average retired-worker benefits.

The remaining annual spending gap after Social Security is multiplied by 25, reflecting the traditional 4% withdrawal rule.

The estimates exclude state income taxes on retirement income, long-term care costs and local property tax exemptions for seniors, which can be significant in some markets. That means actual needs could be higher or lower depending on a retiree’s health, tax profile and housing situation.

For reverse mortgage professionals, the findings underscore how strongly retirement readiness is tied to housing costs and geography. For senior homeowners, decisions about paying off a mortgage, downsizing, tapping home equity or relocating to a lower-cost state can materially change the size of the nest egg required to sustain their standard of living in retirement.

This article was generated using HousingWire Automation and reviewed by a HousingWire editor before publication.

This post was originally published on here. 

The 2026 Atlantic hurricane season is underway, and despite predictions of a quieter year, experts are urging the housing industry not to ease up on storm-resilient building.

NOAA’s 2026 outlook calls for 8–14 named storms, 3–6 hurricanes, and 1–3 major hurricanes. That follows 2025, the first season since 2015 in which no hurricane made U.S. landfall. Two consecutive slow seasons can breed a dangerous sense of normalcy among builders and developers making long-term infrastructure decisions.

Last year’s quiet season still delivered real consequences. Tropical Storm Chantal made landfall in South Carolina, flooding coastal communities, and offshore storms generated large swells that accelerated coastal erosion along the Outer Banks. A season without a major landfall is not a season without risk.

Patrick Chopson, principal architect with Atlanta-based firm Cove, told The Builder’s Daily that developers and builders may be tempted to dismiss the threat during a slower season.

“But I always tell people, Indiana University won a football championship this year, and we got the New York Knicks in the NBA finals,” Chopson said. “You should really expect the impossible.”

In its May 30 forecast, global engineering firm Thornton Tomasetti warned that a “below-normal forecast does not eliminate risk for individual buildings, portfolios, campuses, or critical facilities.”

What the forecast shows

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Climate Prediction Center has issued an El Nino Watch. NOAA projects an 82% chance that El Nino conditions will develop during the May–July period, increasing wind shear over the Atlantic basin and suppressing storm development.

Currently, the climate sits in an El Nino-Southern Oscillation-neutral phase – commonly known as ENSO-neutral – the transitional window between La Nina and the anticipated El Nino emergence.

“The weather patterns are going to be all strange in 2026, and they’re supercharged by climate change,” Chopson said.

Forecasters caution that ENSO-neutral periods carry their own unpredictability. The atmospheric brakes that suppress Atlantic hurricane activity have not fully engaged.

History bears out potential threat

The 1992 Atlantic hurricane season offers the starkest warning. El Nino conditions were developing, and the season produced only six named storms. Then came Andrew.

Hurricane Andrew made landfall in South Florida on Aug. 24, 1992, as a catastrophic Category 5. It killed 65 people and caused more than $27 billion in damage, exceeding $60 billion in today’s dollars. Andrew leveled entire communities in Miami-Dade County and remains one of the costliest landfalling hurricanes in U.S. history.

Andrew’s destruction produced one lasting policy response. Florida overhauled its building codes, adopting some of the most stringent hurricane construction standards in the nation. The 2001 Florida Building Code mandated stronger roof-to-wall connections, impact-resistant windows, and higher wind-load requirements – reforms credited with meaningfully reducing structural damage in subsequent storms.

Chopson said that conditions this season structurally resemble those of 1992.

Don’t confuse quiet with safe

Emergency management officials and housing policy advocates are pushing back against any easing of resilience investment. Consecutive above-normal seasons had pushed many state and local governments to accelerate storm-resistant building codes and coastal infrastructure upgrades. A quieter forecast could stall that momentum.

Chopson said investors in markets like New Orleans face near-certain exposure to a catastrophic weather event within a standard 10-year multifamily hold period – risk that visibly suppresses development activity in the area. But he warned that the threat extends well beyond obvious danger zones, noting that lower-lying areas east and south of Tampa fall into an extreme-risk category many investors overlook.

“The bottom line is, if you’re not pricing the risk in appropriately for your particular location, you can be off by two times what the actual risk is,” Chopson said. “A lot of your large insurers have pulled out of Florida because they’re running the actual math.”

For builders, Chopson’s math carries a direct warning: the forecast may be quieter, but the exposure is not.

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Mutual of Omaha Mortgage remained the nation’s largest reverse mortgage lender in May, even as overall Home Equity Conversion Mortgage (HECM) endorsements continued to decline, according to a report released Monday by HECMWorld.com that utilizes data from Reverse Market Insight (RMI).

Mutual of Omaha recorded 423 HECM endorsements during the month, upping its total to 2,169 on a year-to-date basis. That represents a 21.5% market share. But the lender’s production fell 14.9% from April and was down 9.4% from the same period a year earlier.

Finance of America ranked second with 407 endorsements in May and 2,017 year to date, capturing a 20.7% market share. Unlike many competitors, the lender posted a 3.3% monthly increase in production, although its year-to-date volume remained down 14.9%.

Longbridge Financial held the No. 3 spot with 357 endorsements in May and 1,694 through the first five months of 2026, accounting for 18.2% of the market. Its monthly volume slipped 2.7% while year-to-date production was down 5.7%.

The three largest lenders collectively controlled more than 60% of the reverse mortgage market through the first five months of the year.

Industrywide, the top 100 retail lenders endorsed 1,967 HECM loans in May, down 4.7% from April and 10.8% year over year. Total endorsements across all lenders reached 10,288 through May, a 13.3% decline from the same period in 2025.

Several lenders posted notable monthly gains. Guild Mortgage increased endorsements by 54.8% from April, while Rate rose 50% and All Western Mortgage doubled its monthly volume. loanDepot posted a 150% month-over-month increase, although from a smaller base.

Among the top 10 lenders, GoodLife Home Loans ranked fourth with 87 endorsements in May, followed by South River Mortgage with 74 and Guild Mortgage with 65.

The total of 1,967 endorsements in May marked the lowest monthly volume reported so far this year and was below the 2,296 endorsements recorded during the same month in 2025, continuing a downward trend in originations of federally insured reverse mortgages.

HMBS issuances

The slowdown in lending activity was also reflected in the secondary market. HECM Mortgage-Backed Securities (HMBS) issuance totaled $500 million in May, down from $525 million in April and $544 million in May 2025, according to data compiled by New View Advisors.

Issuers created 63 pools during the month, four fewer than in April. New View reported that last month’s figure marked the lowest issuance recorded for the month of May since 2009.

Finance of America was the largest HMBS issuer in May, producing $171 million in securities, up slightly from $170 million in April. Longbridge Financial followed with $133 million, down $14 million from the previous month. Mutual of Omaha Mortgage issued $97 million, a decline of $1 million, while Onity Mortgage Corp., formerly PHH Mortgage Corp. issued $48 million, down $11 million from April.

Ginnie Mae/Reverse Mortgage Funding, known in the market as “Issuer 42,” did not issue any HMBS pools during the month.

Original, or first-participation, HMBS production totaled $330 million in May, unchanged from April. Production increased by $70 million from March but was $36 million below the $366 million recorded in May 2025.

For the first five months of 2026, Finance of America remained the leading issuer of first-participation HMBS with $469 million issued. Longbridge ranked second with $431 million, followed by Mutual of Omaha at $307 million and Onity at $151 million.

Of the 63 pools issued in May, 18 were first-participation pools, 44 were tail pools and one contained both first participations and tails.

Tail pools, which are backed by subsequent participations rather than new loans, totaled $169 million in May, down from $194 million in April. While tail issuances do not represent new reverse mortgages, they reflect additional funds advanced on existing loans.

The report also highlighted the growing use of smaller HMBS pools. Eighteen pools issued in May had aggregate balances of less than $1 million. Ginnie Mae rules allow issuers to create pools as small as $250,000, enabling approximately $10.6 million in unpaid principal balance that otherwise might not have been securitized during the month.

In addition, $57.3 million of participations pooled in May involved multiple participations from the same loan being securitized in the same month under Ginnie Mae guidance adopted in 2023. Of that amount, $6.3 million consisted of first participations.

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With the increasing discourse surrounding listing data control and access, the National Association of Realtors (NAR) has published three new resources aimed at providing clarity for MLSs and brokers navigating these conversations. 

Two of the resources, NAR said, are a complement to its MLS policy 8.5, which prevents MLSs from allowing users to filer listings based on things like offers of compensation, or the name of listing agent or brokerage. 

The first of these two resources is NAR’s Objective criteria in IDX and VOW policies, which clarifies that MLS participants may choose what listings from an MLS data feed they wish to display based on “objective criteria.”

While NAR does not define the exact parameters of this “objective criteria, it does list various examples as geography, list price range and property type. The resource also states that the “objective criteria should be “applied equally” to all MLS participants and should “not explicitly and/or directly target any particular brokerage and/or agent by name.”

To help with this, NAR has also released a chart to determine if filtering criteria for a listing is objective. The chart warms that if not all of the criteria meets the objectivity standards, it “may not be consistent with your MLS rules and require enforcement procedures as adopted by the MLS.” The standards include things like the criteria being applied equally to all participants and that it is based on “measurable or verifiable facts” such as property type, type of listing agreement or listing status. 

NAR also notes that while MLS policy does not prohibit the ranking or sorting of listings, rankings  “must not involve the removal or the blocking of listings which prevent the communication of those listings, based on the existence or level of compensation offered to a cooperating broker or the name of a brokerage or agent, to a client or customer.”

In addition, NAR also released guidelines for one-to-one broker communication under its Clear Cooperation Policy (CCP). NAR defines one-to-one broker communication as “person-to-person communications” between a listing agent or broker and another broker or agent at a different firm.

NAR said this type of communication, allows brokers to gather or disseminate information about a listing without triggering the requirements of CCP. However, NAR noted that this type of communication “must be pursuant to the seller’s informed consent and interests.” 

In an emailed statement, a NAR spokesperson told HousingWire that their resources and guidelines aim “to provide additional context on existing policies and highlight considerations relevant to their application.” 

“These materials will help members and other stakeholders apply these policies more consistently and with greater clarity and confidence,” the spokesperson added.

These guidelines come at a time when different MLSs across the industry are updating their IDX policies and some are pushing back against Zillow’s listing access standards policy, which bans listings that are publicly marketed for more than 24 hours before being available for display on sites powered by IDX or VOW data feeds.

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Fair Isaac Corp. (FICO) has appointed Eric Lapin as vice president and head of strategy and market intelligence for its Scores business, bringing aboard a financial services executive with experience across banking, capital markets, mortgage lending, title insurance, fintech and credit analytics.

Lapin announced the move Monday morning on LinkedIn, confirming to HousingWire that it is his first day at the company. He will report to Julie May, who leads and oversees FICO’s B2B Scores business.

“My career has run through banking, capital markets, mortgage, title, fintech, and credit analytics, and the thread running through all of it has been the same: the quality of the underlying signal determines the quality of every decision built on top of it,” Lapin wrote in his post.

“Mortgage, auto, and consumer credit decisions, securitization structures, and the institutional capital flowing through those markets all depend on whether the credit signal at the center holds up through a full cycle. FICO is that signal.”

In a statement given to HousingWire, Lapin said he will focus on market trends, competitive intelligence, industry engagement, and “the evolving role of credit analytics across lending and capital markets” in the new role.

“It’s an important time as score modernization, and alternative data, reshape risk assessment and expand access to credit, he said. “Given FICO’s central role in helping the financial ecosystem make informed decisions, these conversations are more important than ever.”

Lapin’s post said that FICO is “advancing score evolution, alternative data integration, and the transparency that investors, insurers, lenders, rating agencies, and regulators need as the market modernizes.”

Before joining FICO, Lapin held various mortgage finance, capital markets, credit analytics and financial technology roles, including leadership roles at FormFree, Old Republic Title, Black Knight, Altisource, First American and Credit Suisse.

The appointment comes as the credit scoring industry undergoes significant change. Federal housing regulators have recently taken steps to expand the use of alternative credit-scoring models in mortgage

In a joint announcement in April, U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Secretary Scott Turner announced plans to adopt FICO 10T and VantageScore 4.0 for Federal Housing Administration (FHA) loans.

Meanwhile, Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) Director Bill Pulte unveiled a pilot allowing lenders to use VantageScore 4.0 for loans sold to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, with future implementation of FICO 10T and a revised pricing grid tied to the new credit models.

FICO remains the dominant provider of credit scores used throughout the U.S. lending system, particularly in mortgage finance.

Editor’s note: This story was updated to include Eric Lapin’s correct title.

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HousingWire is proud to announce the 2026 Marketing Leaders, honoring 70 of the most influential and innovative marketing professionals across mortgage, real estate and housing technology.

This year’s honorees are the strategists, storytellers and growth drivers behind some of the industry’s most recognizable brands and successful business initiatives. From leading major brand transformations and launching AI-powered marketing programs to driving customer engagement, revenue growth and market expansion, these leaders are redefining the role of marketing in housing. Their work extends far beyond campaigns, helping shape business strategy, strengthen customer relationships and position their organizations for long-term success.

The 2026 Marketing Leaders reflect the depth of talent and creativity driving the housing industry forward. Whether supporting loan officers and agents, elevating consumer experiences, building category-defining brands or bringing new technologies to market, these professionals are setting a new standard for marketing excellence. HousingWire is honored to recognize the 70 leaders whose vision, innovation and impact continue to influence the future of housing.

Take a look at this full list of 2026 Marketing Leaders below.

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For the past 16 months, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) acting director Russell Vought has moved aggressively to scale back the agency’s enforcement and regulatory activities, even as questions have mounted over how long he can legally remain in charge.

Vought, who is the current head of the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB), was named acting head of the CFPB in February 2025, a position that has a 210-day limit set by the Federal Vacancies Reform Act (FVRA).

Shortly after taking the position, Vought moved to suspend most of the CFPB’s operations, closed the agency’s headquarters and said he would halt its funding.

In April 2025, the Trump administration moved to dismiss roughly 90% of the CFPB workforce, triggering a court fight that temporarily blocked the layoffs. In August, a federal appeals court panel allowed the reductions to proceed, leading to the dismissal of about 1,500 employees.

Two months later, during an appearance on The Charlie Kirk Show, Vought voiced his intentions to shut down the agency altogether.

In November 2025, President Donald Trump nominated Stuart Levenbach, an associate director at the OMB, to serve as CFPB director. Critics, including Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), said the move could allow Vought to remain in charge beyond the 210-day limit set by the FVRA, since the clock is paused while a nomination is pending.

Once a nomination is pending, however, the acting official may continue to serve while the Senate considers it. If the nomination is rejected, returned or withdrawn, the 210-day clock resets from that action.

A CFPB spokesperson had described the nomination to HousingWire as a “technical” step to extend Vought’s tenure.

August deadline looming

On Jan. 3, the Senate returned Levenbach’s nomination to Trump without taking action, a procedural move that allows Vought to remain at the agency’s helm through Aug. 1.

“When this 210-day round expires in August, Vought likely has to step aside. Otherwise, his actions at the CFPB likely would be void if he tried to remain in the acting director role,” said Colgate Selden, a shareholder at Baker Donelson and a founding attorney for the CFPB.

In the days since Levenbach’s nomination was returned, the CFPB, under Vought’s direction, finalized a rule to amend Regulation B, which implements the Equal Credit Opportunity Act (ECOA), a 1974 civil rights law designed to prevent discrimination in lending.

The final rule eliminated disparate-impact liability under ECOA, restricted how lenders can signal discouragement to applicants, and imposed tighter limits and conditions on Special Purpose Credit Programs (SPCPs), especially those using protected characteristics.

In a lawsuit filed last week against the CFPB and Vought, several fair housing groups — including the National Fair Housing Alliance and Rise Economy — sought to block the Regulation B changes and challenged Vought’s authority in enacting the rule. They argue he has not been lawfully appointed to lead the agency since he has not been confirmed by the Senate.

“Mr. Vought has been purporting to act as Director since February 2025, but he has never been confirmed by the Senate, and none of the circumstances contemplated by the Federal Vacancies Reform Act apply,” the lawsuit reads.

In a response to the suit, Vought defended the changes.

“One Hallmark of the second Trump administration has been the eradication of discriminatory race-based policies that have permeated every aspect of government under the banner of ‘diversity equity and inclusion,’” Vought said.

“The administration of fair lending laws is no exception. As acting Director of the CFPB, I am taking steps to correct how the Equal Credit Opportunity Act is enforced. This law was intended to eradicate discrimination in lending, not encourage new forms of discrimination, which it did under the Biden administration.”

Who’s next in the line of succession?

The CFPB did not respond to HousingWire‘s requests about Vought’s leadership status or duration.

“Their argument is that FVRA doesn’t even apply,” Richard Horn, co-managing partner at Garris Horn and a former senior counsel and special advisor in the CFPB’s Office of Regulations, said of the lawsuit.

If the FVRA’s basis for Vought’s role lapses on Aug. 1 and no permanent director is confirmed, Horn expects the current deputy director, Geoffrey Gradler, to step in under the guidance of the Dodd‑Frank Act.

“There’s probably no chance that they’re going to get somebody nominated as permanent director, so the current deputy director is going to become acting director under the provision under the Dodd‑Frank Act,” he said, adding that “there’s no time limit for that under the Dodd‑Frank Act.”

Horn said housing industry observers should be cautious about assuming any successful challenge to Vought’s status would invalidate CFPB rules or enforcement actions.

“It would be unwise for industry to say, ‘We don’t have to follow anything that CFPB has been doing in the rules now because Acting Director Vought wasn’t lawfully the director,’” he said. “A future permanent director can ratify Vought’s actions, so industry should follow them.”

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Between 2021 and 2025, REMAX at the Crossing/REMAX Centerstone — which rebranded on Monday to REMAX One — recorded an impressive 113% growth in transaction sides.

In 2025 alone, the Indianapolis-based firm closed 1,212 transaction sides totaling $377.85 million in sales volume, according to RealTrends Verified data. The firm’s strong performance earned it the No. 5 rank in the 2026 RealTrends GameChanger rankings. 

This growth came despite a housing market slowdown, economic uncertainty and industry changes. 

While Mike Jones, the firm’s broker-owner, is proud of this growth, what brings him the most pride is how his agents, brokers and staff navigated these challenges and supported each other through changes and growing pains. 

“These results are the product of everything that we have all worked for and the accomplishments we have all aimed to achieve,” Jones told HousingWire. 

Jones said his firm’s growth over the past few years has been powered by a combination of organic growth, mergers and acquisitions, and strong agent retention. 

When it comes to agent retention, Jones credits the resources and support he and his team have received from REMAX — and the family-like atmosphere that has been created within the company — for helping him keep agents even through acquisitions. 

“We really do operate the brokerage with this feeling of being a family,” Jones said. “When agents join the company, they have me as well as a bunch of administrators, managers, and other brokers and agents they can reach out to for help, exchange ideas with or just talk if that is what they need. We have found that in creating a great atmosphere, people tend to want to stay around.” 

To achieve this, Jones said they have focused on making sure members of the leadership team are readily available. Having designated spaces for agents to congregate in the firm’s brick-and-mortar offices has helped to foster that collaborative, family atmosphere. 

When looking at possible acquisition partners, ensuring that the culture and atmosphere stay intact is one of Jones’ top priorities.

“I’m really less of a numbers guy, so I have the people on my team who look at that part. But we’ve had conversations with big brokers whose numbers look good, but they just didn’t have the atmosphere that aligned with what we have, so there have been some that we have walked away from,” Jones said.

“For us, it is not just based on numbers, but on the personality, the atmosphere and the overall energy of the brokerage we are looking at acquiring. We want to make sure it is going to be a good fit, first and foremost.” 

Jones said taking this approach to any possible M&A has resulted in the creation of a cohesive company, despite many agents coming over from other firms. 

Looking at the growth Jones and his team have achieved over the past five years, even with the market headwinds, he believes it is consistency that has fueled growth. 

“A few years back, one of our top team leaders, Steve Sergi, told me that there is no market change when it comes to consistency. And I just love that,” Jones said. “If you stay consistent with your clients, stay in front of them and let them know you are still doing business, those clients will then remember you and pass your name on.” 

Jones said this approach to consistent marketing has helped his agents increase their average number of transactions at a time when the market has cooled. 

“We’ve really found that with consistent marketing, consistent communication, and the ability to trade ideas with other agents and our leadership being very hands on, that our agents have been able to grow their business during this time,” Jones said. 

Looking ahead, Jones said he’s excited for the future of operating his firm under the REMAX One banner, as he feels it encapsulates the family his team have has at REMAX at the Crossing/REMAX Centerstone.

“We are excited to bring everybody together as one and we feel that as we bring more people into the fold and into the family, we feel like bringing them together under the REMAX One banner is really going to help expand that network through referrals and the sharing of ideas and tips,” he said.

“We are really excited for the coming year and looking forward to growing even more and becoming a dominant force in the markets we serve.”

This post was originally published on here. 

Mortgage application fraud risk declined in the first quarter of 2026, returning to historic norms as refinancing activity increased, according to a new report from Cotality.

The company’s Q1 2026 National Mortgage Application Fraud Risk Index fell 9.3% from a year earlier and 9% from the fourth quarter of 2025. Cotality estimated that about one in every 129 mortgage applications showed indications of fraud risk during the quarter.

The decline comes as refinancing activity accounted for 41% of mortgage applications in the first quarter, while purchase loans made up 59%.

Despite the overall improvement, Cotality found that the undisclosed real estate category posted the only year-over-year increase among major fraud risk indicators, rising 7.7%. The category can signal hidden debt, occupancy misrepresentation or undisclosed derogatory credit events, such as foreclosures, notices of default or short sales.

The increase appears to be tied to a greater concentration of investment property applications, according to the report. Historically, undisclosed real estate alerts are 2.5 times more likely to occur on investment properties than on owner-occupied homes.

Investment and multifamily properties continued to carry the highest fraud risk. Cotality estimated that one in 44 investment property applications and one in 29 multifamily applications showed indications of fraud, compared with the overall industry average of one in 129.

“We saw that surge of investor volume from last year plateau and begin to decrease in Q1 2026 as an overall portion of the applications. In Q4 2025, investment and multi-unit represented 13.4% of applications but that dropped to 12% in Q1 2026, roughly an 11% decrease,“ Matt Seguin, senior principal for Cotality Mortgage Fraud Solutions, said in a statement.

Seguin said lenders should remain vigilant when reviewing loans tied to investment and multifamily properties as underlying risk indicators remain elevated despite the overall decline in fraud risk.

He also noted that property fraud risk, which can include inflated property values, rose 1.4% from the fourth quarter, while transaction fraud risk increased 7.1% on a quarterly basis.

The company said that overall mortgage applications increased 6.7% from Q4 2025 to Q1 2026. Government loans backed by the Federal Housing Administration, Department of Veterans Affairs and Department of Agriculture accounted for 23% of all applications, down slightly from the prior quarter.

Cotality also identified growing risk trends between January and March in income, property and occupancy categories.

Income-related alerts increased for borrowers whose reported income appeared unusually high relative to their age. Property-related alerts rose for homes that may have been recently flipped, and for transactions involving sellers structured as corporations or limited liability companies.

Occupancy-related alerts also increased, including instances in which borrowers may have misrepresented whether a property would serve as a primary residence or second home.

Among states, New York ranked as the riskiest market for mortgage fraud in the first quarter, followed by Florida, Connecticut, New Jersey and California. Fraud risk increased from the previous quarter in New York, Florida and Connecticut, while it declined in New Jersey and California.

The index is based on residential mortgage applications processed through Cotality’s LoanSafe Fraud Manager platform, which uses predictive analytics to assess fraud risk. The report tracks six major categories of fraud indicators: identity, income, occupancy, property, transaction and undisclosed real estate debt.

This article was generated using HousingWire Automation and reviewed by a HousingWire editor before publication. 

This post was originally published on here. 

Plaza Home Mortgage, a wholesale and correspondent mortgage lender, has disclosed a data breach due to a security incident that may have exposed customers’ and employees’ personal information. The exact number of people affected and the specific states involved have not yet been publicly disclosed.

The company said that on or around Feb. 17, 2026, there was unauthorized access to an employee’s computer when “threat actors” illegally accessed information systems without permission. “Our security controls immediately informed us about the access, and we took action immediately to shut down the attack,” the company stated.

But the company explained that customer information — such as names, addresses, Social Security numbers, birth dates, driver’s licenses or other government identification, as well as information related to mortgage applications and servicing — may have been compromised. For employees of Plaza, the exposed data also includes usernames and passwords for their accounts.

California-based Plaza Home Mortgage was the 39th-largest mortgage lender in the country in the first three months of this year, per Inside Mortgage Finance. The company originated about $2 billion in the period, up 32% year over year.

The company said it launched an investigation, with immediate action to remove the threat actor from its systems. Plaza has also implemented “additional organizational, technical and administrative security measures to prevent the reoccurrence of this security incident and to protect the personal information of our employees and customers.”

The company notified impacted customers and employees of the incident on May 29. It said it will offer free access to credit and identity monitoring, as well as identity restoration services, to any affected individuals.

“We are very sorry for any concerns that this incident has caused our customers and employees. We will continue to monitor our security systems to safeguard our customers’ and employees’ information and privacy,” Kevin Parra, co-founder, chairman and CEO of Plaza Home Mortgage, said in a statement.

Plaza is the latest in a growing list of mortgage companies affected by cyberattacks and data compromises.

In March 2026, US Mortgage Corp. was hit with a class-action lawsuit following a May 2025 data breach that exposed sensitive information to the dark web.

Similarly, in July 2025, New American Funding reported a data breach to the California attorney general involving a vendor that potentially compromised customer data.

This article was written by Flávia Furlan Nunes and generated with the assistance of HousingWire Automation, then reviewed by a HousingWire editor before publication. 

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The Huntsville Area Association of Realtors (HAAR) has appointed association veteran Tiffany James as its next chief executive officer, the trade group said Monday. She will lead both HAAR and its wholly owned multiple listing service, ValleyMLS, which together serve nearly 5,000 real estate professionals across North Alabama.

In the new position, James will work with HAAR and ValleyMLS leadership, brokers, Realtors, subscribers and local partners to sharpen member services, support professional standards and expand the organization’s role in regional housing and business conversations. 

James brings more than 20 years of experience in Realtor association leadership, communications, advocacy, governance and member engagement, according to the association’s announcement. Most recently, she served as CEO of the Fort Collins Board of Realtors in Colorado, where she led strategic and operational initiatives, broadened partnerships and added non-dues revenue streams, including technology and modernization projects such as a new website and association management system

Before Fort Collins, James held senior leadership roles at the Greater Las Vegas Association of Realtors. There she launched the group’s first communications department and helped position the association as a regional source for housing data and media engagement, a function that has become more important as real estate policy and market conditions draw increased public scrutiny.

“Tiffany brings exactly the kind of forward-thinking, relationship-centered leadership HAAR needs for this next chapter,” Regina Mitchell, president of the Huntsville Area Association of Realtors, said in a statement. “Our region is growing rapidly, our members are navigating a changing real estate environment, and HAAR must continue to elevate its role as a trusted resource, advocate, educator and industry leader.”

James said she plans to prioritize relationships with brokers, agents, subscribers and community partners as she steps into the role.

“The strength of HAAR and ValleyMLS starts with the people they serve, and I am looking forward to building strong relationships with the brokers, Realtors, subscribers, staff and community partners who are shaping North Alabama’s future,” James said in the announcement. “This is a market with extraordinary momentum and an association with an incredible opportunity to help shape the future of real estate services, professionalism, advocacy and market leadership.”

She is scheduled to begin as CEO at the end of July.

This article was written by Brooklee Han with the assistance of HousingWire Automation, then reviewed by a HousingWire editor before publication.

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HouseMe.ai, a new AI-powered real estate intelligence platform, launched Monday with a free service that generates instant, data-driven reports on every active home listing in the Greater Toronto Area, according to a company announcement.

Built by a team of high-volume luxury brokers, the Toronto-based platform aims to put professional-grade analysis directly in the hands of buyers by delivering cost breakdowns, valuation scores, negotiation guidance and neighborhood data on any listing in under 30 seconds. 

Founder and CEO Peter Torkan — a Toronto luxury broker at The Agency and a star of Amazon’s “Luxe Listings Toronto” — created HouseMe.ai with co-founders Paige Torkan and Nurit Coombe. Coombe’s Washington, D.C.-based real estate team closed over $270 million in sales volume in 2024, according to RealTrends Verified data. 

HouseMe.ai’s core product is an “Intelligence Report” on any GTA listing, generated automatically from a direct PropTx Toronto Regional Real Estate Board data feed that spans more than 224,000 active and sold MLS records, plus more than 60 AI-powered neighborhood profiles.

The report, which the company said can be generated in 30 seconds, bundles several features that traditionally require multiple conversations with agents and advisors:

• True Cost Calculator: Estimates total cost to close, including land transfer taxes, legal fees and monthly carrying costs, to help buyers understand affordability up front.
• AI Investment Thesis: Produces a broker-style narrative analysis for each property, with financial summaries, key highlights and a plain-language risk assessment.
• AI Valuation Score: Assigns a public 0–10 “fair value” rating for each active listing, which the company positions as a first-of-its-kind consumer feature in Canada.
• Negotiation Strategy: Uses days on market, comparable sales and local conditions to suggest offer strategies and pricing bands.
• Area Market Pulse: Surfaces neighborhood-level trends, including pricing, inventory and market conditions.
• Conversational AI: Lets consumers ask listing-specific questions in 97 languages, with near-instant responses planned in a forthcoming version.

The platform is free to consumers and covers “all active GTA listings,” the company said. It is available via HouseMe.ai’s website.

According to the announcement, HouseMe.ai’s back-end includes a conversational engine designed to process natural language queries across 97 languages in under a second, further illustrating how generative AI is being applied to localized housing market data.

The company did not disclose whether it plans to monetize the service through premium tiers, referral partnerships or integrations with brokerages and lenders. For now, HouseMe.ai’s free access model positions it as a lead-generation and engagement tool in a market where buyers increasingly expect instant, mobile-first decision support.

This article was written by Brooklee Han with the assistance of HousingWire Automation, then reviewed by a HousingWire editor before publication.

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Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) on Monday announced the launch of ICE Fraud Monitor, a mortgage fraud and property research solution integrated with the Encompass loan origination system to help lenders reduce risk and speed underwriting.

Fraud Monitor pulls fraud risk scoring and property risk data into a single dashboard within Encompass, cutting down on the need for underwriters to log into multiple vendor portals, according to ICE.

Users can click into specific fraud categories to see underlying data sources and supporting reports, which can make it easier to investigate red flags and document decisions.

The solution is built around configurable, exception-based automation that can clear conditions and update Encompass, which is designed to streamline the review process and limit repetitive manual steps for underwriting teams.

“Fraud reviews are often fragmented and highly manual, creating bottlenecks in the underwriting process and contributing to condition fatigue among lenders,” Bob Hart, president of mortgage technology at ICE, said in a statement.

“Fraud Monitor helps simplify that process by bringing fraud detection, condition management and supporting documentation into a unified workflow within Encompass,” he added. “By automating portions of the review process and giving underwriters faster access to detailed reports, they can identify and resolve potential fraud risks more efficiently while keeping loans moving through the pipeline.”

ICE said Fraud Monitor incorporates configurable risk scoring and ongoing monitoring so lenders can align workflows with internal risk management and compliance policies.

The tool integrates data from ICE SiteXPro property records, credit and employment validation sources, exclusionary lists and watchlists, and other third-party fraud and verification tools to create a more complete view of potential risk indicators.

The product also maintains a full audit trail with automated recordkeeping, user-level permissions, time-stamped condition clearances and reporting designed for compliance reviews.

The launch comes at a time when the Mortgage Industry Standards Maintenance Organization (MISMO) and industry fraud reports have shown persistent fraud risk in areas such as income, employment and occupancy misrepresentation, even in a lower-volume market. At the same time, lenders are under pressure to trim turn times and reduce per-loan costs while meeting heightened regulatory expectations around fraud controls and documentation.

This article was generated using HousingWire Automation and reviewed by a HousingWire editor before publication.

This post was originally published on here. 

Despite an announcement last week, Realtracs will continue sending listing feeds to Zillow until June 8, even though the deadline for Zillow to comply with Realtracs’ updated IDX display rules was Sunday. 

Over the weekend, Realtracs warned brokers that Zillow’s access to its listing data could end June 8 if the two sides do not reach a new licensing agreement that complies with the MLS’s updated listing display rules.

The Nashville-based multiple listing service, which serves more than 19,000 real estate professionals across six states, said in a May 31 update to members that there will be no change to Zillow listing displays on June 1 despite the ongoing negotiations. The current Zillow license expires June 8.

A key goal of the new agreement is broker compensation for the use of listing content, according to the Realtracs announcement. The MLS reiterated its position that brokers own their listing data and said it is negotiating “on behalf of its members to see that the value of their work is recognized by platforms, including Zillow, that rely on listing information created by brokers and agents to operate their businesses.”

“Our responsibility is to the brokers, agents, and clients we serve, not to any particular business model,” Stuart White, president and CEO of Realtracs, said in the statement. “That means protecting seller choice, recognizing the value of broker-created listing content, and providing a platform that encourages cooperation while preserving flexibility and opportunity for everyone involved in a transaction.”

The backstory

On April 29, Realtracs updated its IDX display rules.The updated rules require that if a seller wants a listing to be publicly marketed, that property must appear in search results that match a buyer’s search criteria on any platform receiving the Realtracs data feed.

The MLS said all data recipients were notified of the rule change, its implementation timeline and the consequences of noncompliance. The rule took effect May 13, with full compliance required by May 31.

As of May 31, Zillow is the only platform that has not complied with the updated agreement terms, Realtracs told members. Zillow has cited an internal policy that “prevents sellers from choosing how their properties are marketed,” which Realtracs said has resulted in dozens of its listings being suppressed on the Zillow platform.

If no new agreement is reached by June 8, Zillow’s access to Realtracs data feeds “will terminate at that time,” the MLS said. The advance notice is intended to give brokers time to understand their options and make any necessary preparations.

Even if the license lapses, brokers will still be able to send listings directly to Zillow through GRID’s Broker Only Export program, which operates independently of the Realtracs–Zillow licensing agreement.

Part of a larger dispute

If Realtracs ultimately suspends Zillow’s listing feed next Monday it would be the second MLS to do so in recent weeks. In mid-May, Midwest Real Estate Data (MRED) suspended Zillow’s listing feed over a “material breach of its license agreements.” Two days later, however, a Chicago federal court partially granted Zillow’s temporary restraining order, forcing MRED to restore the listing feed by the end of the day.

This dispute was part of a larger legal battle between Zillow, MRED and Compass International Holdings, in which Zillow has accused MRED and Compass of colluding. Earlier this spring, both MRED and Realtracs announced plans to expand nationwide, with both securing national listing feed agreements with Compass, as well as with United Real Estate for Realtracs.

This article was written by Brooklee Han with the assistance of HousingWire Automation, then reviewed by a HousingWire editor before publication.

This post was originally published on here. 

Christina Harmes has the reverse mortgage bug in her blood. She previously worked with her father, Scott, at C2 Financial Corp., one of the nation’s largest mortgage brokerages, and has been originating loans since 2011.

Harmes, who’s based in Southern California, has since moved on to Barrett Financial Group, where she works as a reverse mortgage broker, coach and mentor. She recently sat down with HousingWire’s Reverse Mortgage Daily to discuss details about the coveted Certified Reverse Mortgage Professional (CRMP) designation, the importance of emotional intelligence in sales, and referral strategies to generate more HECM for Purchase business.

Editor’s note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Neil Pierson: Let’s talk about Certified Reverse Mortgage Professionals — there’s only about 200 of them in the country and you’re one of them. What are the advantages of being a CRMP and how difficult is it to get the certification?

Christina Harmes: It’s hard. It takes 50 closed reverse mortgages, or having been in the industry for three years, plus a letter of recommendation. Then you have to pass a pretty difficult test. The last I knew, it had a 25% pass rate, so it’s pretty challenging.

I was sick the three days before I took the test, so I just stayed in bed studying the whole time. And I thought, “I’m going to be so mad at overstudying and wasting all this time.” And I just barely passed that test. I walked out of there going, “Whoa,” because it’s not what you’re going to learn by getting your mortgage license. You have to go out of your way to understand some counseling concepts, deep underwriting guidelines. I actually read two sets of lender underwriting guidelines, cover to cover, prior to that test.

I actually like that it’s difficult because it really is that higher level of expertise. When I see different designations and signature lines, I know they don’t come anywhere close to what the CRMP holds. We sign a code of ethics, which is really important, in my opinion. Some of us have fiduciary duties and some of us don’t as originators, but I think that fiduciary duty is a really important piece.

I had to learn that early in my career — you’re going to do what’s right for the client. You’re not just going to put them into a loan because it may be satisfying your sales quotas. You’re going to look at whether this a realistic and right solution. In my experience, CRMPs ask more questions and they ask different questions. In order to do reverse mortgages, I think there should be additional licensing besides the normal MLO licensing, but I don’t write the rules.

Pierson: Let’s talk about the recent Reverse Mastermind Summit. You were a speaker there and your points about having emotional intelligence with clients seemed to resonate. In your day-to-day dealings with clients, what is the importance of emotional intelligence, especially in light of the mistrust around the product?

Harmes: Emotional intelligence in this space is so important because we are dealing with a vulnerable population at a vulnerable time of their life. For a lot of people, finances and money feel like survival — and quite literally, it’s hard to say that it’s not.

If you can’t afford a roof over your head, then you could be homeless. If you can’t afford the groceries in the grocery store, then you’re not going to be eating. Those are survival pieces. I think it’s really important you have the emotional intelligence to be able to understand that and see that in your clients.

Dealing with a retired homemaker who did not deal with the finances, and now is a widow or widower, is a very different interaction than dealing with an engineer who is still working. And in our space, we’re going to have both types of clients. I’ve done loans for financial advisers themselves. Those are all very different type of experiences.

The reverse mortgage had some problems when it first started, and those problems created enough media sensation and enough noise that they got fixed. But people don’t always know that they got fixed. We’re dealing with people who are at least age 55 and they lived through the time where their nonborrowing spouse was not protected.

It’s really important to have that emotional intelligence, to bring it back around and say that these fears are real and they’ve been addressed. This product may have had some bumps along the way. It’s a very young mortgage compared to other mortgages, so we’ve had less time to work out those kinks.

Pierson: Barrett Financial is a broker shop, so let’s talk about broker agreements with lenders. When you’re setting up a loan and sending it to someone else for financing, how well do you feel protected? Refinance churning is still an issue and some clients may get solicited soon after closing. Has that ever been a worry for you?

Harmes: Coming from the forward space, it was a big worry on my mind. I was at one of the very first meetings for BRAWL (Brokers Rallying Against Whole-tail Lending), because in the forward space, every time rates drop, you’re trying to contact every client and say, “Hey, I can save you 50 bucks a month.”

In the reverse space, we’re interest rate sensitive, but we’re not interest rate driven. A lot of the time, when I look at a HECM-to-HECM refinance, their line of credit is already so big, I’m not going to refinance that loan. I put them in a good loan, I’m stoked they’re still in that loan, and it’s grown the way we wanted it to.

I don’t think lenders should be going after our clients. I think it’s really nice that there are broker protect programs in place with various lenders. But I also feel it’s important for you, as a business owner and a broker, to stay in front of your clients and maintain those relationships, so there’s no question.

Some of my clients come back to me saying, “Hey, I’ve been getting a lot of solicitation mail, I’ve been getting some phone calls, so I figured maybe I have a refinance opportunity. Can we talk?” That’s cool. I have that relationship, so other people are spending their marketing money and I’m getting the business.

Pierson: HUD reports that single women accounted for 41% of HECM endorsements in the past year. With that in mind, does there need to be a targeted effort to get more women to be originators?

Harmes: In the last six months, I’ve gotten four cold calls from clients, and each one of them said, “I just want to work with a woman.” I’ve had situations where it was a husband and wife. The wife didn’t feel cared for and spoken to properly by the originator who was male, so she went and looked up somebody else.

I’ve never had those kind of calls before. There’s something changing about the world where women want to work with women to feel comfortable in this space. I know there’s men in this industry who are emotionally intelligent and they’re not going to lose their business to a woman on that simple fact.

But I do think that when they say, “I’m looking for a woman,” what they’re really trying to explain is, “I’m looking for somebody who makes me feel safe, who explains things on my terms.” In their heads, that is a woman. As the world changes, bringing more women into this space is a really important thing, especially because of what you just said — 41% of our clients are single women.

Pierson: HECM for Purchase (H4P) is an interesting program that’s been underutilized. What are your thoughts on what it can do for seniors, and how do you build relationships with real estate agents to get the word out?

Harmes: Real estate agents are great to educate on H4P all day, but they actually end up sending you refinances. Most of my H4P business is not from Realtors — it’s from the clients directly.

I actually have a really cool transaction right now. The borrower came to me and she goes, “Christina, I want to do a HECM for Purchase. It’s a four-unit property, we’re going move into one of them, then we’re going have the rental income from the other three units.” And I lit up. I was like, “That’s one of my favorite strategies. Where did you find out about that?” And she goes, “From you on your YouTube channel.”

Honestly, with the H4P transaction, this this was not too different from my experience with Realtors on forward loans either. They don’t understand the finances all that well and they also have some big misconceptions about reverse mortgages. You have to educate them to a high level and hold their hand.

Other practices are structured different ways, but in my experience, we try to go directly to the consumer or to other professionals — the financial planners, the CPAs, other loan officers that might be talking money already. We’ll say, “Hey, if your client needs to downsize, if they need to sell and get some of that equity out, this is a piece of the puzzle that you should be looking at.” I’m not a Realtor partner — I’ll be open about that.

This post was originally published on here. 

In business, executives often spend months modeling synergies, forecasting EBITDA improvements, and calculating cost savings. Yet the factor most likely to determine whether a merger, acquisition, or integration succeeds rarely appears in a spreadsheet: culture.

The homebuilding industry offers a useful example. A structured, process-driven builder such as Beazer Homes and a more entrepreneurial organization such as Dream Finders Homes can both be successful, but they often operate on fundamentally different assumptions about how decisions should be made, how risk should be managed, and how much autonomy local leaders should have.

Beazer represents a more centralized corporate model, where standardization, consistency, and formal controls are prioritized. Dream Finders, by contrast, has built much of its growth on entrepreneurial flexibility and local operating autonomy, including a willingness to preserve acquired teams and market-specific practices. Neither model is inherently better; each evolved to support a different business strategy.

The problem begins when leaders assume one culture can simply be imposed on another.

The myth of cultural conversion

Executives often talk about “aligning cultures” as if culture were a software patch that can be installed over a weekend. It is not. Culture is the accumulated result of incentives, relationships, habits, and thousands of decisions made over time. It reflects what an organization actually rewards, not what it says in a slide deck.

When two organizations merge, leaders often underestimate the strength of the existing foundations. An entrepreneurial operator who has spent twenty years making independent decisions does not suddenly become comfortable seeking permission through multiple layers of management.

Likewise, a manager formed in a highly structured organization may view entrepreneurial behavior as undisciplined rather than innovative. Neither side is wrong. They simply operate from different assumptions about how success is achieved.

The mistake occurs when leadership tries to erase one identity in favor of the other.

History is full of warnings

Corporate history is filled with examples of deals that made sense on paper but failed in practice because the cultures were incompatible. The Daimler-Benz and Chrysler merger remains one of the most cited examples. The transaction was meant to create a global automotive powerhouse, but the two organizations brought sharply different management styles, decision-making norms, and expectations about authority.

Daimler favored hierarchy, process, and engineering discipline. Chrysler was known for speed, flexibility, and a more entrepreneurial operating rhythm. Those differences created persistent friction, contributed to morale problems and talent loss, and helped undermine the synergies that had seemed so attractive during the announcement phase.

The lesson was not that the product was weak. The lesson was that culture can overwhelm strategy when leaders ignore it.

Homebuilding makes it personal

The homebuilding industry faces the same challenge whenever a larger organization acquires a smaller builder. Many local builders succeed precisely because they are entrepreneurial. The founder knows local landowners personally, decisions are made quickly, and opportunities are evaluated by experience as much as by formal underwriting.

After an acquisition, corporate leadership may move quickly to standardize reporting, approval chains, and decision authority. What management views as better governance, the local team often experiences as bureaucracy. The very traits that made the acquired company effective begin to erode, and the buyer starts undermining the asset it paid for.

That is how integration turns into assimilation. And assimilation is where value starts to leak out.

Integration is not assimilation

Successful leaders understand a crucial distinction: integration is not assimilation. Integration asks what strengths each side should preserve. Assimilation asks how quickly one side can become the other.

The first approach creates value. The second often destroys it.

A smart acquirer recognizes that local market expertise is often the very asset being acquired. If that expertise is stripped away in the name of uniformity, part of the acquisition’s value is lost. That is especially true in homebuilding, where land, entitlement strategy, municipal relationships, and sales execution are often local rather than abstract.

Forced mergers create brain drain

A voluntary merger between different cultures can still be difficult, but a forced or hostile one is far more dangerous because it triggers something executives routinely underestimate: cultural brain drain. When people believe they are being absorbed rather than respected, the best operators do not wait to see how it turns out. They leave.

That loss is rarely just about headcount. It is the departure of the people who know the relationships, the informal channels, the local market nuance, and the real operating rhythm of the business. In homebuilding and other relationship-driven industries, that knowledge is often the actual asset being acquired. Once it walks out the door, the buyer may still own the company, but it no longer owns the same capability.

Forced integration also signals that trust is optional. When a transaction feels like a conquest rather than a partnership, employees begin protecting themselves rather than investing in the combined organization’s future. That is how a deal meant to create scale ends up producing fear, attrition, and a slow bleed of institutional memory.

Buy price, sell price, and hostility

Everything has a buy price and a sell price, but hostility carries its own hidden tax. In business, as in war, head-on attacks rarely yield clean outcomes. They harden resistance, deepen loyalty on the other side, and often provoke the very defense you sought to avoid. 

In my experience, if you come at me hostile, I bunker in and fight. I am built for the grind. If I decide to come at you head-on, the casualty rate is high enough that I may end up damaging my own empire in the process. History teaches the same lesson. England came at the American colonies with force and lost control of them. Hawaii, by contrast, changed hands through purchase and formal transfer. One path created a battlefield. The other created a deal.

That is the real warning for executives who think force is just a faster form of persuasion. It is not. Force changes the psychology of the transaction. Once that happens, the integration stops being about value creation and becomes a fight for survival.

Texas loyalty matters

In Texas, brand matters. Uniformity matters. But loyalty matters more. Texans tend to respect companies that look and act like they know who they are, and they distrust organizations that arrive with a broom, trying to erase the people who made the business work in the first place.

That is why a hostile or heavy-handed acquisition can backfire so badly in this market. If the acquiring company wipes out the target’s corporate management and treats the remaining team like a conquered territory, it should not be surprised when the survivors stop acting like loyal employees and start acting like a resistance cell. They may stay long enough to collect a paycheck, but behind the scenes they begin organizing their departure, protecting their relationships, and quietly working around the new regime.

In a place like Texas, where identity, reputation, and loyalty carry real weight, that is not a minor problem. It is a warning flare. Once the people who understand the local market decide they are no longer respected, the buyer does not just inherit a company; it inherits a fight.

Human nature resists force

The challenge is bigger than the corporate structure. People generally accept change when they understand it, trust the motive behind it, and retain some ownership of the outcome. They resist change when it is imposed without respect for what already works.

A coach who inherits a successful sports team rarely demands that every player abandon the skills that made them valuable. Good coaches adapt systems to talent. Weak leaders do the opposite: they buy a successful organization and immediately try to remake it in their own image. The result is predictable. Top performers leave. Institutional knowledge disappears. Performance declines.

Management responds with tighter control, which only accelerates the decline.

What good leaders do instead

The best integrations begin with humility. Leaders should assume that if a company was worth acquiring, it likely contains capabilities worth preserving.

That means asking, “What do they do better than we do?” instead of “How do we make them look like us?” It also means separating the functions that need standardization from those that benefit from local judgment. Accounting, treasury, compliance, and risk controls often require consistency, while land acquisition, entitlement strategy, municipal relationships, and market-specific sales approaches often require regional autonomy.

The objective is not uniformity. The objective is performance.

Incentives shape culture

Many executives also misunderstand what creates culture. Culture is not driven primarily by mission statements, posters, or town halls. Culture follows incentives. Employees watch what is rewarded, what is tolerated, and what is punished.

If leadership says it values entrepreneurship but punishes every decision that carries risk, employees will stop acting entrepreneurially. If leadership says it values collaboration but rewards only individual metrics, collaboration will disappear. People pay far more attention to incentives than to slogans.

That is why forced cultural integration often fails. The acquiring company may promise to preserve the entrepreneurial spirit, but the new incentive structure quietly rewards conformity. Employees immediately see the contradiction.

The third culture

The strongest integrations do not produce a winner and a loser. They create a third culture that preserves the best strengths of both organizations while eliminating the weaknesses of each.

That takes time. It takes listening. It takes leadership with enough confidence to admit that the acquired company may know something valuable. And it takes discipline to distinguish between the parts of culture that support performance and those that simply reflect legacy habits.

Whether in homebuilding, technology, manufacturing, finance, or professional services, the principle is the same: organizations succeed when their business model and culture reinforce one another, and they struggle when leaders try to force incompatible operating philosophies into the same box.

The lesson is simple

People can adapt. Organizations can evolve. Cultures can merge. But none of that happens because a memo says so. It happens when leaders recognize that culture is not an obstacle to strategy.

Culture is strategy. Ignore it, and even the most promising combination can fail.

This post was originally published on here. 

Few phrases surface more often in mortgage boardrooms than “loan officer productivity.” Leaders understandably want more loans per originator, more dollar volume per head and greater efficiency across the sales force. The metric feels clean and controllable, offering a simple way to measure performance and signal accountability.

Gradually, that focus can harden into the assumption that productivity is primarily an individual trait. Conversations drift toward hiring more “productive” people, intensifying training or pressing teams to close more. Yet, output reflects far more than personal drive. Organizational structure, territory design, competitive density and operational support all shape results. 

Viewing productivity as something that resides solely with a single loan officer obscures the broader organizational design that makes production possible in the first place. It can also obscure where much of the industry’s most practical growth opportunity lies—not necessarily in recruiting the best of the best, but in how effectively institutions identify, position and develop originators who align with the markets they want to grow.

The superstar illusion

Mortgage culture amplifies the emphasis on individual performance. Rankings spotlight top producers and recruiters pursue high-volume originators with the expectation that last year’s numbers will carry forward. A triple-digit loan count can quickly become shorthand for guaranteed impact.

In recruiting conversations, the dynamic can become surprisingly candid. Top loan officers often command sizable signing bonuses and are purported to ask for perks as lavish as company-paid country club membership. These stories circulate because they reflect a familiar reality: Top-producing originators often negotiate from a position of confidence, and lenders eager for volume sometimes accommodate those gilded expectations.

What tends to receive less attention is the context behind the production. Those loans may have been concentrated in a particular neighborhood, tied to a specific borrower segment or sustained by referral relationships built over many years. Change the geography, product strategy or competitive environment, and performance can shift accordingly. 

An exclusive focus on the top of the curve can therefore lead lenders to pay premiums for results shaped as much by structure as by individual skill—and occasionally for perks that signal status more than strategy.

The financial stakes are already significant. The Mortgage Bankers Association’s Quarterly Mortgage Bankers Performance Report shows that lenders spent an average of $7,598 per loan on personnel expenses in the first quarter of 2025. That’s more than 60% of their total production costs, which averaged $12,579 per loan. Net production income was negative $28 per loan, meaning lenders were losing money on each origination. Expanding headcount without clear alignment to market opportunity only intensifies pressure on the largest component of the cost structure.

A more reliable approach is to align originators with markets where careful analysis points to the strongest opportunities for sustainable growth. Those with more modest aggregate volume may be working in markets where demand exists, but production has not yet caught up with opportunity. In those cases, development and alignment can generate more incremental growth than another high-cost recruit.

When headcount becomes a reflex

The same mindset often appears during periods of turnover. If several originators depart, the instinct is to refill those seats quickly, ideally with candidates who bring impressive track records. The response can appear disciplined, yet it may simply replicate the same structural misalignment that existed before.

Markets have boundaries. Purchase activity rises and falls, competition clusters in certain corridors and some territories can support only a finite number of producers. Gradually expanding staffing beyond what local demand can sustain thins pipelines and heightens internal pressure. Even capable originators can struggle in overcrowded or poorly aligned markets.

Over time, this dynamic turns into a turnover treadmill. Recruiting packages can briefly lift volume, but rising compensation costs often outpace sustainable production, creating mounting pressure across the institution. As expectations go unmet, departures follow and the cycle begins again.

Data from the Mortgage Bankers Association and STRATMOR Group’s Peer Group Roundtables program illustrates how significant that churn can be. During the first half of 2022, one of the more recent periods with published detailed figures, annualized turnover rates for processors, underwriters and closers ranged from roughly 35% to 50% at large non-bank lenders and 18% to 22% at large banks. Turnover at those levels compounds operational strain and erodes consistency across the production platform.

The instability complicates target growth strategies. An institution may prioritize expansion in specific borrower segments or census tracts while its highest-volume originators operate elsewhere. Another marquee hire rarely shifts penetration in those priority markets; strategic placement and equipping loan officers with the right data and tools do. 

Redefining productivity

The starting point is a clear understanding of market opportunity. Examining where lending activity is concentrated, where the organization lags relative to demand and how much production each geography can realistically sustain reframes productivity as an outcome of alignment rather than individual intensity.

Historical scorecards reveal who produced in the past, but forward-looking analysis clarifies where opportunity is headed. That perspective allows leadership teams to establish shared goals grounded in measurable demand, calibrate staffing levels and define what strong performance should look like within each territory.

Within that framework, much of the scalable upside often resides in the middle of the productivity curve. Elite producers frequently operate with mature systems and entrenched networks, which can limit incremental expansion. Mid-tier originators, positioned in markets with identifiable demand and clear strategic direction, often demonstrate meaningful growth potential. Incremental improvements across that segment can compound significantly at the enterprise level.

As staffing, strategy and operational support align more closely with actual market capacity, production tends to stabilize. The organization gains steadier growth, improved retention and greater resilience through the industry’s inevitable cycles.

Bernard Nossuli is the COO of iEmergent
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of HousingWire’s editorial department and its owners. To contact the editor responsible for this piece: zeb@hwmedia.com.

This post was originally published on here. 

Berkshire Hathaway Inc. has agreed to acquire Taylor Morrison Home Corporation in an all-cash deal valuing the national homebuilder at approximately $8.5 billion, the companies announced Friday.

Under the definitive agreement, Berkshire will pay $72.50 per share in cash, a 24% premium to Taylor Morrison’s closing price of $58.50 on May 29, 2026. The transaction implies an equity value of about $6.8 billion and an enterprise value of roughly $8.5 billion for Taylor Morrison.

The Scottsdale, Arizona-based builder operates more than 350 communities across 21 markets in 12 states, serving entry-level, move-up and resort lifestyle buyers under the Taylor Morrison and Esplanade brands and developing rental communities under the Yardly brand. It also offers mortgage, title, escrow and homeowners insurance services.

Following the closing, Taylor Morrison will become a private company within Berkshire’s portfolio and its shares will be delisted from the New York Stock Exchange. The existing management team, including Chairman and CEO Sheryl Palmer, will remain in place, according to the announcement.

Greg Abel, CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, said the acquisition aligns with Berkshire’s long-term commitment to housing, citing existing holdings such as Clayton Homes and other building products businesses. Over time, Berkshire expects to unify its site-built homebuilding operations into a combined platform.

The deal is expected to close in the second half of 2026, subject to approval by Taylor Morrison shareholders and customary regulatory approvals. For housing professionals, the transaction underscores continued consolidation in the homebuilding sector and signals Berkshire’s increased bet on long-term demand for U.S. housing and ancillary services like mortgage and insurance.

This post was originally published on here. 

One video. 320,000 views. Five closings. That’s what happened when I posted a short video explaining down payment assistance programs not as a polished advertisement, but as the kind of casual, straight-talk conversation I’d have with a friend. The response didn’t just surprise me. It changed how I think about building a real estate business entirely.

For years, real estate agents built their businesses through cold calls, open houses, online leads and referrals. Those strategies still matter. But something fundamental has shifted in how consumers choose the agent they’ll trust with the biggest financial decision of their lives and I’ve found myself at the center of that shift.

The unexpected discovery

Before I ever posted a real estate video, I had already built a loyal audience on TikTok and Instagram through Las Vegas food reviews. About a year into that content, I decided to test something different.

What stood out most wasn’t just the reach it was how quickly social media collapsed the trust-building process that traditionally takes agents months, sometimes years, to establish. Buyers were reaching out already feeling like they knew me, already feeling like we’d work well together.

My clients feel more like warm leads because there’s already a rapport built from seeing my content. People often reach out because they already feel like we’ll work well together and that changes everything about the first conversation.

Today, 100% of my business comes directly from social media. Every piece of content is curated and created by me personally, and I make it a priority to respond to every direct message myself because those conversations are where real relationships begin.

Recently, I hosted a first-time buyer workshop with more than 100 attendees, all generated entirely through my real estate social media platforms. That experience reinforced just how powerful authentic online connection can become when people feel educated, comfortable, and genuinely seen.

Why education outperforms advertising

The videos that perform best for me are rarely the most structured ones. They’re the most human.

Topics like down payment assistance, first-time buyer misconceptions and new construction incentives consistently drive my engagement because they answer questions buyers are already searching for privately often questions they’re too embarrassed to ask an agent directly.

One of the biggest misconceptions I encounter is the belief that buyers need perfect credit or massive savings before they can even begin. A lot of people think they’re two or three years away from buying a home but in reality, there are often programs and options available that can help them sooner than they realize.

That’s the real power of educational content: instead of waiting for buyers to schedule a consultation, I can educate them daily. Over time, that consistency builds familiarity and trust long before the transaction begins and long before a competitor even enters the picture.

Stay grounded while going viral

Building a recognizable online presence comes with a real tension: how do you stay relatable without sacrificing the professionalism that real estate demands?

I have a simple filter I apply before posting: If I’d be embarrassed for my mom or my broker to watch the video, it doesn’t go up. I also sit on content for at least 24 hours before publishing a deliberate pause to ask whether a video truly reflects the brand and reputation I’m building for the long term.

That discipline matters because social media rewards entertainment, but real estate still runs on credibility. People might discover me through an entertaining video. What converts that attention into actual business is consistency and trust over time.

What converts views into clients

For agents hesitant to start, my advice is simple: stop overthinking it and start with the conversations buyers are already having. Keep a running notes page on your phone with video ideas minimum qualifications to buy, builder incentives, common misconceptions. Then talk through those topics casually rather than scripting them.

Clients don’t want to be talked at. They want to be talked to. And the moment your content starts to feel like a conversation instead of a pitch, everything changes.

I post multiple videos per week alongside consistent story content to stay visible in the algorithm. The first two seconds of every video are critical a strong hook that stops the scroll. And my calls-to-action work best when they feel natural: a simple, genuine invitation to reach out at the end, with a clear path to make that easy.

The big picture

What made my transition into real estate content work is that it never felt like a pivot, it felt like an evolution. I didn’t abandon my food-review audience overnight. I gradually wove real estate into my content mix, letting both sides of my brand coexist naturally until they became inseparable parts of the same identity.

I think that approach points to where real estate marketing is headed more broadly. Consumers still care about experience, market knowledge, and professionalism. But increasingly, they also want agents who feel like real people accessible, relatable, and worth following before there’s ever a transaction in sight.

The agents seeing the strongest results aren’t necessarily the ones with the most polished production. They’re the ones who show up consistently, talk to people like people and understand something that the rest of the industry is just beginning to grasp: in a business built on relationships, familiarity isn’t just a nice-to-have. It’s the most valuable marketing asset any of us can build.

Cindy Mae Hawkins is a Realtor with huntington & ellis, A Real Estate Agency.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of HousingWire’s editorial department and its owners.

To contact the editor responsible for this piece: tracey@hwmedia.com

This post was originally published on here. 

Florida’s housing market is settling into a period of measured stability, with pending sales on the rise and inventory levels flattening. Sellers who cling to pandemic-era pricing continue to face resistance from buyers navigating high mortgage rates and affordability constraints.

As of May 23, HousingWire Data shows the median list price of homes in Florida at $495,000, with the median price of new listings at $450,000. Forty-four percent of listings have seen a price cut — a signal that pricing discipline remains a dominant theme.

“We’ve been up year over year for closed sales for eight straight months after a two- to three- year period — basically since rates went up — where we saw a decline in sales, and that halted about halfway through last year,” Brad O’Connor, chief economist for Florida Realtors, told HousingWire.

“That does tell me there’s additional demand. Even a half a point of interest rate [change] has been good for us, and just that much has allowed our market to stabilize and there’s been some growth there.”

O’Connor said Florida Realtors measured the time on market for single-family homes that closed in April at 44 days.

“It’s elevated compared to that pre-pandemic period, but it’s not out of the sphere,” he said. “Condos and townhouses are around 60 days right now, and they’ve been as high as the mid-70s for us in recent months.”

Condo market response to new regulation

Longer times on market for condominiums partially stem from new regulations that followed the 2021 Surfside condominium collapse.

Despite these changes, condo sales have risen year over year for eight consecutive months, O’Connor said. Condos, he said, sit at roughly nine months of supply, tilting into buyer’s market territory.

“The story about Florida last year and the year before was how fast our inventory was increasing, especially since sales were falling during that period,” O’Connor said. “What we’ve seen over the last eight months is the inventory has really flattened out — and in some areas it’s declining. This is where it really depends where in Florida you’re looking.

“Parts of our state that have built a lot of single-family homes — southwest Florida and parts of central Florida — have seen the biggest price weakness and largest inventory growth. Other parts that are building constrained, like South Florida, have maintained their prices fairly well.”

Affordability, insurance and uncertainty

HousingWire Data shows that statewide pending sales for the most recent week totaled 6,208 — a 9.8% increase over the same time last year. This suggests buyer demand is slowly returning despite a higher-rate environment.

But 7% of properties have been relisted after being previously removed. O’Connor said that figure actually feels low, given the number of sellers who delisted last year.

“No one’s being forced to sell right now,” he said. “There are people who are trying to capitalize on what they thought was a high property value, but they’re not getting what they want. They can walk away. Some of those people might just be staying put and they’ve resigned themselves to wait until prices start moving again, which could be a while.”

Looking ahead, O’Connor said migration remains a dominant driver of Florida’s real estate market.

While in-migration has cooled from its post-pandemic peak, people continue moving to Florida from the West Coast and the Northeast.

“If interest rates were a little more favorable — they don’t have to be down at 3% like they were during the pandemic, but even like 5% — I think we would be seeing a lot more migration than we used to pre-pandemic into Florida,” O’Connor said. “Interest rates are key, of course, but the insurance rates were another driver of the lessening of affordability in Florida.

“Their growth rate has slowed down a lot. Legislation has dramatically increased competition and close to 20 insurance companies have come back into the state. That price competition is keeping our rates from growing a lot faster, like they were two or three years ago.”

The coming months, he said, will be crucial in determining how well Florida’s market weathers recent interest rate increases tied to geopolitical turmoil and economic uncertainty.

“I think we just wait to see what happens with the Iran war and the oil prices, which are a big driver behind the resurgence of mortgage rates as of late,” O’Connor said. “As an economist, I don’t have a model that can predict when those kinds of thing will will pass, so we all just need to stay on our toes.”

This post was originally published on here. 

Florida’s housing market is settling into a period of measured stability, with pending sales on the rise and inventory levels flattening. Sellers who cling to pandemic-era pricing continue to face resistance from buyers navigating high mortgage rates and affordability constraints.

As of May 23, HousingWire Data shows the median list price of homes in Florida at $495,000, with the median price of new listings at $450,000. Forty-four percent of listings have seen a price cut — a signal that pricing discipline remains a dominant theme.

“We’ve been up year over year for closed sales for eight straight months after a two- to three- year period — basically since rates went up — where we saw a decline in sales, and that halted about halfway through last year,” Brad O’Connor, chief economist for Florida Realtors, told HousingWire.

“That does tell me there’s additional demand. Even a half a point of interest rate [change] has been good for us, and just that much has allowed our market to stabilize and there’s been some growth there.”

O’Connor said Florida Realtors measured the time on market for single-family homes that closed in April at 44 days.

“It’s elevated compared to that pre-pandemic period, but it’s not out of the sphere,” he said. “Condos and townhouses are around 60 days right now, and they’ve been as high as the mid-70s for us in recent months.”

Condo market response to new regulation

Longer times on market for condominiums partially stem from new regulations that followed the 2021 Surfside condominium collapse.

Despite these changes, condo sales have risen year over year for eight consecutive months, O’Connor said. Condos, he said, sit at roughly nine months of supply, tilting into buyer’s market territory.

“The story about Florida last year and the year before was how fast our inventory was increasing, especially since sales were falling during that period,” O’Connor said. “What we’ve seen over the last eight months is the inventory has really flattened out — and in some areas it’s declining. This is where it really depends where in Florida you’re looking.

“Parts of our state that have built a lot of single-family homes — southwest Florida and parts of central Florida — have seen the biggest price weakness and largest inventory growth. Other parts that are building constrained, like South Florida, have maintained their prices fairly well.”

Affordability, insurance and uncertainty

HousingWire Data shows that statewide pending sales for the most recent week totaled 6,208 — a 9.8% increase over the same time last year. This suggests buyer demand is slowly returning despite a higher-rate environment.

But 7% of properties have been relisted after being previously removed. O’Connor said that figure actually feels low, given the number of sellers who delisted last year.

“No one’s being forced to sell right now,” he said. “There are people who are trying to capitalize on what they thought was a high property value, but they’re not getting what they want. They can walk away. Some of those people might just be staying put and they’ve resigned themselves to wait until prices start moving again, which could be a while.”

Looking ahead, O’Connor said migration remains a dominant driver of Florida’s real estate market.

While in-migration has cooled from its post-pandemic peak, people continue moving to Florida from the West Coast and the Northeast.

“If interest rates were a little more favorable — they don’t have to be down at 3% like they were during the pandemic, but even like 5% — I think we would be seeing a lot more migration than we used to pre-pandemic into Florida,” O’Connor said. “Interest rates are key, of course, but the insurance rates were another driver of the lessening of affordability in Florida.

“Their growth rate has slowed down a lot. Legislation has dramatically increased competition and close to 20 insurance companies have come back into the state. That price competition is keeping our rates from growing a lot faster, like they were two or three years ago.”

The coming months, he said, will be crucial in determining how well Florida’s market weathers recent interest rate increases tied to geopolitical turmoil and economic uncertainty.

“I think we just wait to see what happens with the Iran war and the oil prices, which are a big driver behind the resurgence of mortgage rates as of late,” O’Connor said. “As an economist, I don’t have a model that can predict when those kinds of thing will will pass, so we all just need to stay on our toes.”

This post was originally published on here. 

Hostile takeovers don’t happen often among publicly traded companies in America, and they’re even rarer in U.S. homebuilding.

So a little over a week of public quiet during Dream Finders Homes’ hostile pursuit of Beazer Homes should not be mistaken for inaction.

Rather, this may be the phase when the under-the-hood work moves out of the press-release channel and into shareholder calls, advisor meetings, financing conversations, legal positioning, alternative-buyer assessment and boardroom risk calculation.

To better understand what may be unfolding beyond public statements, The Builder’s Daily reviewed publicly available SEC filings, investor presentations, proxy materials, financing disclosures and transaction documents related to the pursuit.

We also spoke with multiple investment-banking and equity-research professionals who closely follow the homebuilding sector and are familiar with mergers and acquisitions, public-company governance, valuation analysis, and hostile takeover processes. None offered predictions about the outcome. Still, their insights help illuminate how situations like this typically evolve, where common pressure points emerge, and what homebuilding leaders should watch in the weeks and months ahead.

What’s abundantly clear is that the Dream Finders-Beazer contest is not merely a one-off corporate fight. It is a real-time case study in how public homebuilders may be valued, challenged, defended and potentially acquired in a slower, more margin-sensitive, affordability-constrained operating environment.

Where the battle stands

The latest public move came May 21, when Dream Finders released an investor presentation reaffirming its $25.75-per-share all-cash proposal to acquire Beazer. The presentation urged Beazer to engage constructively and argued that Beazer shareholders should be allowed to evaluate the offer. Dream Finders’ materials characterized Beazer as a long-term underperformer on margins, growth, returns, leverage, and shareholder value.

Beazer, after rejecting the bid, has not issued a new direct response to Dream Finders’ May 21 reaffirmation. A Beazer media-relations response to The Builder’s Daily last week said the company had nothing further to add.

That leaves the public record largely unchanged: Dream Finders says Beazer shareholders deserve immediate cash value and a better owner; Beazer says the proposal significantly undervalues the company, particularly relative to book value and to earlier, higher unsolicited proposals.

Between those two positions, the next phase of the battle will unfold.

A quiet phase

In a hostile public-company process, silence does not necessarily signal a stalemate. It may mean each side is working the less visible channels that determine whether a transaction becomes inevitable, improves, stalls, attracts another bidder or collapses.

For Dream Finders, the task at hand amounts to shareholder persuasion. The company has to convince enough Beazer holders that engagement with Dream Finders is preferable to waiting on Beazer’s go-it-on-its-own plan.

For Beazer, the task is the inverse. It has to make a case to convince shareholders that its future value – in its land, product strategy, operating model, and eventual market recovery – exceeds the current cash offer.

That is the drama.

Dream Finders’ May 21 materials make a highly specific case. The company argues that Beazer trails small- and mid-cap public peers by 640 basis points in last-12-month adjusted gross margin and 1,040 basis points in pre-tax margin. It says Beazer is the only small- or mid-cap homebuilder peer to report two consecutive quarters of operating losses as of the latest quarter, and that Beazer’s share price has declined 30% since 2011 while ITB and XHB rose 606% and 490%, respectively, over the same period.

The presentation also attacks Beazer’s strategy, arguing that its focus on energy-efficient homes has become cost-prohibitive for value-oriented buyers at a time when affordability is the central consumer challenge.

Dream Finders further argues that Beazer has prioritized book value per share and share repurchases funded by land sales rather than productively using assets to generate stronger returns.

Those are Dream Finders’ claims, not neutral findings. But they are now part of the public record, and shareholders, advisors and industry observers must evaluate.

One constraint: Dream Finders can’t simply buy its way In

One question some industry observers naturally ask is why Dream Finders cannot simply accumulate a larger ownership stake in Beazer while the process plays out.

The answer is that public-company takeover battles rarely hinge solely on open-market stock purchases, and Beazer already has shareholder-approved protections in place that complicate that path.

At its February 2026 annual meeting, shareholders renewed a rights agreement and related charter provisions intended to protect the value of the company’s deferred tax assets, including energy-efficiency tax credits and other tax attributes. Those protections are designed to deter investors from accumulating ownership positions above 4.95% without triggering the rights mechanism.

Importantly, those measures were not adopted as a direct response to Dream Finders’ approach. Beazer’s board presented them as a means of preserving potentially valuable tax assets tied in part to the company’s long-standing investment in energy-efficient homebuilding.

Still, the existence of those protections illustrates why the current contest is likely to be decided less through stock accumulation and more through shareholder persuasion, board pressure, valuation arguments, financing credibility, and strategic alternatives.

The book value question

Beazer’s cleanest defense is also clear: its enterprise price tag.

Its board rejected the public $25.75-per-share bid after Dream Finders had previously made higher private proposals of $28.50 and $29.00 per share. Beazer has also emphasized that the latest offer is well below stated book value.

That raises one of the compelling questions in this contest: What does book value mean if the assets underlying it are not generating competitive returns?

For decades, book value has been a familiar shorthand in public homebuilder valuation. Builders own land, lots, communities, work in process, and housing inventory. In cyclical businesses, investors often look to book value as a reference point for assessing whether a public builder is undervalued.

But book value is not the same as realizable value. Nor is it the same as earnings power.

A distinction like that gathers meaning in a market where sales pace is slower, incentives are elevated, mortgage rates remain a drag on affordability, and land positions may not be monetized at the originally penciled internal rates of return.

This is where the Dream Finders-Beazer situation may have implications beyond the two companies.

The 2025 acquisition of Landsea Homes by New Home Co., now Risewell Homes, offers a relevant precedent. Landsea sold at a premium to its unaffected share price, but in a context where a below-book valuation had become part of the broader discussion around underperformance, profitability and asset productivity.

That recent precedent could weaken the once-comfortable assumption that a public builder trading below book will necessarily receive a takeout offer at or above book.

A premium to market and a discount to book can coexist. That is a hard message for boards. It is also a useful one for operators.

A builder’s land position may carry a stated balance-sheet value. But public investors and strategic buyers increasingly appear to care just as much – perhaps more – about whether that land can be converted into pace, margin, return on equity, cash generation, and a durable local operating advantage.

So a hostile bid, it turns out, is as much a valuation story as an M&A story.

Dream Finders’ job to instill confidence

The pressure on Dream Finders is real as well.

An all-cash offer sounds straightforward, but it is not simple. Dream Finders says Kennedy Lewis has provided a letter expressing high confidence in land-bank financing, and that Goldman Sachs and BofA Securities have issued letters stating they are highly confident that financing for the transaction can be arranged in capital markets.

That financing language is important. It is meant to signal seriousness, reduce shareholder uncertainty and counter any argument that Dream Finders cannot close.

Still, investors will continue to assess financing costs, equity-market reaction, leverage, integration risk, and whether Dream Finders can improve Beazer’s operations quickly enough to justify the transaction.

The longer the process stretches, the more scrutiny both companies face.

For Beazer, that scrutiny centers on whether its management’s standalone plan can create more value than the offer on the table.

For Dream Finders, scrutiny centers on whether it can sustain confidence, maintain pressure, and avoid eroding its strategic flexibility as the process continues.

Here are several paths our investment analyst experts tell us are plausible.

Beazer can continue rejecting the proposal and defend its standalone plan. Dream Finders can improve its offer, adjust its tactics, or escalate pressure through additional shareholder-facing steps. Shareholders can push Beazer to engage. Another bidder could emerge. Or the process could drag on without resolution, with Beazer remaining under a brighter valuation and governance spotlight.

The White Knight potential

That possibility of another buyer is important but uncertain.

A so-called “white knight” could theoretically offer Beazer a path more attractive to its board and management than Dream Finders’ proposal. But any competing buyer would still need to answer the same basic questions: What is Beazer worth? What operating improvements are achievable? How much of the land portfolio supports acceptable returns? What costs can be eliminated? What financing is available? And does the buyer have both the strategic appetite and the capital to enter a hostile or semi-hostile process already underway?

For Japan-based acquirers, public peers, large private builders, or institutionally backed platforms, Beazer’s footprint may be appealing. But the same factors that make Beazer vulnerable may also make it complex.

So, the next chapter may take time.

Hostile processes often become contests of endurance, wars of words, financial clout and attrition. Not merely who has the strongest press release, but who can sustain the most convincing argument with shareholders, advisors, capital providers and ultimately the board.

The Dream Finders-Beazer standoff suggests that the valuation framework for public homebuilding has become more demanding. Scale, local clout and concentration, margins, returns, and balance-sheet flexibility. It all matters. Above all, asset value “cannot not “– i.e. it must – translate into operating performance.

That is the through-line from Landsea to Beazer and from today’s public builder valuation debate to the private-company boardrooms, where owners are closely watching this drama.

Book value may still matter. But book value without return generation is becoming harder to defend.

Our evolving story may be how public homebuilding investors judge performance, patience, accountability and strategic alternatives when a once-private acquisition overture has exploded into a public test of value creation.

This post was originally published on here. 

A little over a week after real estate agents and brokers in the Chicagoland area saw their listings disappear from Zillow after Midwest Real Estate Data (MRED) suspended its data feed to the listing portal giant, real estate professionals in Tennessee are preparing for the same possibility. 

In an email sent to broker members on Wednesday, Tennessee-based MLS Realtracs informed subscribers that it was preparing to suspend its listing feed to Zillow on June 1 if Zillow did not adhere to its updated IDX display rules by a May 31 deadline.

According to Realtracs, on April 29 it updated its IDX display rule to require vendors and portals to display all listings entered into Realtracs that match a consumer’s search criteria in their consumer search results unless the seller has specifically elected to not include their property listing or address in public displays. As of Wednesday, Realtracs said Zillow was the only platform to not be in compliance with the updated agreement terms. 

“We do not expect that to change, given Zillow’s own rule [listing access standards] that prevents sellers from choosing how their properties are marketed and has resulted in dozens of banned Realtracs listings,” Realtracs’ email to brokers stated. 

As Debra Beagle, the CEO and broker-owner of The Ashton Real Estate Group of REMAX Advantage, heads into the weekend wondering what will happen come Monday, she told HousingWire that the whole situation is “very confusing” for herself, her agents and her clients. 

“Our sellers want our listings on Zillow and agents have told us this. We also handle Zillow Seller leads in our area. We always put our listings in Realtracs unless a seller signs the Realtracs waiver not wanting any public marketing at all — no sign, no advertising publicly,” Beagle said. “Realtracs has always had that waiver option since May 2020. I, as a broker, have to sign that form when a seller requests that. In the five years we’ve only maybe had three dozen sellers ever select that option out of almost 7,000 listings.”

Beagle noted that Zillow does allow brokers to supply it with a direct listing feed, something she and Gary Ashton, the founder of The Ashton Real Estate Group of REMAX Advantage, said they were working to ensure was in place before the weekend. 

“We have a responsibility to our clients to make sure we maximize their exposure through all channels — Realtor.com, REMAX.com, Homes.com and Zillow,” Ashton said. “So, we are in the process of enabling a direct feed so our clients aren’t impacted.”

Beagle added that their sellers “want the most exposure possible to their listings.” 

“That is why they list with us. And our buyers want to be able to see all properties available,” she added. 

“Very unlike the MRED situation”

Like Beagle and Ashton, Phillip Cantrell’s firm Benchmark Realty also has a direct listing feed with Zillow, as well as other portals, which he said was due to agent feedback on consumer preferences to have their listings on all portals. 

Despite potentially facing the same situation as brokers in the Chicagoland area last week, Cantrell told HousingWire that the situation with Realtracs is “very unlike the MRED situation.” 

“Realtracs is one of the best run MLSs in the country. Heretofore, any portal could go to them and get a syndicated feed for $50/month. Most portals took that and repurposed the data, reselling it to the consumer, making huge profits off of the broker and agent’s work product. With zero compensation to the broker or agent for it,” Cantrell wrote in a post on Facebook.

“All this move by Realtracs means is they are saying ‘Hey everybody, we are an IT/data company, warehousing and providing products to access the data, all of which belongs to the broker. If you want to allow a feed, charge for a feed, or terminate a feed, it’s up to you, not us.’ Smart move indeed.”

In Cantrell’s mind, Realtracs’ warning to Zillow shows that the MLS is “stepping out of the middle of deciding winners and losers” and is allowing brokers to decide if they want their listings syndicated to Zillow. 

“What this newest change means is that instead of Realtracs being the one who decides who follows what rule, they have placed all the tools necessary in the broker’s hands (the owner of the data) and what the broker does with it is up to them,” Cantrell told HousingWire via email. 

Zillow’s response

It remains to be seen whether Realtracs will follow through with suspending Zillow’s listing feed on Monday if the listing portal fails to comply with the MLS’s updated IDX display rules. In an emailed statement, a Zillow spokesperson told HousingWire that Realtracs’ decision to cut off Zillow’s listing feed is “the same playbook already documented in federal court: a coordinated campaign, initiated by Compass International Holdings CEO Robert Reffkin, to pressure MLSs across the country into pulling sellers’ listings off Zillow.”

“Nashville’s MLS has threatened to cut Nashville-area sellers off from Zillow, the most-visited real estate platform in the country, unless Zillow abandons the standards it has put in place to ensure buyers can trust what they see on our platform,” the spokesperson wrote. “A judge on Friday just ordered the MLS in Chicago to restore our listing feed. Nashville sellers and buyers deserve access to a full, transparent market. Zillow’s listing access standards exist to protect that. We will not abandon them.”

Earlier this month, Zillow filed an antitrust lawsuit against Compass and MRED claiming the two firms  conspired to withhold listing data and pressure Zillow to carry private “hidden” listings nationwide. Last Friday, a federal judge partially granted Zillow’s motion for a temporary restraining order, requiring MRED to restore its listing feed and Zillow to display any listings that were in the MLS’s system as of May 21.

Additionally, Zillow is not allowed to ban listings within ZIP codes nationwide where MRED has had listings between April 2025 and April 2026. The temporary restraining order is set to expire next Friday, however the firms are slated to take part in a two day hearing in early July regarding Zillow’s preliminary injunction motion, which also seeks to prevent MRED from suspending Zillow’s listing feed. 

While, as of Friday afternoon, Zillow has not taken legal action against Realtracs regarding the possible suspension of it listing feed, in a post on the firm’s Front Porch blog on Thursday, the company claimed that this was part of Compass’s “campaign to roll back America’s open and transparent housing market. Sellers and buyers would be harmed, while the country’s largest brokerage benefits.”

Zillow claims that Realtracs is doing this “to line its own pockets and advance the interests of Compass, the largest U.S. real estate brokerage.” 

“What’s happening in Nashville is just one piece of a bigger puzzle. Chicago was the first. Nashville is likely not the last. Compass has devised this broader scheme designed to spread until America’s open and transparent housing market is replaced by one that works better for a single large brokerage than for buyers and sellers,” the post states. “Zillow will continue its fight to ensure this playbook cannot take root permanently, in Nashville or anywhere else. Nashville buyers and sellers deserve access to a full, transparent market.”

This post was originally published on here. 

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ proposal to phase out property taxes for most primary homeowners is rapidly becoming one of the state’s most consequential housing debates in years.

Supporters argue it could ease affordability pressures while critics warn it may fuel higher home prices and reshape local tax structures.

The proposal would raise Florida’s homestead exemption from $50,000 to $250,000 — a move DeSantis said would eliminate property taxes for about 60% of homeowners.

The exemption would later increase to $500,000, potentially removing property taxes for as many as 92% of primary residences statewide.

Housing leaders told HousingWire the proposal could dramatically alter monthly ownership costs and reignite demand across the state.

“Overall, it can’t be a bad thing for housing,” said Aaron Davis, CEO of Florida Agency Network. “I mean, first and foremost, in both Florida and Texas there’s no state income tax, and that’s certainly helped in raking in businesses and people and wealth and jobs.”

Removing property taxes for primary homeowners, he said, could further strengthen the state’s appeal to employers and residents relocating from higher-tax states.

“If someone’s now looking at, say, New York versus Florida, or many other states from a jobs perspective, you can now say with the affordability, ‘Come live in Florida, work in Florida, buy a home in Florida and not pay property taxes,’” Davis said. “Property tax bills can be absolutely exorbitant in Florida. There’s also still commercial property tax, tax on rental vacation homes and tax on secondary residences that’s still going to be there.”

DeSantis has called a special legislative session next week to begin debate on the measure. Approval would require support from 60% of lawmakers and later 60% of voters in a statewide referendum.

The governor also proposed requiring residents to live in Florida for at least five years before qualifying for the tax relief.

Could savings fuel higher prices?

Beth Silverman, a Realtor and investment expert with eXp Realty in Florida, said the proposal could simultaneously improve affordability and increase home values.

“I think it’s a little bit of both,” she said. “I think that if this passes, we’re looking at a 4% to 9% increase in prices for a Florida homeowner. The equity is about 30 to 40 grand, which is great. However, that’s not the real affordability piece.”

Silverman said the proposal could especially benefit first-time buyers struggling to absorb rapidly increasing ownership costs after purchasing a home.

“Say you have a first-time buyer, newly married, and they bought a house for $420,000,” she said. “The taxes at the time of closing were $3,200, their insurance was $3,750 and the monthly mortgage was $3,500. They were committed. They love being homeowners. They stretched things and they made it work.

“Year two, their taxes were reassessed at $8,500 because that’s what happens in Florida after a sale. Their insurance crept up, normally $200 bucks — bringing their monthly mortgage to $400 more per month. Now they just got pregnant with their first baby. They are now dealing with the same grocery and gasoline prices as everyone else.”

Silverman said many younger homeowners have grown skeptical toward the status quo.

“For that Florida family, if a bill like this doesn’t pass, how do they share in this market?” she said. “They are now questioning whether or not owning a home was the right decision, and we have a chance to change this.”

First-time buyers, market mobility

Some analysts have questioned whether the proposal could deepen divides between longtime homeowners and first-time buyers — particularly because longtime owners already benefit from Florida’s homestead protections that cap annual assessment increases.

Silverman argued the proposal is designed to help buyers enter the market rather than reward existing owners.

“I think that this was built for the first-time buyer, which people should get really excited about,” she said. “When we lower the cost of affordability, it literally brings buyers off the sidelines and into houses.”

She cited that lower monthly ownership costs often determine whether some buyers qualify for mortgages at all.

“This bill could actually be the difference between qualifying versus not qualifying,” Silverman said. “People have to remember, this isn’t the market of 2021. We’re not competing against 15 offers where we have to waive an appraisal. Buyers have room to breathe, whether they’re first- time or seasoned.”

Davis said the proposal may also encourage existing homeowners to move up into larger homes after years of remaining sidelined by high mortgage rates.

“I think there’s pent-up demand for the move up, for home sellers and the buyer,” he said. So many people still have that 3.5% interest rate. I think mathematically, this may allow that home seller to say, ‘You know what? I can go ahead and sell my home because I’m now factoring moving into a different home.

“If you tell me I don’t have to pay property tax on that $600,000 home, it’s going to be a a different story than before.”

Renters and local governments

The proposal has also sparked debate over whether local governments would shift more tax burdens onto renters, apartment owners and commercial property owners.

Silverman — who owns rental properties in Florida — said landlords are already under significant pressure from rising insurance and property costs.

She said landlords currently have limited ability to raise rents because many tenants are already stretched financially.

“We have more inventory than ever before, and the landlords know that right now, renters cannot support any absorption in an increased rental payment,” Silverman said. “Because, again, gas, groceries and everything costs too much right now. The concern about [costs] shifting to renters is absolutely valid, but the market’s doing the real work to keep that in check.

“The biggest threat is to the landlords, because what happens when the small mom and pops can’t make the numbers work and we’re forced to sell? I believe that this is where the institutions who are doing build-to-rent are going to capitalize.”

Davis said broader impact of the proposal will ultimately depend on lawmakers balancing affordability relief with long-term funding stability for local governments and public services.

Still, he believes the measure could reshape the way buyers evaluate Florida real estate for years to come.

“Florida is one of those states that the housing market has always been strong, lots of jobs created, lots of economic booms and incentive created around housing,” Davis said.  “Now, with this [tax proposal] it feels to me like this is less of a housing play and it’s more of a jobs play. With good paying jobs, come homeowners that can perhaps now afford a home they might not have been able to before.”

This post was originally published on here. 

Rocket Mortgage and Rocket Pro provided additional details this week on their rollout of VantageScore 4.0 in mortgage lending after officially announcing last week that they have started using VantageScore 4.0 alongside Classic FICO scores.

Heather Lovier, chief operating officer of Rocket Companies, told HousingWire that VantageScore 4.0 can currently be used for Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) loan products offered through Rocket Mortgage and Rocket Pro. This is line with guidance from the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) and the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).

The company declined to disclose specific pricing adjustments tied to the use of VantageScore 4.0, although Lovier said Rocket is using updated pricing frameworks consistent with investor guidelines.

“VantageScore 4.0 is a model that’s functionally independent from existing models,” Lovier said. “While we don’t publicly disclose specific pricing methodologies and adjustments for any of our products, we are working with updated pricing frameworks when it is used, consistent with investor guidelines.”

Some lenders, including Rocket’s crosstown rival, United Wholesale Mortgage, reduced pricing by as much as 20 basis points when transitioning from Classic FICO to VantageScore 4.0. Rocket did not confirm whether it is applying similar adjustments.

Rocket said it is currently pulling both FICO and VantageScore credit scores for each mortgage application and plans to continue doing so during the pilot phase. The company said it has not yet determined when brokers may be able to utilize a single-score model or whether one score would take priority over another.

“By leveraging both scoring models in tandem, we are giving our clients the most opportunity to show they qualify for a loan,” Lovier said.

Rocket also declined to share current VantageScore 4.0 loan volume figures, saying the pilot remains in its early stages. The company said it is still collecting data to compare outcomes between Classic FICO and VantageScore 4.0.

Lovier said brokers have raised questions about the practical implications of adopting multiple credit scoring models simultaneously, particularly how the changes could affect borrower eligibility and homebuying opportunities.

“Any time there’s a major update to an existing standard — and in this case, one that’s been held for so long — there are bound to be lots of questions about real-world, practical impacts,” Lovier said.

Rocket’s rollout follows an April announcement from the FHFA to launch a pilot program for VantageScore 4.0 on loans sold to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, alongside plans to adopt FICO 10T and updated pricing tied to the new credit models.

FHFA Director Bill Pulte said lenders have already delivered roughly $10 million in VantageScore-based loans to Freddie Mac through the pilot. Separately, HUD said it plans to allow both FICO 10T and VantageScore 4.0 for Federal Housing Administration (FHA) loans in the coming months.

This post was originally published on here. 

StreetMatrix has expanded its independent real estate analytics platform into Arizona and Utah, adding two fast-growing Western states to a housing index that already covers California and Nevada, the company announced on Wednesday.

StreetMatrix was created by housing analyst Jonathan Miller, president and CEO of Miller Samuel, and economist Nick Huntington-Klein, an associate professor at Seattle University. It publishes monthly housing market reports that use the proprietary StreetMatrix Index to track statewide and local trends.

“The expansion into Arizona and Utah represents another important milestone as we continue building a more transparent and consistent framework for understanding housing market performance across the country,” Miller said in a statement. “These are markets that have experienced significant population growth, migration shifts, and pricing volatility over the last several years. Our goal is to provide a reliable benchmark that cuts through fragmented housing data and offers a clearer picture of what is actually happening in the market.”

StreetMatrix said the new monthly reports for Arizona and Utah will mirror its existing outputs, with statewide analysis and city-level insights, transaction trends, and one-, two- and three-year comparisons to put current price movement in context.

“Arizona and Utah have become increasingly important markets to monitor as affordability pressures, migration patterns, and economic shifts continue reshaping the housing landscape across the West,” Huntington-Klein, chief economist at StreetMatrix, said.

This article was generated using HousingWire Automation and reviewed by a HousingWire editor before publication.

This post was originally published on here. 

Zoning reform has grabbed most of the attention in housing policy circles, but sometimes it’s the unglamorous, technical building code changes that save builders real money.

Single-stair reform was the first to sweep through state legislatures and city halls as a tool to spur missing-middle housing. Washington state is now cutting deeper into the building code by allowing scissor stairs – two interlocking stairways that crisscross within a single, fire-rated enclosure.

Gov. Bob Ferguson quietly signed the building code change into law in March, making Washington the first state in the nation to allow scissor stairs in multifamily construction. The law takes effect June 11. Whether other states follow will depend on both the reform’s performance and the fire safety industry’s considerable influence over building code changes.

For Washington, the change is the latest in a steady flow of aggressive housing reform to address a severe affordability crisis. The crisis is concentrated in the Seattle metro area, where Amazon, Microsoft, and a dense tech corridor have made the region one of the most expensive housing markets in the country.

Single-stair code changes were among the laws passed. After three years of work, the State Building Code Council faces a July 1 deadline to adopt amendments allowing single-stair construction up to six stories. Seattle has allowed that type of construction for decades.

Single stair versus scissor stair

Single-stair reform targets smaller multifamily buildings, typically six stories or fewer with a dozen or so units, where one stairwell is sufficient for safe egress. Scissor stairs solve a different problem. In taller buildings on tight urban infill lots, placing two stairwells at opposite ends of the floor plate can consume so much of a narrow building’s width that development becomes impossible.

By folding two fire-rated egress paths into a single shared shaft, scissor stairs restore that lost design flexibility – opening urban lots that the dual-stairwell requirement had effectively locked out of development. Those separate shafts for dual stairwells also carve out significant floor area that could otherwise be leasable units. Developers can trim a building’s footprint, add units, or both.

“Scissor stairs are a design feature common in other countries but rare in most US cities,” Seattle urban planner Markus Johnson wrote in a post for think tank Sightline Institute. “They help save more of a building’s interior square footage for homes, while still providing two fire-safe staircases for residents and emergency responders.”

Research suggests the design consolidation can cut total construction costs by 6% to 13% per building, even after accounting for additional fire protection requirements. For a mid-rise project in Seattle or Bellevue, that translates to hundreds of thousands of dollars left on the table under the old code.

Builders eager to take advantage of the new law will need to wait a little longer. It directs the State Building Code Council to convene an advisory committee and develop final code amendments – a rulemaking process expected to extend into 2027. June 11 opens the door, but the council will determine exactly how far.

This post was originally published on here. 

Realty ONE Group International has launched ZONE Pro, a rebuilt proprietary tech platform that uses artificial intelligence to centralize business operations, referrals and training for its more than 20,000 real estate professionals, the company announced on Tuesday.

The Laguna Niguel, California-based brokerage described ZONE Pro as a next-generation ecosystem and “command center” engineered to help agents and franchise owners automate workflows, manage referrals and scale their businesses from a single interface. The platform replaces and expands on the firm’s prior ZONE technology.

Key features include an AI Growth Coach, a global referral network, an AI support concierge named “ROGer,” an enhanced marketplace and a centralized training calendar, according to the announcement.

The AI Growth Coach functions as a predictive analytics tool and virtual business partner, analyzing data to deliver personalized lead generation strategies, market insights and daily action plans for revenue growth. The global referral network allows Realty ONE Group professionals across nearly 30 countries and territories to exchange international and domestic referrals inside the platform.

ROGer, the AI support concierge, is designed to handle troubleshooting, asset retrieval and operational questions so agents can stay focused on clients, the company said. The ONE Marketplace surfaces preferred vendors, tools and discounted services aimed at lowering business overhead, while a global training calendar aggregates live, virtual and on-demand coaching content in one hub.

Realty ONE Group said ZONE Pro was built using feedback from top-producing agents and team leaders and is intended to reduce administrative time by automating routine tasks and consolidating fragmented tools into a single dashboard accessible from anywhere.

The rollout to all Realty ONE Group professionals begins immediately, according to the firm, which operates more than 450 offices worldwide.

This article was generated using HousingWire Automation and reviewed by a HousingWire editor before publication.

This post was originally published on here. 

As municipalities adopt AI tools to cut days or weeks from permitting and approval timelines, one company has introduced a free training initiative for local governments taking baby steps to explore deploying the technology internally. 

Clariti recently announced the launch of Clarita AI Studio, which offers municipalities customized workshops that demonstrate how AI can reduce delays and drudge work, and improve consistency in the permitting and review process. Clarita’s AI plan review tool, CivCheck, has already proven to reduce plan review times by 70% in Honolulu.

The announcement comes as municipalities across the United States face pressure to streamline housing development.

Julia Richman, VP of Government Relations at Clariti, told HousingWire’s The Builder’s Daily that many cities recognize that their permitting and approval processes are inefficient. However, they often don’t know how to streamline the process. That’s where the workshops and the plan review tool come in handy. 

A problem with personal significance 

For Richman, the problem that Clariti and CivCheck aim to address has both professional and personal significance. 

She previously worked for the Colorado Governor’s Office of Information Technology. Before that, Richman was the Chief Innovation Officer for the City of Boulder, CO, a city known for its complex land-use and zoning regulations. 

“I got firsthand knowledge of the sort of pain and suffering that planning departments have in these kinds of environments. Employees who are really motivated to make a difference and to do their jobs were hamstrung in lots of different ways,” Richman said. 

In 2021, Richman began a gut renovation of her 110-year-old Denver, CO  home, originally planning to simply add a bathroom in preparation for starting a family. But after the demolition exposed major issues with the home’s aging brick foundation, Richman’s contractor advised against rebuilding on it, so she ultimately redesigned the project as a full teardown and rebuild on the same lot. 

However, the project took far longer than she had hoped. 

“We lost nine months while we waited for someone to look at the permit,” Richman explained. 

Finding and fixing inefficiencies

Denver’s permitting delays were driven by a perfect storm. A surge of applications hit the city at the same time staffing levels were strained in the wake of the COVID pandemic, generating a huge backlog that the planning department is still working through, despite some recent improvements. 

In a bid to address this glut of applications, the City of Denver entered into a partnership with Clariti in April, joining other cities like San Jose, Honolulu, Seattle, Vancouver, Calgary and Toronto that have engaged CivCheck to streamline their permitting. Many other municipalities, like Seattle, Louisville, Boston, Los Angeles and Harris County, Texas, have similarly partnered with competing AI tools. 

As Richman explained, many cities receive low-quality or incomplete submissions, typically from inexperienced individual applicants. These faulty applications can overwhelm understaffed municipal departments, often delaying approvals for professional applicants such as homebuilders and developers.

Richman cited the work that Clariti did with the City of San Jose, California, to exemplify this challenge. 

“We did a pilot for them looking at ADUs, and about 75% of the applications that came in to the city around ADUs were incomplete. They were missing documents that needed to be a part of that application, etc. And we see that all over,” she said. 

CivCheck aims to simplify and improve the quality of these applications before they even reach the city, helping reviewers complete permit reviews more efficiently and opening up bandwidth to review larger applications from builders and developers. 

The platform also automates tasks like finding information within massive plan sets and locating relevant codes and checks, which can shorten hours-long tasks into minutes. 

The platform additionally makes reviews more consistent across reviewers and reduces the back-and-forth process of cat and mouse that frustrates architects, engineers and developers. Cities using CivCheck saw roughly 50% fewer review cycles, indicating the potential for positive change. 

“We typically see time reduction somewhere along the lines of 70% on average. So this is not sort of fiddling around the edges,” Richman explained. 

A closer look at the Clariti AI Studio 

Since joining Clariti, Richman has worked to streamline permitting and approvals for nearly 20 planning departments. In her experience, these municipalities, from large cities like Denver and Toronto to small mountain communities in Colorado, often need outside assistance to streamline the process. 

“They don’t often have time to figure out what the actual problems are. They know they have a problem and they know it’s really bad, but they don’t know why, or what they could do to fix it,” Richman explained. 

Richman referred to Seattle, a Clariti customer, as a city with a particularly complex set of regulations and codes, which can create an unpredictable and frustrating process for applicants. For cities like Seattle looking to simplify their review and approval processes, the Clariti AI Studio can be a valuable tool. 

“The AI studio is going to be this really useful tool for communities, to have a little bit of dedicated time to really diagnose what’s wrong with their processes,” she said. “We’ll sort of diagnose what communities it’s a fit for, and how their problem can be best solved, whether with technology or business process or something else.”

On a shot clock

As more municipalities and states adopt AI to streamline their permitting and approvals, those that haven’t yet adopted the latest technology will likely feel the pressure to do so. 

If that pressure isn’t felt internally, it will likely come from legislators. Many states have already implemented or passed “shot clock” laws, which mandate that local governments initiate or complete reviews within a specified timeframe. Georgia, for example, recently passed a law setting a 45-day deadline for initial permit reviews, followed by 20 days for a second review and 14 days for subsequent submissions. 

As the pressure on municipalities to meet these types of deadlines grows, so does interest in AI tools like CivCheck. However, the challenge is that this is a new technology, and many municipalities are still learning how to implement it effectively and responsibly within a constrained budget. 

“Right now, people are really poking around. We’re seeing lots of pilots,” Richman said. “We do see a lot of communities exploring this. Our RFP pipeline has been very healthy, and it’s really all over the map in terms of the New York Cities and Torontos of the world, but also, I just saw an RFP from Southlake, Texas, a community of 30,000 people. Everybody’s really trying to solve this problem.”

This post was originally published on here. 

Scotiabank has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Maple Financial Holdings Inc., a deal that will support its U.S. mortgage capital markets business, the bank announced Friday. Financial terms were not disclosed.

Maple Financial is the parent company of MapleMark Bank, a U.S. commercial bank with operations primarily in Dallas.

“Our acquisition of MapleMark Bank allows Scotiabank to offer FDIC deposit insurance to our clients, which is important for our Mortgage Capital Markets business and our deposit growth strategy,” Travis Machen, CEO and group head of global banking and markets at Scotiabank, said in a statement.

“MapleMark Bank is a well-run bank primarily operating in Dallas, Texas and further supports our strategic focus within the North American corridor.”

The transaction is subject to customary closing conditions and regulatory approvals. Scotiabank said it does not expect the deal to have a material impact on its earnings or common equity tier 1 (CET1) capital ratio.

The deal follows Scotiabank’s recent buildout of a U.S. mortgage capital markets platform. In August 2024, the bank hired a team of seven JPMorgan Chase executives in Texas, including industry veteran Thanh Roettele, to lead a new mortgage warehouse finance business.

JPMorgan, however, has remained the largest mortgage warehouse lender in the U.S, according to Inside Mortgage Finance. Its volume was at $30.9 billion at the end of 2025, followed by Bank of America at $19.5 billion and Atlas SP Partners at $11 billion. 

By recruiting that team and now adding a U.S. bank insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., Scotiabank is positioning itself as a new funding source for independent mortgage banks (IMBs) at a time when some traditional warehouse lenders have exited the space.

The market — a key source of short-term, secured liquidity for IMBs — has been reshaped by the regional bank turmoil of two years ago and subsequent capital pressures. Flagstar Bancorp, for example, exited warehouse lending in May 2024, while Dallas-based Comerica Bank has also pulled back from the business.

Scotiabank, which operates as the Bank of Nova Scotia, has been emphasizing a North American corridor strategy focused on the U.S., Canada and Mexico. In 2024, the bank also announced a $2.8 billion strategic minority investment in Cleveland-based KeyCorp, representing a 14.9% pro forma common stock stake at a fixed price of $17.17 per share.

With assets of approximately $1.5 trillion as of April 30, Scotiabank trades on the Toronto Stock Exchange and New York Stock Exchange under the ticker BNS.

This article was written by Flávia Furlan Nunes and generated with the assistance of HousingWire Automation. It was reviewed by a HousingWire editor before publication.

This post was originally published on here. 

Housing is generally considered affordable when it consumes no more than 30% of a household’s gross income, but for many buyers, especially first-timers, saving enough cash for a down payment remains the biggest barrier.

That’s according to a new analysis by Down Payment Resource (DPR) in partnership with the Urban Institute. They dug into Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) data to examine eligibility for down payment assistance (DPA) programs.

The analysis suggests that while DPA programs can help borrowers navigate that barrier, misconceptions about borrower risk and loan quality have limited their use. DPA programs can lower a borrower’s loan-to-value ratio by an average of 8.8%, according to DPR, potentially improving mortgage eligibility and reducing upfront costs at closing.

DPR and Urban Institute used HMDA data from the nation’s 10 largest metropolitan statistical areas and found that 43.6% of originated purchase mortgages were eligible for DPA programs. Nearly 80% of Federal Housing Administration (FHA) loan applicants likely could have qualified for a down payment program, but Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) data shows only about 15% of FHA borrowers used government-sourced down payment assistance.

That leaves a gap of nearly 65 percentage points between eligible borrowers and actual program participation, suggesting that many qualified homebuyers were either unaware of available assistance or did not access it during the mortgage process.

“The gap between borrowers who are eligible for down payment assistance and those who actually use it is striking. This suggests the mortgage industry still has work to do when it comes to raising awareness about these programs and integrating into the early stages of the homebuying process,” said Miki Adams, president of CBC Mortgage Agency, a federally chartered housing finance agency.

A similar pattern was found among conventional borrowers. About 44% of borrowers using conventional mortgage products were eligible for down payment assistance, but fewer than 10% used these programs.

Advocates say the disconnect represents a missed opportunity in a housing market still strained by elevated home prices, higher mortgage rates and limited entry-level inventory.

“The report makes clear that many borrowers who qualify for down payment assistance are already successfully qualifying for mortgages,” Adams said. “For first-time buyers, the issue is often not about credit quality or the ability to make payments, but access to the upfront cash needed to buy a home in a market where prices are outpacing wages.”

“One of the more important takeaways from the report is home prices have grown much faster than wages, which means buyers who would have had little trouble saving for a down payment in prior years are now finding that hurdle much harder to overcome,” she added.

Critics of DPA programs have sometimes linked them to concerns about FHA credit quality, but housing advocates argue the data does not support the claim that the programs introduce riskier borrowers into the market.

HUD reported that 42.31% of FHA purchase borrowers used some form of down payment assistance in fiscal year 2025. But more than half of that assistance came from family member gifts rather than government or housing finance agency programs. Of the total, 23.16% came from family gifts, while 17.74% came from government sources.

HUD also reported that average FHA borrower credit scores have increased for four consecutive years, reaching a 10-year high average of 679 in fiscal year 2025. Members of DPR’s Housing Finance Agency Advisory Group reported average borrower credit scores above 700 in recent lending activity.

HUD data also showed FHA debt-to-income ratios have remained stable over the past three years and declined slightly in the latest fiscal year.

This post was originally published on here. 

Despite pushback and attempted intervention by the Batton and other homebuyer commission lawsuit plaintiffs, several opt-in settlements in the Tuccori homebuyer commission lawsuit gained preliminary approval earlier this week. 

On Tuesday, Chicago-based U.S. District Court Judge Lindsay Jenkins granted preliminary approval to several opt-in settlements totaling $106 million in the Tuccori homebuyer lawsuit.

The settlements that gained preliminary approval included those reached by the National Association of Realtors ($52.25 million), Compass ($7.33 million), eXp World Holdings ($4.34 million), Hanna Holdings ($8.25), HomeServices of America ($30 million) and Douglas Elliman ($2.04 million). 

In total, the settling parties in Tuccori have contributed more than $120 million into the Global Settlement Fund. 

These firms were not originally named as defendants in the Tuccori suit, but they were able to settle the homebuyer litigations they were named in — which included Batton 1 and 2, Cwynar, Davis and Lutz — through an opt-in feature in the Tuccori settlement.

Since the settlements were announced, the plaintiffs in other homebuyer commission lawsuits have sought to prevent the settlements from gaining approval. 

In the order, Jenkins wrote that the terms of the settlement, including the amount of each proposed opt-in agreement, are “fair, reasonable and adequate.” She ruled they were negotiated at arm’s length by experienced counsel acting in good faith, including through multiple mediation sessions overseen by a court-appointed special master for mediation.

The judge also wrote that the opt-in agreements were “reached as a result of those negotiations; there has been adequate opportunity for experienced counsel to evaluate the claims and risks at this stage of the litigation; and the Court will likely be able to approve the Opt-In Agreements.” 

Additionally, despite claims by the Batton plaintiffs that these opt-in settlements were the result of a “reverse auction,” the judge concluded that the “Opt-In Agreements compensate indirect purchaser claims at almost the same rate as the claims previously resolved by the [home seller] Burnett, Gibson, Keel and Hooper settlements.” 

A final approval hearing date for these settlements has yet to be announced.

This post was originally published on here. 

As part of HousingWire’s Editor’s Choice awards spotlight series, we’re spotlighting past Women of Influence honorees whose careers, leadership and insights continue to influence the industry. This series offers a closer look at the experiences and decisions that have shaped their paths.

HousingWire spoke with Elisha Elliott, SVP of Customer Experience and Corporate Marketing at Constellation1, about leadership, customer success and the evolving role of technology in real estate.

Elliott was recognized as a 2025 Women of Influence honoree for her leadership in improving customer experience and driving measurable business outcomes across Constellation1’s global customer base. She also played a key role in standardizing customer experiences across products, increasing adoption and satisfaction while helping shape more customer-centric solutions.

Women of Influence recognizes the leaders making a meaningful impact across mortgage, real estate and homebuilding. Nominations for the 2026 Women of Influence awards are open now through May 31.

HousingWire: What’s one decision that changed the trajectory of your career?

Elisha Elliott: The most pivotal decision I made was choosing breadth over comfort. Early in my career, I intentionally took on roles that stretched me across disciplines including customer success, operations, marketing, professional services, and revenue strategy. It wasn’t always the obvious path, but it gave me a much deeper understanding of how businesses actually operate.

That perspective has been invaluable, especially in housing and proptech, where customer experience, technology, and commercial outcomes are tightly connected. Leadership today requires systems thinking, the ability to connect the full customer lifecycle from acquisition to retention to advocacy. That’s shaped both my career and the impact I’m able to have.

HW: Looking back, what experiences most prepared you for the leadership role you’re in today?

Elisha Elliott: Building and scaling teams during periods of rapid growth prepared me more than anything else. In one phase, we grew the team by more than 3x in under 18 months while expanding the number of customers we supported significantly.

Growth is exciting, but it exposes the gaps in your systems, your processes, and your leadership approach. Those moments force clarity.

I also had the opportunity to work across functions and alongside leaders who challenged how I think. They pushed me to balance empathy with accountability, and strategy with execution.

Leadership isn’t about having all the answers. It’s about asking better questions, making sound decisions, and creating an environment where people can do their best work.

HW: What are you most focused on right now, either within your organization or in response to broader industry shifts?

Elisha Elliott: Right now, I’m focused on how we scale customer value in a market that’s evolving quickly. Housing and real estate technology are going through a meaningful shift, driven by changing consumer expectations, the acceleration of AI, and a growing demand for efficiency.

Our responsibility is to not just keep up, but to lead thoughtfully. That means strengthening our customer partnerships, improving speed to value, and building more connected, intelligent experiences across our portfolio.

Recently, we’ve been focused on streamlining onboarding and reducing time to value, cutting it nearly in half through more guided and automated experiences.

The companies that will stand out in this next chapter are the ones that pair innovation with trust.

HW: What’s one leadership lesson you’ve learned that more people in this industry should understand?

Elisha Elliott: Great leadership is an investment. It’s easy to get caught up in the pace of the business, but your most important responsibility is developing the people around you.

One-on-ones shouldn’t be a box to check. They should matter. Know your people, challenge them, coach them, and give them opportunities before they feel fully ready. Let them into the room. Let them stretch.

The true measure of leadership isn’t your own success, it’s theirs.

HW: What advice would you give to the next generation of women working toward senior leadership roles in housing?

Elisha Elliott: Invest in capability before title. Focus on building expertise, strengthening your business acumen, and understanding how value is created. The title will come.

Don’t wait for permission to lead. Speak up, take ownership, and step into opportunities that stretch you, even when they feel uncomfortable. Confidence is built through experience.

And, last but certainly not least, be intentional about the people around you. Leadership can feel lonely at times, but it shouldn’t feel isolating. Find mentors, sponsors, and women who will champion your growth. Some of the most meaningful moments in my career have come from those relationships.

Click here to nominate a 2026 Woman of Influence.

This post was originally published on here. 

The National Association of Realtors (NAR) is urging federal antitrust regulators to issue clear guidance that recognizes multiple listing services (MLSs) as procompetitive data infrastructure and clarifies how competitors can share property data and use AI tools without running afoul of the law.

In a May 21 letter to the U.S. Department of Justice Antitrust Division (DOJ) and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), NAR President Kevin Brown responded to the agencies’ request for public comment on draft guidance for business collaborations among competitors. The comments focus on how MLSs operate as shared marketplaces and what kinds of information exchanges should be considered low risk from an enforcement perspective.

NAR described the MLS marketplace as “highly competitive,” with many business models serving buyers and sellers. Brokers and agents invest heavily in obtaining accurate listing information and then submit those listings to their local MLS, where standardized rules supported by NAR organize, verify and distribute the data broadly to market participants. That structure, the group said, allows brokers to compete using “complete, reliable, and comparable information.”

The association laid out several ways MLSs function as procompetitive infrastructure:

• Expanding sellers’ exposure to the widest pool of buyers, which can increase competition and support market-based prices
• Reducing buyers’ search costs and information gaps by offering a one-stop source for most area home sales
• Lowering barriers to entry by giving brokerages of all sizes equal access to high-quality property data
• Powering innovation through data feeds used by brokerages, consumer portals and other technology firms
• Advancing fair housing by providing transparent, broad access to listings
• Equipping regulators with data needed to monitor for anticompetitive behavior

NAR warned that a diminished MLS system would likely shift market power to the largest brokers, portals or technology companies, reduce competition and choice and leave buyers and sellers navigating a fragmented market with no single source of verified property data.

NAR said the current reliance on case-by-case enforcement creates uncertainty that can discourage beneficial collaboration and data sharing. The group asked the DOJ and the FTC to issue updated, example-driven guidance that:

• Reaffirms MLSs as procompetitive infrastructure
• Clarifies that sharing historical, factual property data that is widely disseminated and not forward-looking or competitively sensitive presents low enforcement risk
• Confirms that common property data fields — such as characteristics, transaction history and home prices — may be shared
• Draws a clear line between independent use of AI tools and algorithmic coordination among competitors
• Explains how trade association activities, including rulemaking and data-sharing, can support independent decision-making and competition without facilitating collusion
• Recognizes that shared data systems can enhance competition through standardized formats, quality controls and broad, even-handed access

For housing professionals, the outcome of this guidance will shape how MLSs handle data, how brokerages can deploy AI and analytics, and how far industry groups can go in standardizing practices without triggering antitrust risk. Clear rules could reduce legal uncertainty around new data products and technology partnerships built on MLS data.

NAR said MLSs already demonstrate that sharing factual property information can promote competition and benefit consumers. The association told regulators it “stands ready to assist” DOJ and the FTC as they refine the guidance for collaborations among competitors.

NAR joins MLS trade association, the Council of MLSs (CMLS), in addressing this issue with the DOJ and FTC. Earlier this week, CMLS sent its own letter asking the federal regulators to explicitly recognize MLSs as pro-competitive collaborations.

“MLSs are one of the most important examples of how collaboration can strengthen competition and benefit consumers,” Nicole Jensen, chair of CMLS and CEO of realMLS, said in the announcement. “CMLS is proud to lead this effort on behalf of the MLS industry and ensure policymakers understand the essential role MLSs play in creating an open, transparent, and efficient housing market.”

This article was written by Brooklee Han and generated with the assistance of HousingWire Automation, then reviewed by a HousingWire editor before publication.

This post was originally published on here. 

Private equity firm MidOcean Partners has signed a definitive agreement to sell Bora Inc. and its subsidiaries, known as Zonda, to CoStar Group, according to a company announcement on Friday.

Zonda is a North America-focused data, marketplace and software platform built around the new-home ecosystem. Its products span land discovery, homebuilding, home discovery and homebuying and are delivered through three main offerings: subscription-based data and intelligence that cover more than 500 housing metrics across North America, new-home marketplaces in the U.S. and Canada, and a suite of software tools for virtual home evaluation including visualization, customization and tours.

During MidOcean’s ownership, Zonda completed nine add-on acquisitions, expanded its geographic coverage and invested in proprietary and patented AI-driven data collection and workflow tools, the firm said. MidOcean reported that Zonda more than doubled in scale, materially expanded margins and delivered more than 50 consecutive quarters of year-over-year annual recurring revenue growth across multiple housing cycles.

CoStar Group, which has built a dominant position in commercial real estate data and online marketplaces, has been expanding further into residential. Adding Zonda’s builder-focused datasets, marketplaces such as NewHomeSource and Livabl, and its workflow software could deepen CoStar’s presence on the new-home side of the business and eventually give lenders and real estate agents more granular insight into pipeline supply, especially in fast-growing Sun Belt and exurban markets.

Sara Badham, a managing director at MidOcean, said in the announcement that the firm and Zonda’s management team sought to build “the preeminent platform for data, insights and technology across the residential housing ecosystem” and backed that strategy with investments in acquisitions, technology, product and talent.

Jeff Meyers, founder and CEO of Zonda, said MidOcean’s “strategic insight, operational support, and capital partnership were instrumental in transforming Zonda into the platform it is today” and added that Zonda expects to “continue to deliver exceptional value” to customers as part of CoStar’s larger platform.

Houlihan Lokey Capital served as lead financial advisor to MidOcean and Solomon Partners Securities also advised the company. Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher was MidOcean’s legal counsel. Financial terms of the transaction and an expected closing timeline were not disclosed in the announcement.

This article was written by Brooklee Han and generated with the assistance of HousingWire Automation, then reviewed by a HousingWire editor before publication.

This post was originally published on here. 

As part of HousingWire’s Editor’s Choice awards spotlight series, we’re spotlighting past Women of Influence honorees whose careers, leadership and insights continue to influence the industry. This series offers a closer look at the experiences and decisions that have shaped their paths.

HousingWire spoke with Erica Acie, Head of Originations at Truist, about leadership, AI adoption and the evolving future of mortgage originations.

Acie was recognized as a 2024 Women of Influence honoree for her leadership in expanding access to homeownership, strengthening community lending initiatives and developing high-performing teams across originations and business strategy. She also has played an active role in mentoring future industry leaders through organizations like NAMMBA while championing affordable housing opportunities and community impact.

Women of Influence recognizes the leaders making a meaningful impact across mortgage, real estate and homebuilding. Nominations for the 2026 Women of Influence awards are open now through May 31.

HousingWire: What are you most focused on right now either within your organization or in response to broader industry shifts?

Erica Acie: I believe many people currently have AI fatigue. However, when you align AI with the WIFM (What’s In It For Me) I think it lands different for improved adoption.

Redefining the originations model in response to both rapid technological advancement and increasing market complexity is an area of focus. Leaning deeply into AI and technology as a core capability continues to be vital to the longer-term strategy. The industry is at an inflection point where AI is no longer experimental, it’s becoming embedded into how we originate, underwrite, and serve clients.

Our focus is on scaling AI responsibly, ensuring it’s governed, trusted, and aligned to real production outcomes — not just innovation for innovation’s sake.

As AI expands access to data and insights, differentiation shifts to the human experience. Our teams are critical in applying judgment, building trust, and translating insights into meaningful client advice. We are deliberately leaning into a human-in-the-loop approach, where AI enhances recommendations, but people remain accountable for outcomes and relationships.

Ultimately, the future of originations will be defined by how well we integrate AI, data, and human expertise. The organizations that win won’t be the ones with the most technology but the ones that apply it most effectively to improve both performance and the client experience.

HW: What’s one leadership lesson you’ve learned that more people in this industry should understand?

Erica Acie: Embracing is the power of relentless curiosity. The most impactful leaders are not the ones with all the answers — they are the ones bold enough to ask the right questions.

Curiosity ignites discovery. It challenges assumptions, uncovers hidden opportunities, and allows you to move beyond surface-level thinking to truly understand what’s driving outcomes.

Great leaders don’t just solve problems; they build engines of repeatable success. In a fast-moving, high-stakes environment, curiosity isn’t optional — it’s the catalyst that turns insight into action and action into sustained impact.

HW: What advice would you give to the next generation of women in housing?

Erica Acie: Start by mastering your internal mindset. Before you lead others, you must believe deeply that you are ready.

“We got this” isn’t just a phrase; it’s a commitment to your own capability. Trust your instincts as much as your data, and don’t wait for permission to step forward.

At the same time, build your leadership on substance and sustainability. Let data be your superpower — it gives your voice weight and your strategy credibility.

And most importantly, focus on building real relationships, not just networks. This industry is built on trust and impact. When you combine confidence, insight, and genuine connection, you don’t just advance — you create lasting influence and open doors for others to follow.

Click here to nominate a 2026 Woman of Influence.

This post was originally published on here. 

I’d like to tell you about someone who did everything right.

She built a wedding photography business from the ground up. What started as a side hustle became a full-time operation, then a team, then something that could support not just her, but her entire family. Her income wasn’t inconsistent, but it was complex, with seasonal flow creating a strong, upward trend. She paid her bills. She saved. She reinvested in her company the way her financial advisor recommended.

On paper, she was exactly the kind of person the mortgage industry says we want to serve: responsible, capable and financially disciplined. But when she sat down to apply for a mortgage, none of that seemed to matter. The system didn’t know how to see her.

Telling a borrower like her that she doesn’t qualify because her financial life doesn’t fit inside a typical credit box is more than a transactional failure. It’s a signal that the system has a gap. And the mortgage companies that make it? They’re going to be the ones who bridge that gap.

A system designed for one kind of earner

The Qualified Mortgage (QM) framework was built around the dominant assumptions of the time. It serves a specific kind of financial life: salaried, with an annual W-2 and solid predictability. And those borrowers still exist. But they are no longer the only story, or even the dominant one, in many communities.

Today’s fastest-growing segment of the workforce includes 1099 earners, gig workers, freelancers and independent contractors. In fact, according to Make My Paystub, an estimated 70.4 million Americans are freelancing (about 36% of the workforce), with projections that it could reach 50% by 2027. Many are from immigrant backgrounds. Many are Black or Latino entrepreneurs building businesses. And some are building entirely new kinds of businesses powered by AI. 

Hence, the gap. Those atypical borrowers are often the ones for whom homeownership would be most transformative. When access breaks down at the point of underwriting, it doesn’t just delay a purchase. It puts a hurdle in the way of using homeownership as a way to build generational wealth.

Consider the self-employed business owner. Often first- or second-generation, building something from nothing. The write-offs that reflect smart business decisions — reinvestment, growth, long-term planning — are interpreted as reduced income. Standard underwriting reads the very behaviors that create durable wealth as instability.

That disconnect isn’t malice. The system doesn’t want to prevent success. But it nonetheless needs a push.

What the industry loses when it doesn’t solve this

It’s easy to frame this as a missed deal. Just a borrower we couldn’t place, or a file that didn’t work. But the cost is higher than that.

Homeownership remains one of the most reliable drivers of wealth creation in this country. When we fail to serve borrowers whose financial lives fall outside traditional frameworks, we’re not just losing volume, we’re functioning as gatekeepers and narrowing who gets to kickstart that wealth-building engine.

Which means we’re not only missing out on helping people, we’re missing out on profit.

The communities driving small business formation, entrepreneurial activity and nontraditional income growth are not on the margins of the economy. They are increasingly at its center. The originator who cannot serve self-employed or non-traditionally documented borrowers isn’t just opting out of a niche. They’re stepping away from where opportunity is actively expanding.

Another thing to keep in mind is the relational cost. Many of these borrower communities are deeply networked. Which means word of mouth travels through families, churches and associations. When someone finds an originator who understands their financial life — and can translate it into a successful outcome — they don’t keep that to themselves.

And if you drop the ball? That gets around, too.

The infrastructure to serve these borrowers is no longer theoretical. The Non-QM market has matured. Execution is more consistent, and product offerings are more refined. The question is no longer whether these borrowers can be served at scale. It’s whether we are prepared to meet them there.

What better lending actually looks like

Serving this segment of the market requires more than access to products. It requires both financial and educational fluency.

Obviously, income analysis is part of it. 

• The ability to read a Schedule C and understand what it actually represents
• Comfort with interpreting a K-1 beyond the surface once-over
• Structuring an asset depletion loan in a way that reflects reality, not just ratios

These aren’t just technical skills. They’re the tools that enable an originator to say yes when a borrower with a complex file deserves that answer. But technical skill alone isn’t enough. Respectful, educational communication matters just as much.

For many borrowers, Non-QM is unfamiliar territory. And if it’s presented as a consolation prize for people who “don’t quite qualify,” it reinforces the very exclusion we’re trying to solve. But when it’s explained clearly, in plain language, as a product designed to reflect the way they actually earn and manage money, the experience changes, becoming recognition rather than rejection.

The originators who do this well combine product sophistication with something less talked about but equally important: the ability to see the full person behind the file. To understand not just how someone earns, but how they think about money, risk and stability. To communicate in a way that is respectful, culturally aware and grounded in clarity rather than assumption.

The system can do better. So can we.

We have products that can responsibly and effectively serve borrowers whose financial lives don’t fit conventional molds. We have a secondary market that has evolved to support them. In many cases, we have the data and experience to underwrite these loans with discipline and confidence. What we are still building is the will and fluency to use them well.

Non-QM is not a last resort. For many borrowers, it is the first time the lending process has fully accounted for how they actually earn, save, and build. Increasingly, it’s a recognition that the workforce has changed, and that our approach can change with it. 

Yes, QM can reach more borrowers and close more loans. And we are in the business of business. But it can also be a part of the next chapter of the American workforce. After all, wedding photographers need a place to live, too.

Tai Christensen is the Founder of Origin & Oak Creative.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of HousingWire’s editorial department and its owners. To contact the editor responsible for this piece: zeb@hwmedia.com.

This post was originally published on here. 

I interviewed Anthony Lamacchia on this episode of the HousingWire Daily podcast about mounting tensions over listing distribution and MLS rules. He is the founder and CEO of Lamacchia Realty and Crush It in Real Estate — and a fiery advocate for Realtors.

Lamacchia had a lot to say about the ongoing battle between Zillow, Compass and MRED and the disruption to the Chicago housing market last week. That’s when many consumers woke up to find that local listings had largely disappeared from Zillow but remained visible on the Compass website. (Read our coverage of the complicated backstory of that battle in this article: Everything you need to know about Zillow’s listing war with MRED and Compass).

Lamacchia lays much of the blame for the current listing chaos at the feet of Compass CEO Robert Reffkin, who has spearheaded the fight for companies to be able to market their properties as private listings. This puts Reffkin and Compass at odds with some multiple listings services (MLSs) and portals like Zillow.

In Lamacchia’s view, the dispute is part of a longer-running campaign by Reffkin to challenge NAR’s Clear Cooperation Policy, which was designed to ensure that all buyers would have access to all property listings. Below is a summary of our conversation.

Lamacchia’s take: Zillow vs. Compass and the risk of a ‘listing war’

Lamacchia credited Reffkin for elevating the issue many agents have with Zillow but disagreed with the strategy. He said he understands the concern that “Zillow has found a great way to get in between the consumer and the house,” monetizing access through lead fees or referrals, but argued that restricting listings on major portals is not in consumers’ best interest.

He framed the Chicago blowup as a culmination of long-building friction, comparing it to a conflict that erupts only after years of underlying pressure. Once Compass and MRED reached an agreement, he said, the MLS “shut down Zillow’s feed” and Zillow “naturally fires back” via the courts.

The practical impact for Chicago-area consumers and sellers was immediate: for roughly 30 hours, many local listings vanished from Zillow but remained on Compass. Lamacchia said that if the outage had lasted a week or more, seller and agent backlash would have been severe, particularly for properties that were already sitting on the market.

“Sellers that have homes that aren’t selling… go searching online, and they don’t see their home on Zillow,” he said. Those clients, he argued, would quickly “go ballistic,” pressuring their agents, who would in turn pressure brokerage leadership.

Despite his critiques of Zillow over the years, Lamacchia said that in this particular dispute he sides with the portal because of the need for maximum listing exposure.

Clear Cooperation Policy

On Clear Cooperation, Lamacchia recalled being in the packed NAR meetings in San Francisco in 2019 when the policy was debated and ultimately adopted. Initially skeptical, he said that after hearing broker after broker describe listing hoarding and fair housing concerns in a low-inventory market, he concluded the policy was necessary.

The rule, which took effect in 2020 just as the pandemic drove inventory to historic lows, requires that within a set timeframe, listings marketed publicly must be submitted to the MLS. Lamacchia believes it prevented widespread off-MLS “pocket listing” practices that could have limited buyer access and raised fair housing issues.

He linked current tensions to Reffkin’s vocal opposition to Clear Cooperation, describing the Compass chief’s push as an attempt to “break the system” now that Compass controls Anywhere’s brokerage network and has significant market share in key metros.

Is a ‘listing war’ coming?

Lamacchia said at least one prominent MLS CEO told him the Chicago incident could be “the beginning of the war” — a cycle where large firms start cutting each other off from listings. He believes that if any major brokerage moves to keep its listings from competitors’ agents, others will retaliate, leading to fragmented inventory and reduced access for buyers.

He expressed cautious optimism that the industry will stop short of that outcome, arguing that the practical downsides for large players are too severe: “If he does, it’s going to be retaliation, and then his agents are going to have trouble accessing listings too.”

Inventory trends weaken the case for hoarding listings

Market conditions are another constraint. Lamacchia pointed out that as inventory rises, the ability to sell homes entirely in-house falls. In a higher-inventory environment, both agents and sellers are more focused on maximum exposure across portals and brokerages.

He expects seller pressure for broad marketing to grow in the second half of the year, particularly in northern markets where inventory is seasonally higher. That timing, he argued, makes this a difficult moment to successfully push for tighter control of listing distribution.

The MLS role and the risk of fragmentation

Lamacchia defended the MLS as core infrastructure for a unified, transparent market. Without MLSs, he said, the U.S. would begin to resemble countries in Europe and South America where buyers must search many brokerage sites to see a complete picture of inventory and sellers often feel compelled to list with multiple firms.

He acknowledged that some MLSs have “overplayed their hand” with aggressive rules or large fines, but maintained that some level of enforcement is necessary to keep data accurate and widely available. Without consequences for noncompliance, he said, “we wouldn’t have uniformity.”

For real estate professionals, MLS fragmentation would not necessarily increase their value proposition, in his view. Instead, it would create “a real access problem,” undermine buyer loyalty at a time when buyer-broker agreements are already a difficult sell and potentially unravel recent efforts to formalize buyer representation.

Lamacchia ended the interview by stressing that any structural change — whether in listing rules, portal leverage or commission practices — should be judged by its impact on the consumer. If reforms do not clearly improve the experience for buyers and sellers, he warned, they risk further eroding trust in the real estate system.

This article was written by Sarah Wheeler and generated with the assistance of HousingWire Automation, then reviewed by a HousingWire editor before publication.

This post was originally published on here. 

The Council of Multiple Listing Services (CMLS) has asked federal antitrust regulators to explicitly recognize multiple listing services (MLSs) as pro-competitive collaborations as the government updates guidance on how competitors can work together.

In a May 26 comment letter to the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ)’s Antitrust Division and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), CMLS argued that MLSs expand access to accurate housing data, reduce search and transaction costs, and support an open and competitive real estate marketplace.

The agencies requested public input on potential guidance for “collaborations among competitors” as they continue to scrutinize real estate commission practices, listing policies and data access under federal antitrust law. Industry trade groups, MLSs and brokerages have increasingly turned to formal comment processes to influence how regulators view long-standing industry structures.

“MLSs are one of the most important examples of how collaboration can strengthen competition and benefit consumers,” Nicole Jensen, chair of CMLS and CEO of realMLS, said in the announcement. “CMLS is proud to lead this effort on behalf of the MLS industry and ensure policymakers understand the essential role MLSs play in creating an open, transparent, and efficient housing market.”

CMLS represents more than 230 MLSs and 80 related industry businesses. Its member MLSs serve more than 1.7 million subscribers across North America, including brokerages, real estate agents and appraisers, as well as the consumers they support.

The letter emphasized that MLSs are built around broad, even-handed access to factual property data. By collecting, verifying and distributing listing information, CMLS said its members provide reliable information on homes for sale and recent sales to consumers, brokers, appraisers, lenders and technology providers.

CMLS highlighted several specific benefits it says MLSs provide to the housing market:

• Market transparency: Timely, reliable property information that helps buyers and sellers make informed decisions.
• Lower search and transaction costs: Consolidated listing information in one trusted source, enabling buyers to find homes more efficiently and helping sellers reach a wider audience.
• Support for smaller firms: Equal access to marketplace information and exposure for small and independent brokerages alongside larger firms.
• Technology and innovation: MLS data underpins portals, valuation tools, lending and appraisal workflows, and other technology that helps consumers navigate the housing market.
• Independent decision-making: MLSs do not set prices, commissions or service models, but instead provide factual information that supports independent choices by buyers, sellers and real estate professionals.

The organization also asked regulators to recognize that certain MLS rules are needed to preserve these benefits. Requirements for accurate, complete and timely data, along with standards that prevent free-riding, are “essential to making the MLS system work,” CMLS said in the announcement.

Antitrust treatment of MLSs is a central concern for brokers, MLS executives and proptech firms as the industry adapts to litigation settlements, potential commission decoupling and evolving data-sharing models. Federal guidance that affirms MLSs as legitimate, procompetitive collaborations could provide more certainty around rulemaking, data access and how far MLSs can go in standardizing practices without inviting additional scrutiny.

Conversely, if DOJ or FTC guidance narrows the scope of permissible cooperation among competitors, MLSs could face pressure to revise participation rules, data policies or enforcement practices in ways that affect listing exposure, compensation fields and downstream technology products.

CMLS framed its advocacy as part of a broader effort to position MLSs as “critical infrastructure” for the housing market, and to ensure that policymakers understand how MLSs interact with consumers, competition and technology.

“MLSs are critical infrastructure for the housing market,” Jensen said. “CMLS will continue working to ensure the value of MLS is understood, protected, and advanced.”

The organization said this work is supported in part through its Champions of MLS program, which funds national-level advocacy and supports MLSs engaged in local and state policy efforts.

This article was generated using HousingWire Automation and reviewed by a HousingWire editor before publication.

This post was originally published on here. 

New data from the U.S. Census Bureau indicates that new home sales fell well short of economists’ and investors’ expectations in April, amid a challenging spring selling season marked by elevated mortgage rates, persistent inflation and broader economic and geopolitical uncertainty. 

Sales of newly built single-family homes fell to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 622,000 in April, falling 6.2% from March and 11.3% year over year. At the same time, due to a product- and segment mix bias toward higher-end home purchases, the median sales price of new homes sold in April ticked up to $422,500, up 8.0% from March and 2.2% compared to April 2025. 

In March, new home sales increased 3.3% year over year, but median sales prices fell 6.2%, indicating that builders ramped up incentives to keep sales activity positive. 

In a sense, the April data offers a contrast to the March results. However, conditions remained similar, with buyers struggling to afford mortgage payments amid an environment of higher inflation and elevated mortgage rates. 

“Although there are still signs of demand, many potential buyers are stepping back because of higher mortgage rates and gas prices,” Bill Owens, chairman of the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB), said in a statement. “Builders continue to offer a range of sales incentives, but home sales have declined this year because income growth is not keeping pace with housing costs.”

The Census data also indicated that a slowdown in sales pushed up the supply of new homes. At the current sales rate, homebuilders have a 9.4 months’ supply of new homes, up 13.5% from the April 2025 estimate of 8.6 months. 

What this means for the new home market

Homebuilders entered the 2026 spring selling season with some cautious optimism, as many builders reported green shoots at the tail end of 2025 and the early weeks of the new year. However, geopolitical uncertainty has thrown a wrench in that momentum.  

NAHB Chief Economist Robert Dietz argued that new home sales are on track to decline, citing elevated mortgage rates over the coming months as a primary driver. 

“The Midwest remains a bright spot, with sales up 7.3% year to date, compared with declines in the rest of the country,” Dietz said. 

The increase in new home prices in April doesn’t necessarily signal a general increase in prices. Instead, it may reflect a broader shift in sales pace and product positioning among both public and private builders away from entry-level buyers. Some public homebuilders, such as Beazer Homes and Hovnanian Enterprises, indicated on recent earnings calls that they reduced their reliance on entry-level homes in a bid to resecure margins and reach a less price- and interest-rate-sensitive buyer.

This is because more affordable segment typically requires heavier incentives, especially in the current market, and often generates lower margins for builders that are already facing a profitability squeeze.  

First American Deputy Chief Economist Odeta Kushi, in a statement, discussed this very point. 

“The increase likely reflects product mix more than renewed pricing power. In April, 55% of homes sold were priced $400,000 and above, up from 47% in March, pointing to a larger share of higher-priced transactions rather than a broad acceleration in home prices,” Kushi said.

In today’s housing market, there are warning signs aplenty. For example, a report from ATTOM found that foreclosure filings rose 18% year over year, illustrating affordability and monthly payment constraints that are challenging for consumer households. 

However, the news isn’t all doom and gloom for homebuilders, who can leverage incentives and mortgage rate buydowns that aren’t available in the existing-home market. 

Kushi additionally argued that there is still solid, pent-up underlying demand, which could pay off for builders down the line once the affordability picture improves.

“April sales were approximately 3% higher than the average April pace seen from 2015–2019, underscoring that underlying housing demand remains intact despite elevated mortgage rates and affordability pressures,” Kushi explained. “There is also still significant pent-up demand in the market, particularly from millennial households moving through their prime home-buying years.”

Amid weak sales, homebuilders have pulled back on new construction, with single-family housing starts down 2.4% year over year in April. 

Zillow Senior Economist Orphe Divounguy noted this trend and explained that homebuilders should expect to face increased competition from rising resale inventory. 

“With fewer new construction homes in the pipeline, new home sales could stabilize at a lower level than in recent years,” Divounguy said.

This post was originally published on here. 

Retirement savers continued to build momentum in early 2026, even as markets fluctuated, according to the latest quarterly analysis from Fidelity Investments.

The firm reported that total savings rates reached record levels in the first quarter.

Combined employer and employee contributions for 401(k) savers hit 14.4%, approaching Fidelity’s suggested 15% target. For 403(b) participants, the total savings rate reached 12%.

IRA activity also surged. Contributions rose 29% year-over-year, while the number of Fidelity IRA account holders making contributions increased 28%.

Although average account balances dipped slightly quarter-over-quarter amid volatility, longer-term trends remained positive.

Compared with Q1 2025, average balances rose 11% for 401(k)s, 13% for 403(b)s and 7% for IRAs.

Employer contributions also set a record, averaging $2,080 per participant in the quarter, up from $2,020 a year earlier.

Nearly one in five participants — 18% — increased their savings rate, largely through automatic escalation features. Only 5.7% changed asset allocations, down from 6% a year earlier.

“Retirement savers started the year strong with record-high savings rates and contributions, reflecting the long-term approach they’re taking with retirement preparedness,“ said Sharon Brovelli, president of workplace investing at Fidelity Investments. “While it can be tempting to make changes to retirement savings during market volatility, it is positive to see participants stay the course with their contributions – an approach that will ultimately strengthen outcomes as retirement nears.”

Roth growth accelerates as investors seek tax flexibility

Roth retirement vehicles continued to gain traction, accounting for 67% of IRA contributions in the quarter.

Roth conversion activity rose 41% year-over-year, a product of growing interest in tax diversification strategies.

“We’re encouraged to see investors creating thoughtful, long-term strategies to build their wealth,“ said Bob Mascialino, president of wealth at Fidelity Investments. ”Choices like increasing contributions to Roth accounts reflect a focus on flexibility, tax efficiency, and confidence in planning for the future – principles that are essential to navigating financial complexity and building lasting financial security.”

Equity compensation strengthens retention

Fidelity’s stock plan research highlighted the expanding role of equity compensation in workforce financial wellness. The data found that 43% of participants became first-time investors through company stock plans.

In addition, 73% of employees said they plan to rely on equity compensation proceeds for long-term investing.

About 56% said stock benefits make them more likely to remain with an employer, while 65% said equity compensation is an important factor in accepting a job offer.

Reverse mortgage demand shifts toward private-label market

Beyond traditional retirement savings gains and workplace benefit trends, housing equity products are also seeing a shift, according to new analysis from New View Advisors.

The data shows rising demand for proprietary reverse mortgages alongside stagnation in federally insured Home Equity Conversion Mortgages (HECM).

Proprietary reverse mortgage volume reached an estimated $250 million in December 2025, $730 million in the fourth quarter and nearly $2.5 billion for the full year.

By comparison, HECM volume totaled about $292 million in December and roughly $4 billion in 2025.

The data indicates private-label loans accounted for about 30% of originations at the start of 2025, rising to 45% by December.

The shift comes as policymakers and industry groups debate reforms to the HECM program.

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development has issued a request for information on program changes, while stakeholders including the National Reverse Mortgage Lenders Association and Mortgage Bankers Association have proposed lower insurance costs and secondary market reforms to boost demand.

This article was written by Jonathan Delozier and generated with the assistance of HousingWire Automation, then reviewed by a HousingWire editor before publication.

This post was originally published on here. 

Real estate agents are being asked to do far more than sell homes — and that growing workload is exactly what Houston-based Epique Realty hopes artificial intelligence (AI) can solve.

Epique Realty has grown rapidly in recent years — climbing to No. 15 among brands in RealTrends Verified’s 2025 rankings for transaction sides. The company recorded $7 billion in 2025 sales volume across 23,000 transactions. CEO and co-founder Josh Miller sat down with HousingWire as the brokerage prepares to lauch its EpiqueX platform later this year.

The tech is designed to help agents automate increasingly complex demands of modern real estate work, from marketing and lead nurturing to paperwork and social media management.

“There was a time where you would just show homes, and you get friendly with your clients and be a trusted expert,” said Miller, a HousingWire 2025 Tech Trendsetter. “Now you also have to be a marketing director, an app developer, an SEO person, a content creator and maybe you’ve been an influencer — and there’s so many jobs that agents don’t have to do on their own.”

The new platform will operate separately from Epique Realty and reflects Miller’s broader vision of the company as a technology-first organization.

“We’re more like a tech company that owns a real estate brokerage, instead of being a real estate brokerage that has tech,” he said. “I know that sounds like a silly distinction, but it’s a real one.”

Miller cited the massive number of agents currently relying on legacy customer relationship management (CRM) systems or general-purpose AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude.

“Agents have been kind of crafting their own systems with AI, and they’re turning to [popular AI models], which are great, but they are an all-in-one solution,” he said. “They’re not built specifically for [real estate].”

Specialization is key

Miller said the EpiqueX platform is being developed around smaller, specialized systems built for particular tasks instead of one broad AI platform attempting to handle everything.

“This idea of like one godlike AI that is an expert at everything is not really accurate,” he said. “What ends up happening is you end up with something like a handyman that can do a little bit of everything, but it brings everything to a really awesome point of mediocrity.”

Instead, Miller said EpiqueX will focus on practical tools tailored specifically to agents’ workflows and industry knowledge.

“So, giving agents expert tools that are built specifically for them, I think, will be really, really important,” he said. “Being able to get real estate coaching, not from a general AI chat bot, but from AI that’s built specifically by real estate agents, for real estate agents, and understands the business, being able to have that kind of nuance is really important.

“We’re building out some AI training that has that knowledge. We’re building out AI tools that help streamline the communication beyond drip campaigns, beyond text message — making it omni-channel and able to reach people in different formats.”

The platform is expected to include tools for automated communication, lead follow-up, social media posting and identifying revenue opportunities agents may be missing.

Miller said the launch remains on track for later this year — although the company has not announced a specific date while audits and compliance work continue.

AI as an assistant — not a replacement

While fears persist across many industries about AI replacing jobs, Miller argued the technology will instead make agents more productive.

“They get to do more deals,” he said of agents who effectively adopt AI. “You really have a small bandwidth for buyers, and how many homes you can show and how many people you could work with. The same thing with sellers — you have only so many deals you can do before you start getting burnt out.”

Miller said AI can help agents maintain work-life balance while scaling their businesses.

“A lot of agents chose this profession so they could have more time with their families,” he said. “The minute you start getting good at it and get successful at it, all that goes out the window and you’re just working all the time.”

Future agent workflows are likely to involve multiple AI assistants helping with administrative tasks, scheduling and client communication, Miller added.

However, he also highlighted aspects of the job where human interaction remains irreplaceable for agents and brokers.

“You’re showing a house and you might think, ‘Wow, it smells like they may have mold here,’ or, ‘The floor looks uneven,’” Miller said. “Those things, being an expert in your neighborhood — because real estate is local — the AI is just not going to know.

“You have to be there face to face to have that kind of knowledge. It’s understanding the feeling of a home, what it’s like for you and others to actually be there.”

Warning against overreliance

Miller cautioned agents against blindly trusting AI-generated marketing or communication.

“Yes, use it, but don’t trust it,” he said. “You should be checking its work always. You should not give it access to do your entire job. You still need to have an expert eye on it, because no matter how good the AI is, it’s not an expert at your job.

“AI is being mediocre. It will produce you the best mediocre thing. If you wanted it to give you a flyer, it’ll produce you the most average flyer you’ve ever seen, but what it’s not going to do is create new things. You’re the one who introduces the new things, the originality.”

Miller said brokerages that embrace AI will likely define the next era of the industry.

“What will replace agents are agents using AI,” he said. “Otherwise, you’re going to be one of those people who refused to adopt the internet. Those people don’t have careers anymore, and their careers went away quickly.”

This post was originally published on here. 

Providence, Rhode Island’s city council passed rent stabilization but failed to override the mayor’s veto. Rent stabilization is now one of the sharpest fault lines in the 2026 mayoral race.

In September, voters will decide between a Democratic mayoral incumbent who vetoed the ordinance and a Democratic state representative from Providence who is promising rent stabilization.

If David Morales, who is backed by Vermont U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, defeats incumbent Brett Smiley in the Democratic primary, chances are good that the city will move forward with capping rents at 4% annually.

Such an outcome would make Providence the only city in the state with rent stabilization.

The Providence race is part of a national reckoning. From Los Angeles to Massachusetts, rent stabilization has gained political momentum as an affordability fix, even as economists and housing investors argue the policy stalls new construction, pointing to Montgomery County, Maryland, and St. Paul, Minnesota, as cautionary examples. In both places, construction ground to a halt under stabilization.

Meanwhile, Austin, Texas, has been hailed for housing reforms that led to a significant supply boost that pushed rent prices down for 30 consecutive months. Those reforms did not include rent stabilization.

Providence is now the smallest major arena in a debate reshaping housing politics – and economics – across the country.

Providence housing affordability shortage

Zillow recently listed Providence as the hottest rental market in the country. Rents increased 5% annually. Just 12.9% of property managers are offering rent concessions, the fewest among the top 10 markets.

By comparison, Austin ranks among the top five cities for rent concessions, according to Apartments.com. It joined Phoenix, Charlotte, San Antonio and Sarasota, Florida, in offering one or two months of free rent.

Providence leaders on both sides of the debate spin the Zillow ranking as a sign of trouble. The numbers amount to a positive for landlords but an emphatic negative for renters.

Mayor Smiley’s position aligns with the supply-side argument: build more to make housing more affordable, as Austin has done.

“You can’t solve a housing shortage without building more housing,” the mayor said on local talk radio.

He added that the rent stabilization ordinance would “make it less likely that more housing was going to be built.” Because Providence would be the sole Rhode Island city under stabilization, he said developers could choose to build outside the city.

In contrast, Morales has argued that the Zillow ranking makes Providence the most unaffordable rental city in the country.

He launched his campaign last year on a promise to deliver rent stabilization, echoing the theme that carried New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani to victory. Mamdani this week released a 10-year housing plan and is pushing further rent stabilization.

New York City followed Providence on the Zillow list, along with San Francisco; Hartford, Connecticut; Los Angeles; Chicago; and Boston. California has passed several supply-focused housing laws in recent years. Connecticut took similar steps last year, and Massachusetts voters will decide in November whether to revive rent control, which the state eliminated in the early 1990s after it reduced the rental housing supply.

State lawmakers a half-mile from Providence City Hall are debating legislation that would legalize single-room occupancy, incentivize commercial-to-residential conversions and allow faith-based organizations to build affordable housing on property they own.

Tale of the city’s rent stabilization tape

The numbers currently favor keeping rent stabilization off the books.

The council voted 9-6 to approve the ordinance. Smiley quickly vetoed it. The council needed 10 votes to override, which meant flipping at least one member who had voted against it.

Nine members voted to override. One voted against. Five did not show up.

After the failed vote, Morales said in a social media post, “I’m committed to working with the council to pass rent stabilization to ensure rent doesn’t go up more than 4% a year.”

He committed to doing so within his first 100 days in office.

This post was originally published on here. 

For many in the real estate industry, Zillow’s announcement that it had filed an antitrust lawsuit against Midwest Real Estate Data (MRED) and Compass International Holdings earlier this month came with a sense of deja vu. 

Bradley Weber, the co-chair of Troutman Pepper Locke’s antitrust practice group, views the allegations made by Zillow as the “mirror image” of the claims Compass made in its antitrust lawsuit filed against Zillow last June, which it voluntarily dismissed in March 2026. 

“It is striking that the claims Zillow is now making against Compass are basically the same claims Compass was making against Zillow under Section 1 of the Sherman Act for conspiracy and Section 2 for monopolizing a relevant market,” he said.

In the suit, Zillow claims that Compass and MRED are taking part in a horizontal group boycott, which Weber said would imply, under a per se application of the law, that the two defendants are competitors.

“There is a theory there that Compass is competing with MRED because it has its own private listing service, but I am not sure how strong of an argument that is,” Weber said. 

In addition, Zillow also makes a vertical conspiracy claim against MRED and Compass, which Weber said would fall under the rule of reason application of the law. He feels this argument may be stronger, especially when it comes to Zillow’s claim of monopoly power. 

“If these vertical agreements are designed to enhance or protect large market share, which in MRED’s case is the vast majority of the MLS listing in Chicagoland,” he said. “So, if by entering into this relationship with Compass, it is protecting MRED from competition, then that could be a viable claim.”  

As Chuck Cain, an attorney and the president of Alliance Solutions, sees the question at the center of the lawsuit as “can companies that have data, which they view as proprietary, have exclusive control of that data, or, especially in the world of realty post Sitzer/Burnett, if companies the size of the defendants withhold that data from the MLS, is it an antitrust violation?”

“That is the real question and I have no idea how the courts will look at this,” Cain said. 

As with any antitrust lawsuit, the impact on consumers is front and center here, and for Cain that opens the door for even more questions to surface over the course of this litigation. 

“The defense’s position is that consumers are not harmed by withholding listings from Zillow, they just need to go to our website, which is three clicks away,” Cain said. “But does that then cause confusion for the consumer? And if it devolves to consumers needing to go to 20 websites to see what is actually for sale in a neighborhood, are aggregators entitled to access that data or is the data proprietary?”

Is Zillow now a public utility?

As for Zillow, Cain believes the court will have to examine whether Zillow “is so large and relied on by so many consumers nationwide, that cutting off listing data to it causes consumer harm?”

“This then begs the question, is Zillow a public utility? Is it so large and has been around for so many years that it has become effectively some sort of public utility? I don’t think that is what Zillow wants to see or hear, but that is how this could go,” Cain added.

Although it remains to be seen which questions the lawsuit will actually attempt to answer, attorneys agree that Zillow may be using this litigation as a “warning shot.” 

“I think one of Zillow’s primary goals with this lawsuit is to scare other MLSs so they don’t follow MRED’s lead,” Harrison McAvoy, a partner at Mandelbaum Barrett PC, said. “They want to show the MLSs that there is something to be afraid of if they pull their listing feed from Zillow.” 

Weber agrees, as he feels this might be Zillow’s way of telling other MLSs that if they follow MRED’s suit, they might be opening themselves up to a costly federal lawsuit.

“For PR reasons, I could see why Zillow would file this to sort of scare off other MLSs from entering into similar agreements with Compass,” Weber said.

In McAvoy’s view, however, MRED and Compass ultimately have the better of the two  arguments on the merits of the case, due to the fact that Zillow’s listing access standards policy, reflects, in his mind, an exercise of market power and restriction on competition, by forcing sellers to market their properties in a certain way.

Outcome could reshape things more than Sitzer/Burnett

But whichever way the case shakes out, the attorneys agree that the outcome could have a massive impact on the real estate industry. 

“I think this litigation has the potential to be an even bigger decision than Sitzer/Burnett and the suits that followed with how it could potentially reshape things. Both sides are trying to throw the table over and however this comes out, it is pretty much how things will operate moving forward and it could have major implications for the industry, especially if the defendants prevail,” Cain said. 

If Compass and MRED win the lawsuit, Weber feels that the MLS-broker relationship model being established by the defendants would become more prevalent. 

“This would definitely threaten Zillow’s market position and it would show that you don’t have to follow Zillow’s rules, which historically, is what much of the industry has done because they have become reliant on Zillow for leads and services,” Weber said.

This post was originally published on here. 

A new study from the Urban Institute concludes that the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) could offer zero-down payment mortgages to first-time homebuyers without significantly increasing default risk or endangering its insurance fund.

“Allowing zero-down payment mortgages would level the playing field for potential homeowners without family wealth,” the researchers wrote in the report. “Moreover, FHA zero-down payment loans would also replace the inconsistent patchwork of down payment assistance programs.”

Authored by Alexei Alexandrov, Laurie Goodman, Ted Tozer and Sam Valverde, the report reviews academic literature and loan-level data, finding that 0% down loans do not generate dramatically higher default risk when underwriting focuses on credit quality.

According to the analysis, moving from a loan-to-value (LTV) ratio range of 96% to 99% to a range of 100% to 104% LTVs raises the default probability by just 12 basis points — a difference the authors describe as statistically insignificant.

The findings draw on Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) public data that covers roughly 47,000 loans originated between 2013 and 2021. Performance was measured by whether a loan entered 90-day delinquency status within three years of origination.

Managing the risk

Because 0% down loans start with less borrower equity, loss severity in the event of foreclosure could be slightly higher. To offset this, the paper proposes a 25- to 35-bps increase in the FHA’s upfront mortgage insurance premium for zero-down loans. On a $400,000 mortgage, that amounts to about $1,400.

This premium could be financed into the loan balance and is calibrated to keep the Mutual Mortgage Insurance (MMI) Fund whole while preserving affordability. The authors noted this structure may also encourage borrowers who can afford a down payment to contribute one.

To further mitigate risk, the researchers recommend limiting the zero-down FHA product to first-time homebuyers. The loans would require a credit score above 700 — or a 660 cutoff if the borrower can provide 24 months of on-time rent payments, for example. The program would also be restricted to one-unit properties to prevent renter-to-landlord transitions.

Unlocking homeownership

Using Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) survey data from 2018, the report found that relaxing down payment requirements could nearly double the share of renters transitioning into homeownership to 14.2 million.

Eliminating the down payment constraint entirely would make an estimated 6.5 million additional renter households “ready to buy.” (The authors note that updated data would likely show the barrier composition has changed somewhat since 2018).

The report also shows an ongoing psychological barrier: Renters consistently overestimate the financial requirements needed to qualify for a mortgage. Many assume a 20% down payment and a 700-plus credit score are mandatory, even though the median FHA borrower puts down less than 5% and has a sub-700 credit score.

Addressing concerns that moving more renters into homeownership would inflate home prices, the researchers argued that the overall demand for housing units would be a net neutral.

When a renter becomes a homeowner, they vacate a rental unit, leaving the total number of occupied housing units unchanged. While there could be short-term shifts in demand between the rental and owner-occupied markets, the housing ecosystem would rebalance over time, the authors added.

Flávia Furlan Nunes reported and wrote this article with drafting assistance from HousingWire Automation, an editorial tool that helps transform announcements and industry data into HousingWire-style news coverage.

This post was originally published on here. 

Longtime Miami real estate partners and family duo Miguel Salvat and Daniel Golik have moved their luxury business to Compass in South Miami, the brokerage announced on Thursday.

The uncle-and-nephew team brings a combined 35 years of experience and more than 1,500 closed transactions to Compass, according to the company announcement. They will focus on the Miami luxury segment, leveraging multigenerational ties to the city’s cultural and real estate communities.

The two were formerly brokered by fellow Compass International Holdings brand CENTURY 21 BE3.

Salvat entered real estate in 2006 and went on to found YES Real Estate Services, which grew to more than 100 agents before being acquired by CENTURY 21, the company said. RealTrends Verified data shows that in 2024, Salvat closed 14 transaction sides totaling $11.91 million in sales volume, earning him the No. 89 rank in Miami in the 2025 RealTrends Verified City Rankings.  

Golik, a graduate of the University of Central Florida’s hospitality program, embraced his roots in real estate; his father served as a senior executive in the Miami market for decades.

Raised in a family that operated a well-known Spanish-language bookstore and the world’s largest Cuban exile publishing house, Salvat and Golik said that background shaped their work ethic and approach to client service.

“We grew up understanding that if you can walk, you can work,” Salvat said in the announcement. “Whether it was unloading trucks in the August heat or navigating complex transactions today, that grit has stayed with us. We chose to partner with Compass because it reflects the same level of service, attention and professionalism we deliver to our clients every day. This transition enables us to serve our clients with greater efficiency, innovation and care at every stage of the process.”

Both have held industry leadership roles over the years. Salvat helped found the Young Professionals Network (YPN) and serves as a governor on the residential board, while Golik has served multiple terms on the YPN board and on the Keller Williams ALC committee, the release said.

Adam Vellano, principal broker of Florida for Compass, said the pair fits the firm’s focus on experienced, relationship-driven agents in key luxury markets.

“Daniel and Miguel are the embodiment of what it means to be a modern real estate professional,” Vellano said. “Daniel’s third-generation expertise and Miguel’s ‘no-task-too-small’ mentality create a unique synergy that is rare to find in this industry. At our core, we are a people business, and these two gentlemen prioritize their clients’ needs and their community above all else. It is an honor to support their growth as they continue to excel in the Miami landscape.”

The team is based in South Miami and remains active in the local community, where both are raising their families and continuing a multigenerational legacy of service, according to Compass.

This article was written by Brooklee Han and generated with the assistance of HousingWire Automation, then reviewed by a HousingWire editor before publication.

This post was originally published on here. 

Reverse mortgage lender Longbridge Financial is partnering with mortgage technology firm Friday Harbor to implement an artificial intelligence-powered pre-underwriting platform aimed at identifying issues earlier in the origination process.

In an interview with HousingWire‘s Reverse Mortgage Daily (RMD), executives from both companies described the arrangement as a strategic partnership focused on modernizing reverse mortgage workflows while maintaining human oversight throughout the lending process.

“We’re really looking to bring significant modernization to the whole space in terms of how we think about interacting with our clients and consumers to really speed up the process, modernize the process, while at the same time really keeping that human in the loop,” said Bill Packer, chief operating officer of Longbridge.

The platform is designed to review borrower documentation and identify potential issues, missing information and underwriting conditions before a loan reaches the formal underwriting stage. Packer said the goal is to avoid late-stage surprises that can delay closings and frustrate borrowers.

“Nobody appreciates when they’re five days before closing, and suddenly we discover an issue that we’ve known about for 45 days,” Packer said.

He framed the collaboration as the next step in the company’s multiyear push to modernize reverse mortgage and home equity line of credit (HELOC) workflows. This follows Longbridge’s prior technology initiatives, including Bridget AI, an AI-powered underwriting assistant.

Friday Harbor’s AI system can analyze loan documents and compare them against lending guidelines in a way that helps staff identify potential concerns earlier in the process. Rather than replacing underwriters, the technology is intended to support processors, underwriters and originators by surfacing issues upfront.

Theo Ellis, co-founder and CEO of Friday Harbor, told RMD that the broader consumer benefit is often overlooked in conversations about AI adoption in mortgage lending.

“Everyone has that story about getting asked for a document or explanation at the last minute,” Ellis said. “If you can use AI to catch these things upfront, you create a much better borrower experience.”

Executives said reverse mortgages present unique operational challenges because the sector lacks some of the automated underwriting infrastructure available in the forward mortgage market, including tools such as Fannie Mae‘s Desktop Underwriter (DU) and Freddie Mac‘s Loan Product Advisor (LPA).

“In the reverse space, we don’t have any of those tools,” Packer said. “There’s really newfound opportunities to bring significant changes to that transaction in a way that’s never been done before.”

Ellis said adapting Friday Harbor’s technology for reverse mortgages required reworking the existing framework. “A lot of that had to be built from the ground up, which was a challenge we were excited to take on,” he said.

The technology is not currently consumer-facing and will initially be used internally by Longbridge staff during the pre-underwriting phase. Packer, who framed the partnership as an indefinite “journey” with different levels of interaction with the AI, said the company expects significant human oversight during the early stages of implementation while employees evaluate the system’s performance.

Packer said Longbridge was drawn to Friday Harbor after hearing repeated endorsements from mortgage technology leaders through industry groups and conferences.

The partnership — officially inked in March — marks Friday Harbor’s first move into the reverse mortgage space, although the executives said they have been discussing a potential collaboration for several years.

The companies said they view the initiative as part of a broader effort to modernize the reverse mortgage process for older borrowers facing growing financial pressures from rising property taxes, insurance costs and other housing-related expenses.

“Older American homeowners deserve a process that should be faster, clearer and more consistent,” Packer said.

This post was originally published on here. 

As part of HousingWire’s Editor’s Choice awards spotlight series, we’re spotlighting past Women of Influence honorees whose careers, leadership and insights continue to influence the industry. This series offers a closer look at the experiences and decisions that have shaped their paths.

HousingWire spoke with Margy Grant, CEO of Florida Realtors, about leadership, navigating industry challenges and supporting one of the nation’s largest REALTOR organizations through periods of change and growth.

Grant, a multi-year Women of Influence honoree, has helped lead Florida Realtors through significant operational and technology expansion while strengthening its role in industry advocacy and member support. Under her leadership, the organization’s technology platforms, including Form Simplicity and Tech Helpline, earned HousingWire Tech100 recognition for three consecutive years, while Florida Realtors continued to expand its impact across education, legal programs and communications.

Women of Influence recognizes the leaders making a meaningful impact across mortgage, real estate and homebuilding. Nominations for the 2026 Women of Influence awards are open now through May 31.

HousingWire: What’s one decision that changed the trajectory of your career?

Margy Grant: Giving up the practice of law. I’d come to realize when I accepted the role of CEO of Florida Realtors, that the needs of our members, the challenges of the industry and the responsibilities of the position meant a new and different direction.

I like to say I’m a recovering lawyer – I haven’t practiced law in eight years.

HW: Looking back, what experiences most prepared you for the leadership role you’re in today?

Margy Grant: Emergencies. You don’t know how strong you are until you are responsible for other people’s livelihoods.

All they want from you is the best you have to offer – and that can be daunting. But, when they know that you are giving that, somehow, that’s enough, even when things don’t go exactly the way you planned.

HW: What are you most focused on right now?

Margy Grant: My focus changes based on what’s needed for our members. Currently, I am very focused on making sure we continue to provide the products, tools and services to make them successful.

I am humbled that I have a Board of Directors who is wholly focused on this as well.

HW: What’s one leadership lesson you’ve learned that more people in this industry should understand?

Margy Grant: Bad news doesn’t wait. And it gets worse, the longer you put it off or forego dealing with it.

HW: What advice would you give to the next generation of women working toward senior leadership roles in housing?

Margy Grant: Step forward – and persevere. If you want to be a leader, step into leadership roles and take on the tasks.

Also, remember: The best you have is you – that’s what is needed to be successful and that’s what you bring to the table, every day.

Click here to nominate a 2026 Woman of Influence.

This post was originally published on here. 

Rachel Glazer has rejoined Brown Harris Stevens from Compass, bringing her team and more than $1 billion in career sales back to the New York-based luxury brokerage, the firm announced Thursday.

Glazer previously spent 12 years at Brown Harris Stevens (BHS), where she was consistently recognized as the firm’s top downtown broker and as one of New York City’s leading luxury agents, according to the company announcement.

Her team closed more than $119 million in sales volume in 2025 and has transacted $1 billion-plus in sales over the course of her career. RealTrends Verified data shows that in 2024, Glazer closed 30 transaction sides, totaling $119.35 million in sales volume. This earned her the No. 25 rank in the state for sales volume in the 2025 RealTrends Verified Rankings.

Glazer’s business centers on high-profile and high net worth clients across Manhattan neighborhoods including the West Village, Upper West Side, Upper East Side, Tribeca, SoHo and Gramercy.

“I’m thrilled to be returning home to Brown Harris Stevens,” Glazer said in the announcement. “BHS has always stood apart because of its hands-on approach and its genuine dedication to supporting agents. I missed the boutique culture and collaborative environment that helped shape my career. Bess Freedman and Will Zeckendorf are really involved day to day and I am also excited to focus on new development which is a passion of mine.”

Glazer began her real estate career after moving to New York to attend the Fashion Institute of Technology and quickly established herself as a luxury specialist. 

“Rachel is one of New York’s most respected luxury brokers and a true relationship-driven professional. She built an extraordinary business here, and her return marks an exciting milestone as we continue to attract top talent across the industry,” Freedman, the CEO of BHS, said in a statement.

Her move comes as Brown Harris Stevens continues to bulk up its agent ranks. Over the past year, the firm has added agents whose combined career sales total more than $24 billion, according to the company.

BHS also recently announced a marketing partnership with FirstTeam, a top West Coast independent brokerage, to expand property marketing and referral opportunities.

This article was written by Brooklee Han and generated with the assistance of HousingWire Automation. It was reviewed by a HousingWire editor before publication. The system helps convert company announcements and industry data into HousingWire-style news coverage.

This post was originally published on here. 

CertifID recently announced the launch of CertifID Client Experience, a new closing platform designed to bring identity verification, document signing, payments and wire instruction delivery into a single secure environment for buyers, sellers, agents and title professionals.

The company said the launch expands its role beyond wire fraud protection into a broader transaction management platform built around secure real estate closings.

“We created wire fraud protection for real estate, and now we are making sure that protection is woven into every step of the closing,” Tyler Adams, CEO of CertifID, said in a statement. “Companies that use CertifID are not just protecting their clients from fraud, they are giving them the best closing experience in the industry.”

The platform is designed to centralize every step of the closing process within one authenticated session, eliminating the need to send sensitive information through email. CertifID said fraud education and security prompts are integrated directly into the transaction workflow, particularly during high-risk actions such as wire transfers.

According to the company, the platform’s Fraud Engine safeguards more than $300 billion in real estate transaction volume annually, continuously improving through transaction activity and fraud monitoring.

CertifID said the Client Experience platform was built with a mobile-first approach, allowing users to verify identity, sign documents and submit payments through their smartphones without creating separate accounts or navigating complex portals.

“The closing process has never had an experience built around the people going through it,” said Josh Linn, chief product officer at CertifID. “When something is genuinely easy to use, security stops being a gate and becomes the foundation.”

The company also highlighted the growing sophistication of wire fraud and cybercrime within real estate transactions, noting that artificial intelligence tools are increasingly being used by criminals to impersonate buyers, sellers, lenders and title agents.

“In 2015, I became a victim of real estate wire fraud, and that experience showed me the industry did not just need better habits, it needed better technology,” said Tom Cronkright, co-founder and executive chairman of CertifID. “This is the next step: fraud protection so woven into the transaction that it becomes invisible. The role of a title agent has expanded from the protection of property rights to consumer protection, the Client Experience empowers the industry to meet that challenge.”

CertifID currently protects more than 1.4 million real estate transactions annually and said it blocked $283 million in attempted fraud last year.

Through its Fraud Recovery Service partnership with the U.S. Secret Service, the company said it has recovered more than $126.9 million in stolen funds.

This article was generated using HousingWire Automation and reviewed by a HousingWire editor before publication. The system helps convert company announcements and industry data into HousingWire-style news coverage.

This post was originally published on here. 

Bank of America said Thursday that it will continue its Community Homeownership Commitment program after surpassing its original goal of delivering $15 billion in affordable home loans and grants.

The program, launched in 2019, has provided more than $15 billion in affordable home loans. This total includes more than $600 million in down payment and closing cost grants to more than 57,000 homebuyers nationwide, the bank said.

Bank of America said the initiative will now become an ongoing commitment rather than a time-limited program, as affordability challenges continue to weigh on prospective homebuyers.

“Affordability remains one of the biggest barriers to homeownership today,” Matt Vernon, head of consumer lending at Bank of America, said in a statement. “Continuing this commitment reflects years of focused work to help more people move from aspiration to ownership through responsible lending and targeted solutions, while recognizing that the challenges in today’s housing market are ongoing.”

The program includes down payment and closing cost grants, low down payment mortgage options, and financial education resources aimed at low- to moderate-income borrowers and first-time homebuyers.

Under the initiative, eligible buyers in select markets can receive down payment grants of up to $10,000, or 3% of the home purchase price, whichever is less. Borrowers may also qualify for up to $7,500 through the bank’s America’s Home Grant program to help cover eligible closing costs or reduce mortgage rates.

Bank of America said it partners with more than 300 nonprofit, Department of Housing and Urban Development-certified housing counseling organizations nationwide to provide homebuyer education and counseling services. The bank also works with community down payment assistance programs and housing voucher providers to help buyers access additional resources.

The lender said it is not establishing a new dollar target for the program despite reaching the original $15 billion benchmark.

Instead, the bank said it plans to continue offering the program’s existing benefits as elevated prices, higher mortgage rates and limited supply continue to challenge affordability across the U.S. housing market.

This article was generated using HousingWire Automation and reviewed by a HousingWire editor before publication. The system helps convert company announcements and industry data into HousingWire-style news coverage.

This post was originally published on here. 

A coalition of fair housing and economic advocacy groups sued the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) and acting director Russell Vought on Wednesday, seeking to block a Trump administration-backed rule they say would weaken longstanding protections against lending discrimination.

The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Washington, D.C., challenges changes made last month by the CFPB to Regulation B, which implements the Equal Credit Opportunity Act (ECOA), a 1974 civil rights law designed to prevent discrimination in lending.

According to the complaint, the CFPB’s rule reverses nearly 50 years of federal fair lending policy.

The plaintiffs include the National Fair Housing Alliance, Rise Economy and two private firms focused on fair lending compliance: BLDS LLC and artificial intelligence company SolasAI. They argue the rule would make it harder to hold banks and other lenders accountable for practices that disproportionately harm Black borrowers, women and other underserved groups.

Disparate impact, credit deterrents and SPCPs

The lawsuit focuses on three major changes.

First, the rule eliminates disparate impact liability under the ECOA, a legal standard that has long allowed regulators and borrowers to challenge lending policies that disproportionately harm protected groups, even without evidence of intentional discrimination.

The plaintiffs argue that these protections are especially important as lenders increasingly rely on automated underwriting, artificial intelligence and targeted digital advertising. Without disparate impact standards, the lawsuit claims, algorithms could reinforce historic patterns of discrimination.

Second, the complaint challenges changes to rules governing “discouragement” in lending, meaning actions or marketing practices that deter people from applying for credit. The plaintiffs say the revised rule narrows what counts as unlawful discouragement, making it harder to pursue cases tied to redlining or discriminatory advertising.

The lawsuit cites past federal enforcement actions involving branch placement, selective advertising and outreach practices that allegedly excluded communities of color. It also points to recent CFPB research, which found that Black small-business applicants were less likely than white applicants to receive encouragement to apply for loans.

Third, the lawsuit argues the rule would effectively dismantle Special Purpose Credit Programs (SPCPs), which lenders use to expand access to credit for underserved borrowers. Plaintiffs say the CFPB’s changes would make these programs nearly impossible for lenders to operate in a for-profit manner.

‘Deliberate dismantling’ of protections

The CFPB said when issuing the rule that it was complying with a January 2025 executive order from President Donald Trump, which directs agencies to “coordinate the termination of all discriminatory programs, including illegal DEI and ‘diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility’ (DEIA) mandates, policies, programs, preferences, and activities in the Federal Government, under whatever name they appear.”

The plaintiffs also accuse the CFPB of violating the Administrative Procedure Act (APA) by failing to adequately justify the rule changes or properly consider evidence and public comments warning that the changes could increase discrimination.

“This is the deliberate dismantling of 50 years of legal jurisprudence, regulatory guidance, and bipartisan consensus that lending discrimination has no place in America,” Lisa Rice, president and CEO of the National Fair Housing Alliance, said in a statement. “The statute did not change. The legal decisions did not change. Washington’s commitment did.”

Rice said that the CFPB’s reversal is “a continuation of this Administration’s efforts to gut fair housing and lending protections,” and that the change to the rule will result in roadblocks to credit access and a less productive economy.

Paulina Gonzalez-Brito, CEO of Rise Economy, said that the CFPB’s move ignores “decades of precedent.”

“The CFPB was created to protect consumers and small businesses from financial abuse and discrimination, and this final Reg B rule would do real harm, setting us back in our collective efforts to ensure that all families and small businesses have a fair chance to achieve the American Dream,” Gonzalez-Brito said. “The CFPB needs to follow the law and return to its core mission of protecting consumers and small businesses.”

“This rule undermines one of the nation’s core civil rights protections in lending and will lead to more discrimination in access to credit,” said Skye Perryman, president and CEO of Democracy Forward, one of the legal teams representing the plaintiffs. “At a time when communities across the country continue to face barriers to homeownership, small business lending, and economic opportunity, the CFPB should be strengthening protections against discrimination, not dismantling them.”

“The CFPB is upending decades of consistent regulatory implementation of ECOA by dismantling some of the statute’s fundamental protections. The court should reject the CFPB’s arbitrary and unsupported rule, which is inconsistent with the plain text of ECOA,” said Allison Zieve, director of Public Citizen Litigation Group, another legal team representing the plaintiffs. 

The CFPB did not immediately respond to HousingWire‘s requests for comment.

Additionally, the lawsuit challenges the authority of Vought, arguing he has not been lawfully appointed to lead the agency because he has not been confirmed by the Senate. Due to Vought not being officially appointed, the plaintiffs argue that the rule is invalid.

Trump had previously nominated Jonathan McKernan to lead the bureau on a permanent basis, but he was never confirmed and Vought remained as acting director. In October 2025, McKernan was appointed as under secretary for domestic finance at the U.S. Department of the Treasury.

This post was originally published on here. 

Homebuyer affordability declined in April as the national median payment applied for by purchase mortgage applicants rose to $2,152, up from $2,131 in March, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA)’s Purchase Applications Payment Index (PAPI) released Thursday.

The national PAPI rose 0.3% to a reading of 156.0 in April, up from 155.5 in March, indicating a higher mortgage payment-to-income ratio for new purchase loan applications. For lower-payment loans at the 25th percentile, the national mortgage payment increased to $1,493, up from $1,479 a month prior.

Despite the monthly deterioration, affordability remains better than a year ago. The median payment of $2,152 in April 2026 was $35, or 1.6%, lower than in April 2025, while household earnings grew 4% over the same period. Taken together, these trends pushed the index down 5.3% on an annual basis, signaling improved affordability compared to last spring.

“Housing affordability conditions weakened slightly in April, as mortgage rates edged higher and rising loan amounts pushed monthly payments up from March. However, affordability remains improved compared to a year ago, supported by lower mortgage rates and continued income growth,” said Edward Seiler, MBA’s associate vice president of housing economics and executive director of the Research Institute for Housing America.

“Looking ahead, continued income gains and some stabilization in mortgage rates could help support better affordability conditions.”

MBA’s national mortgage-payment-to-rent ratio (MPRR) fell to 1.35 at the end of the first quarter of 2026, down from 1.38 at the end of the fourth quarter of 2025 — meaning that mortgage payments for home purchases have decreased relative to asking rents. During that period, the U.S. Census Bureau’s Housing Vacancy Survey showed the national median asking rent climbed to $1,579 in Q1 2026, up from $1,464 in the prior quarter.

The payment-to-rent picture improved more for lower-payment borrowers. The 25th percentile mortgage application payment to median asking rent ratio slipped to 0.94 in March, down from 0.96 in December 2025. This suggests that, at the lower end of the market, monthly mortgage payments are moving closer to or below typical rents in many areas.

The national median mortgage payment for Federal Housing Administration (FHA) borrowers rose to $1,829 in April, up from $1,812 in March, but was down from $1,895 in April 2025. For conventional loan applicants, the national median payment increased to $2,166 in April. That compared to $2,145 in March 2026 and $2,206 in April 2025.

Affordability for newly built homes softened during the month. MBA’s Builders’ Purchase Application Payment Index (BPAPI), which uses data from the Builder Application Survey, showed the median mortgage payment for new-home purchase loans slipping to $2,188 in April, down from $2,210 in March.

Even with that decrease, new-home payments remain slightly higher than the overall market median, reflecting both higher new-home prices and concentration in certain metro areas.

Conditions varied widely at the state level, underscoring the geographic unevenness of the affordability squeeze. The states with the highest PAPI readings in April were Idaho (248.1), Nevada (228.4) and Rhode Island (206.9).

At the other end of the spectrum, the lowest PAPI readings were in Louisiana (120.1), Hawaii (124.4) and the District of Columbia (125.2).

Affordability also slipped across major racial and ethnic groups in April. MBA reported that the PAPI reading for Black households increased from 161.0 to 161.5, while the reading for Hispanic households increased from 143.9 to 144.3, and the reading for white households increased from 156.8 to 157.3.

MBA’s Purchase Applications Payment Index tracks how new mortgage payments change over time relative to income, using loan application data from MBA’s Weekly Applications Survey and earnings data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Current Population Survey. Higher index values indicate a higher mortgage payment-to-income ratio compared to periods when the index is lower.

This article was generated using HousingWire Automation and reviewed by a HousingWire editor before publication. The system helps convert company announcements and industry data into HousingWire-style news coverage.

This post was originally published on here. 

Two Harbors Investment Corp. has once again adjourned its special meeting of stockholders, giving the MSR-focused real estate investment trust more time to solicit votes for its proposed all-cash sale to an affiliate of CrossCountry Mortgage (CCM).

Two Harbors and CCM entered into a definitive merger agreement on March 27. Negotiations with CCM produced two price increases, from $10.80 to $11.30 and then to $12 per share, amid a competing offer from UWM Holdings Corp. (UWMC).

“Given the lack of votes, it is possible that CCM will need to increase its bid from the current level,” analysts at Keefe, Bruyette & Woods said in a flash note.

The special meeting, originally scheduled for May 19 and then moved to May 28, will now reconvene June 11 at 10 a.m. ET. The Two Harbors board is urging stockholders to vote in favor of the transaction with CrossCountry Intermediate Holdco LLC.

According to Two Harbors, the $12-per-share offer represents a 21% premium to the REIT’s unaffected share price and a 19% premium to its fully diluted tangible book value. Common stockholders also would receive a pro-rated stub dividend for the quarter in which the transaction closes, providing incremental cash beyond the $12-per-share merger consideration.

Holders of Two Harbors preferred stock would have their shares redeemed at $25 per share plus accumulated and unpaid dividends.

UWMC’s most recent proposal is $12.50 per share in cash or 2.3328 shares of UWMC stock. But the Two Harbors board said that, based on UWMC’s May 27 closing price, that default stock consideration would be worth about $7.23 per Two Harbors share. It estimates that 25% to 30% of its stockholders could be defaulted into stock at that valuation.

The company said its board, working with “numerous independent legal and financial advisors,” engaged with UWMC throughout a lengthy, competitive process.

According to Two Harbors, the board identified “core deficiencies” in UWMC’s proposals, including deal structure, certainty of closing, regulatory process, and risks around employee attrition and business continuity. The company said UWMC has not addressed these issues.

By contrast, the CCM offer would automatically deliver $12 per share in cash, plus a stub dividend, to all stockholders with no election required, Two Harbors said.

The company said the CCM deal is fully financed with no financing contingency. The parties received early termination of the Hart-Scott-Rodino waiting period on May 21, and 41 of 53 required state and agency regulatory approvals have been obtained.

In press release issued Thursday shortly after the merger vote was delayed, CCM indicated it would not be raising its price again while reaffirming its commitment to complete the acquisition.

“CCM’s $12.00 per share offer, together with the pro-rated stub dividend, is CCM’s best and final offer to TWO stockholders,” the release stated. “This represents the highest premium paid for a mortgage-REIT. CCM will not pursue a deal at all costs; there are other strategic alternatives available.”

Stockholders who previously voted in favor of the CCM deal do not need to take additional action.

This post was originally published on here. 

As part of HousingWire’s Editor’s Choice awards spotlight series, we’re spotlighting past Women of Influence honorees whose careers, leadership and insights continue to influence the industry. This series offers a closer look at the experiences and decisions that have shaped their paths.

HousingWire spoke with Felicia Grumet, Chief Financial Officer at Newrez, about leadership, navigating change and the experiences that shaped her career across operations, servicing and financial management.

Grumet was recognized as a 2025 Women of Influence honoree for her leadership in advancing Newrez’s technology and operational strategy, including driving digital initiatives that improved both customer and employee experiences. She also played a key role in expanding the company’s AI capabilities and aligning technology investments with long-term growth and performance goals.

Women of Influence recognizes the leaders making a meaningful impact across mortgage, real estate and homebuilding. Nominations for the 2026 Women of Influence awards are open now through May 31.

HousingWire: What’s one decision that changed the trajectory of your career?

Felicia Grumet: Earlier in my career, after spending many years in the mortgage space, I made the decision to step into a much broader role that was well outside my comfort zone. It required me to build something from scratch in an area where I had a lot to learn, but I was able to lean on my core skills — organization, curiosity and a willingness to figure things out — while stretching into unfamiliar territory.

What I didn’t realize at the time was that decision would set a pattern. Every few years since, I’ve taken on roles that looked very different from anything I’d done before, and each one broadened my expertise and opened new doors. That first leap taught me that growth lives on the other side of comfort, and it’s a lesson that has defined my career ever since.

HW: Looking back, what experiences most prepared you for the leadership role you’re in today?

Felicia Grumet: Having held so many different roles over the course of my career — each one requiring a steep learning curve — has been the single greatest preparation for leadership. I’ve gotten used to the uncomfortable feeling of starting something new, knowing that I bring a set of skills but also have a lot to learn.

At Newrez, I joined as COO, then took over as Chief Information Officer, and then transitioned into the CFO role. Each of those experiences gave me a different vantage point of the company, and that breadth of understanding only strengthens how I lead today.

Along the way, each new role also meant building relationships and trust with new teams and stakeholders, and those connections have been just as valuable as the technical knowledge. The key is trusting your own process: you learn, you adapt, you earn the trust of the people around you, and eventually you reach a place where you can truly have an impact.

HW: What are you most focused on right now?

Felicia Grumet: We’re focused on growth, operational efficiencies and delivering the best possible experience for our customers, including better digital tools and service.

In my role as CFO, that translates to identifying opportunities for revenue growth and expense savings, which really are the two key levers. It’s about making sure every decision we make supports both the financial health of the organization and the experience of the homeowners we serve.

HW: What’s one leadership lesson you’ve learned that more people in this industry should understand?

Felicia Grumet: I’ve never regretted making a change or pushing myself out of my comfort zone. As hard as it can be, the more we learn and the more exposure we get, the more impactful we become.

Click here to nominate a 2026 Woman of Influence.

This post was originally published on here. 

MasterBrand Inc. has completed its all-stock merger with American Woodmark Corp., combining two of the largest residential cabinet manufacturers in North America at a time when builders are closely watching material costs and product availability.

The transaction, first announced earlier this year, creates what MasterBrand calls the most comprehensive portfolio of cabinetry brands and products in the region, spanning stock, semi-custom, and premium lines for kitchens, baths and other spaces in the home, according to the company’s announcement.

Under the terms of the deal, American Woodmark shareholders received 5.150 shares of MasterBrand common stock for each American Woodmark share. Pre-merger MasterBrand shareholders now hold about 63% of the combined company’s outstanding shares. American Woodmark has become a wholly owned subsidiary of MasterBrand.

The combined company will continue to operate under the MasterBrand name and trade on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol MBC. American Woodmark’s common stock will be delisted from the Nasdaq Stock Market.

MasterBrand, based in Beachwood, Ohio, will keep a presence in American Woodmark’s longtime home of Winchester, Virginia, the companies said.

Scale play in a tight construction market

For homebuilders and residential contractors, the merger further concentrates cabinet manufacturing capacity among a smaller number of national suppliers. Both MasterBrand and American Woodmark have long supplied volume builders as well as big-box retailers and independent dealers, which means purchasing teams could see changes in product assortments, pricing programs and service models as the integration moves forward.

MasterBrand said the combination will expand its operational footprint and geographic reach, with a goal of providing “greater overall choice, superior service, and enhanced value” across the value chain. The company is targeting roughly $90 million in annual run-rate cost synergies by the end of year three and expects the deal to be accretive to adjusted diluted earnings per share in year two.

Those synergy targets matter for builders because they underpin the rationale for offering broader lines while potentially stabilizing or improving pricing and lead times. How much of the cost savings flow through to customers will depend on competitive dynamics in the cabinet category and on overall construction demand, which has been pressured by higher interest rates and affordability constraints even as new-home construction remains structurally undersupplied in many markets.

Leadership and governance changes

Dave Banyard will remain president and CEO of MasterBrand. Three former American Woodmark directors — Andrew Cogan, Philip Fracassa and Daniel Hendrix — joined MasterBrand’s board as independent directors at closing. MasterBrand board chair David Petratis will remain in that role.

Given that the transaction closed just ahead of MasterBrand’s June 4, 2026, annual meeting, Fracassa will be up for re-election this year along with the other Class I directors, as previously disclosed in the company’s proxy filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Why this matters for builders

The cabinet package is a critical component of kitchen and bath design, cycle time and buyer satisfaction on new-home projects. A larger MasterBrand could have several implications for builders and remodelers:

• Product breadth: A wider portfolio may simplify sourcing across entry-level, move-up and luxury lines, especially for multi-market builders trying to standardize specifications.
• Supply chain resiliency: A larger, more geographically dispersed manufacturing footprint could help mitigate regional disruptions, though integration work can create temporary friction.
• Pricing power: With another major combination in the building products space, procurement teams may need to sharpen competitive bids and leverage regional or specialty manufacturers to maintain negotiating leverage.
• Design flexibility: If MasterBrand rationalizes overlapping SKUs, design centers may see changes in finish and style availability, requiring updates to option catalogs and buyer presentations.

The companies noted that their forward-looking expectations for synergies and earnings accretion reflect current operating conditions, including existing tariffs, and do not assume future tariff changes or shifts in market demand.

Advisers

Rothschild & Co served as exclusive financial adviser, and Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP served as legal counsel to MasterBrand. C Street Advisory Group advised on strategic communications and investor relations.

Jefferies LLC served as financial adviser, and McGuireWoods LLP served as legal counsel to American Woodmark.

This post was originally published on here. 

LadderUp Housing announced on Thursday that it received an investment from the Richard King Mellon Foundation to expand its rent-to-homeownership model into Allegheny and Westmoreland counties in Pennsylvania.

The company said the funding will support the acquisition and renovation of homes aimed at helping low- to moderate-income families transition from renting to owning through financial coaching and mortgage-readiness programs.

Founded as a mission-driven housing company, LadderUp purchases, renovates and constructs single-family homes in markets with aging but relatively affordable housing stock. The homes are rented to families who may not yet qualify for a traditional mortgage.

During the rental period, tenants work with financial coaching partners to improve credit scores, build savings and prepare for homeownership. Once they become mortgage-ready, tenants can purchase the homes, often at or below the original appraised value, according to the company.

“Homeownership remains one of the most important wealth-building opportunities for working families, yet millions of Americans remain locked out of traditional mortgage pathways,” LadderUp founder and CEO Tom Voutsos said in a statement.

In an interview with HousingWire, Voutsos said the company focuses on cities where relatively affordable housing stock still exists but often requires renovation and investment.

“We think that cities like Pittsburgh or across the Midwest have an interesting housing dynamic where there’s still this high volume of low-cost housing stock that exists, but it’s in need of capital improvement to make it truly a home for someone,” he said.

The company said its model is intended to preserve affordable homeownership opportunities in neighborhoods increasingly targeted by institutional investors seeking long-term rental properties.

Voutsos said LadderUp aims to avoid contributing to displacement or gentrification by helping existing residents become homeowners.

“We think that it’s important that you have programs where there’s on-ramps to homeownership for existing neighborhood residents,” he said.

LadderUp said it has acquired nearly 90 homes and renovated more than 65 housing units across four markets since its founding. The company said it has helped six families become homeowners, with all home sales completed directly with existing tenants.

Participants in the program have seen average credit score increases of 75 points, according to the company.

Voutsos said credit scores remain the biggest barrier preventing many renters from qualifying for mortgages, even in markets with comparatively affordable homes.

The company initially expected tenants would take about three years to become mortgage-ready, but Voutsos said LadderUp has been working to shorten that timeline to roughly two years on average.

Voutsos said that unlike some rent-to-own operators, LadderUp does not require non-refundable down payments or multi-year lease commitments. Tenants also are not penalized if they decide not to purchase the home.

“We really wanted to preserve optionality…not everybody needs to be a homeowner. There should be a variety of options in every neighborhood when it comes to renting or owning,” he said.

He continued, “There are 4 million families that have paid their rent on time for the last 12 months across the country…not that all 4 million families should be homeowners, but what can we do to make sure that those 4 million families have an option to be a homeowner, and then they can choose what works best for them.”

The Richard King Mellon Foundation made the $250,000 investment through its Social-Impact Investment Program, which supports for-profit startups with social missions aligned with the foundation’s philanthropic strategy. The foundation said it has invested more than $25 million in 76 impact-focused startup ventures.

Voutsos said the partnership with the foundation will also help LadderUp establish relationships with local organizations and community groups as it enters the new markets.

This post was originally published on here. 

Beeline Holdings Inc. has signed a letter of intent to acquire the remaining stake in MagicBlocks, an AI-focused real estate technology firm that powers the lender’s chatbot and digital infrastructure.

The deal is non-binding at this point, meaning either party can still walk away before signing a definitive agreement, the companies announced Thursday.

Beeline currently owns about 47.6% of MagicBlocks, but under the proposed deal, the technology firm would become its wholly owned subsidiary. The acquisition is expected to be structured as an all-stock transaction, supported by a third-party valuation of about $1 million.

MagicBlocks builds AI-driven systems for transaction lead generation, production automation and workflow tools tailored to financial services and real estate applications.

Its platform powers “Bob,” Beeline’s customer-facing chatbot, which the company said contributed to an 8% increase in lead-to-lock conversion on its website at no incremental cost.

Beeline intends to further integrate that stack with its mortgage origination and title services, blockchain-based settlement tools and tokenized home equity offerings. The company plans to use MagicBlocks’ AI infrastructure to support BeelineEquity, its tokenized home equity product developed with partner TYTL.

“MagicBlocks represents a major strategic step forward for Beeline, further differentiating our digital-first approach,” Nick Liuzza, Beeline’s CEO, said in the announcement.

Existing MagicBlocks leadership and development staff are expected to join Beeline.

The companies expect the deal to close in June, subject to negotiation and execution of a definitive agreement and employment agreements for MagicBlocks’ founders. Final approval will also be required from a special committee of Beeline’s board, SAFE noteholders and other customary conditions.

This post was originally published on here. 

Second Century Ventures, the strategic investment arm of the National Association of Realtors (NAR) and operator of the REACH accelerator program, announced the six companies selected for the 2026 NAR REACH residential technology program on Thursday.

The REACH program focuses on identifying and accelerating technology companies serving the residential real estate industry.

Since launching more than a decade ago, REACH has expanded globally and across real estate sectors, supporting more than 375 technology companies worldwide since 2019.

“The future belongs to the agile creators. As the market evolves and technology advances, our promise remains unchanged: we will continue to champion cutting-edge solutions and cultivate an environment where entrepreneurs can turn friction into opportunity while keeping agents at the center of every transaction,” said Dave Garland, managing partner of Second Century Ventures. “We don’t just wait for the future of housing to arrive — we have been dedicating ourselves to building it for years.”

The six companies selected for the 2026 program focus on solving operational and technology challenges across residential real estate, including compliance, fragmented data, affordability, workflow automation and transparency.

The selected companies include:

• Ai.realestate (AiRE), a platform that combines internal business data with property, mortgage and client information to create a centralized intelligence database for sales teams.
• Association Online (AO), which provides HOA data and transaction transparency tools designed to reduce delays and support agents navigating association-related transactions.
• BrokerBot, an AI platform built to support brokerages with administrative tasks, training, compliance and agent guidance.
• LotRoll, a technology platform focused on bringing infrastructure and data solutions to the manufactured housing sector.
• MaxHome.ai, a transaction intelligence platform aimed at streamlining compliance and operational workflows for brokerages and agents.
• StackWrap, a centralized dashboard platform that integrates third-party systems and tracks agent engagement and technology adoption.

“The companies selected for this year’s program offer innovation that delivers the dynamic tools the industry needs to enter a new era of real estate and evolve the consumer experience,” said Ashley Stinton, managing partner of NAR REACH. “Whether focused on streamlining complex workflows and notoriously fragmented datasets, building and improving infrastructure, or creating transparency and access, each of these six solutions harness the power of modern technology to elevate the level of service and connection between clients and the real estate professionals who serve them.

“These tools will not only optimize the balance sheet; they will create a runway for brokers and agents to grow their businesses, develop new ways to serve clients, and expand their roles as trusted advisors before, during and after the transaction.”

The REACH program provides participating companies with mentorship, networking opportunities, education and exposure to the broader real estate industry.

This article was generated using HousingWire Automation and reviewed by a HousingWire editor before publication. The system helps convert company announcements and industry data into HousingWire-style news coverage.

This post was originally published on here. 

Ask 10 agents what’s broken in their business. Nine will say lead generation, which means nine out of 10 will be wrong.

The real leak is almost never at the top of the funnel. It’s in the middle. Most agents have more leads than they think. They just aren’t converting the ones they already have.

That’s the single most important shift an agent can make in a course-correction. Before you spend another dollar on new leads, before you try a new platform, before you sign up for another program, open your CRM. The business you’re looking for is probably already in there.

The keep, cut, change framework

Before you can fix the follow-up problem, you have to see it. And to see it, you need a framework that cuts through the noise.

Every activity in your business falls into one of three buckets.

Keep. Work that produces direct human conversations with people who could hire you or refer you. Listing presentations. Buyer consultations. Past client calls. Sphere touches. Any activity with a clear feedback loop to real business.

Cut. Work that feels productive but has no feedback loop. Posts that no one engages with. Tools that duplicate what your CRM already does. Time spent on platforms where your ideal client doesn’t live. Meetings that don’t move anything forward. Content you’re “working on” that never ships.

Change. Work where the intent is right but the execution is off. You’re making the calls, but at the wrong hours. You’re following up, but your scripts are weak. You’re marketing, but inconsistently. Don’t kill these. Sharpen them.

Run this sort honestly, and you’ll usually find that half of what fills your week belongs in the cut column.

The 80/20 test

After keep, cut, change, run one more test. Which 20% of what you did in the last quarter produced 80% of your results?

For most agents, the answer is uncomfortable. A small number of specific activities, with a small number of specific people, produced most of the income. Everything else was noise.

The fix is simple. Do more of that 20%. Do less of everything else.

It sounds too simple to be real strategy. That’s why most agents don’t do it.

Why follow-up is the real leak

Now back to the main point. Once you’ve run the audit, the leak almost always shows up in one place: follow-up.

Here’s the pattern. An agent gets a lead. They make first contact. The lead says, “let me think about it,” “we’re not quite ready,” or “maybe in a few months.” The agent marks the lead warm, makes a note to circle back, and then never does. Or they circle back once, get a similar response and quietly drop it.

Multiply that by a year, and you have a CRM full of abandoned conversations. Every one of those conversations was a potential deal. Most of them still are. They just need someone to come back.

Research across the sales world consistently shows that most buying decisions require five to 12 touches. Most agents stop at two.

That’s not a lead problem. That’s a follow-up problem. And no amount of new lead generation fixes it, because every new lead will leak out of the same hole.

The sphere is your goldmine

There’s another form of follow-up that’s even more under-worked, and it’s hiding in plain sight. Your past clients and sphere of influence.

Most agents treat their sphere like a holiday card list. One touch in December, maybe a pop-by in the spring and the occasional Facebook like. Then they wonder why their referral business is flat.

The sphere is the single highest-ROI asset you own. The trust is already built. The relationship is already there. You don’t have to earn credibility from scratch. You just have to stay present.

Most agents under-work their sphere by a factor of ten. An agent with 200 past clients and sphere contacts, making consistent personal contact throughout the year, will outperform an agent with 2,000 cold leads every time.

POWER AGENT® Fact:  The people who already trust you are your best lead source. Stop treating them like the last resort.

What real follow-up looks like

Fixing follow-up isn’t complicated. But it is disciplined. Real follow-up has three traits.

It’s scheduled. Not “when I get around to it.” Blocked on the calendar. Same time every week. Treated like a listing appointment.

It’s categorized. Every lead gets an A, B, or C tag. A’s get contacted weekly. B’s monthly. C’s quarterly. You stop treating every lead the same, which means you stop wasting time on the ones that aren’t ready and stop losing the ones that are.

It’s personal. Not automation dressed up as personalization. An actual call, an actual text, an actual handwritten note. A real human showing up for another real human. That’s what builds the relationship automation can’t replicate.

None of this requires new software. None of it requires a bigger team. It requires commitment and a calendar.

Before you generate one more lead

If your business feels slow, the temptation is to go wider. Generate more leads. Try a new platform. Throw money at the top of the funnel. Don’t.

Before you spend another dollar on lead generation, do this:

• Pull every lead from the last 12 months that didn’t close.
• Categorize them honestly. Who’s still potentially in the market? Who’s definitely out? Who’s the maybe?
• Re-engage the maybes with a personal touch. Not a mass email. A real conversation starter.
• Then call 20 past clients with no agenda. Just to check in.

Do that for two weeks before you spend a dime on new leads. The agents who do this almost always find that their supposed lead shortage was really a follow-up shortage, and the pipeline starts moving again without any new marketing spend.

The shift

There’s a reason so many agents default to blaming lead generation. It’s easier. New leads feel like action. Following up with old leads feels like nagging, or admitting you dropped the ball, or doing boring work instead of exciting work.

But the money isn’t in the exciting work. It’s in the boring, disciplined, repeatable work of showing up for the conversations you already started.

Fix follow-up first. Everything else gets easier after that.

Darryl Davis, CSP, has spoken to, trained, and coached more than 600,000 real estate professionals around the globe. He is a bestselling author for McGraw-Hill Publishing, and his book, How to Become a Power Agent in Real Estate, tops Amazon’s charts for most sold book to real estate agents.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of HousingWire’s editorial department and its owners.

To contact the editor responsible for this piece: tracey@hwmedia.com

This post was originally published on here. 

For a decade and a half coming out of the Global Financial Crisis and housing crash of the 20-oughts, a shortage of skilled labor has bedeviled homebuilders and their ecosystem of stakeholders, stalling projects, driving up costs and growing worse as skilled front-liners age out of their roles on job sites. 

The Home Builders Institute’s Fall 2025 Construction Labor Market Report encapsulates this challenge. According to the report, residential construction is short about 723,000 workers. This labor shortage, the report concludes, costs the industry $10.8 billion annually, including $8.1 billion from lost construction and $2.7 billion from construction delay. 

The question has long been, “is there opportunity in residential construction’s chronic, intensifying labor capacity constraint?”

A new company, Navigate.AI, aims to prove there is such an opportunity, with a model that combats the labor shortage by leveraging AI to make construction workers on residential and commercial job sites more efficient and effective.

The platform, launched this week by Opendoor co-founder Eric Wu, utilizes an AI copilot that helps train students and new employees, gives workers real-world insights and assists crews with quality control and project planning. 

Navigate.AI uses video from cell phones and from Meta’s AI smart glasses to provide insights, assistance and coaching to workers in construction and the trades. The copilot has four features: AI upskilling and coaching, AI knowledge on-demand, AI quality control and AI project scoping. 

The company raised $25 million in funding from the likes of Lennar, Invitation Homes, Tishman Speyer and the founders of DoorDash. Lennar already gave Navigate.AI its stamp of approval, partnering with the company to deploy the AI copilot across its entire organization, including with construction managers, general contractors and skilled and semi-skilled trade front-liners. 

“There’s a PhD in our pocket in every vertical, and we see all these impacts and efficiency gains and activity with people behind the desk, including engineers, support people, attorneys and the like. I think those same principles can apply to people in the field,” Wu told HousingWire’s The Builder’s Daily in an interview. 

Training the trades

Navigate.AI has already partnered with trade schools, such as the Aviation Institute of Maintenance, to help students and apprentices learn valuable skills more quickly. Students wearing Meta glasses receive guidance from the copilot, which essentially acts as a virtual on-the-job coach, telling them which steps to take to complete a particular task or project. 

The AI coach gives students and trainees step-by-step instructions and ensures that projects are completed to the correct standards. Users can get feedback and ask the copilot if they are completing a task in the right way.  

“The students have been really excited by it. The first thing that we found is that there are 25 students in the lab for each teacher or one trainer. You just can’t be with every student all the time,” Wu said. “The second thing we uncovered is that some of the students don’t want to raise their hands to ask questions. This [AI co-pilot solution] allows them to actually learn how to do things without having to raise their hand.”

The feature is helpful in the classroom and also supports new employees and trainees as they complete their first projects out in the field. Instead of having a more experienced team member watching over the shoulder, crews can leverage Navigate.AI to help onboard and train new hires. 

“If you had the world’s best journeyman literally just right by your side, then you can probably learn a lot faster,” Wu explained. “As you’re building a home, for example, you’re going to be able to lean on that coach to help you measure things, help you figure out the right steps to take, to do quality control in real time and to do upskilling in real time. I think it’s going to be quite powerful.”

Users can also leverage the knowledge-on-demand feature to ask questions and get real-time answers. The copilot pulls information from specs, manuals and historical records, and leverages that information to give workers instant insights, while citing sources. 

The idea is for workers to have an AI coach with them at all times as they are learning the ins and outs.

“How can we leverage the intelligence that’s in your pocket and help people who are in the field do their work perfectly the first time and safely? That’s the vision,” Wu explained. 

Quality control and project scoping

Navigate.AI is useful even for experienced workers and teams. Users can use the platform to AI-verify a project by using AI quality control to catch issues before a crew leaves. 

The platform was trained on real projects with real teams to detect quality control issues as they arise. All a worker has to do is take a video of a project or capture the project using Meta’s smart glasses, and Navigate.AI will alert the user if there are any outstanding issues. 

Navigate.AI customizes AI models with real-world construction data so that the platform can reliably inspect work captured on camera. 

“All you need is the visual evidence of something, and we can, with AI, tell you whether it’s done correctly or not,” Wu said. 

The feature could prove to be very useful for homebuilders and developers as their teams work on job sites, but it is also helpful for property management firms. Tishman Speyer, which owns properties across various verticals like multifamily, office, industrial and retail, has partnered with Navigate.AI and plans to roll out the platform to its maintenance crews. 

‘They just have to walk around with the app, and, with the video, we’re able to translate that into whether that building or that lobby or that space is set up the right way, and of the quality that their standards require,” Wu explained. 

Navigate.AI also has a project scoping tool, which enables users to get a comprehensive scope of work within minutes. This includes a list of every item, finish and fixture, with pricing estimates. All a user has to do is capture a project area with a phone or the Meta glasses. 

“I just think about it as a second pair of expertise. As you’re walking through an asset, trying to figure out what to renovate and what to repair, there are going to be different opinions. So, how do you apply local and company policies to judgment in the field? We think about it as just having AI supplement someone’s judgment, and really making sure they’re scoping the right things and are in line with policies at the corporate level,” Wu explained. 

The implications for homebuilders

For the homebuilding industry, platforms such as Navigate.AI can get workers ready for the job site more quickly and make crews more efficient, producing higher-quality, right-the-first-time outcomes. Amid a homebuilding environment of compressing margins and tepid buyer demand, every gain in operational efficiency can go a long way. 

“We think this is going to help across all three vectors of speed, quality, and cost. Obviously, speed is top of mind. If you can get installs and builds of different components done correctly the first time with no rework, then you save quite a bit of time. But we also think that it’s going to improve quality, as there’s going to be the removal of defects, and then ideally we will make the whole system more efficient, so that it lowers the cost of building a home,” Wu explained. 

There’s a lot of talk right now about AI replacing humans. While that may be possible in some industries, that is not likely to happen in construction. Wu sees AI as a tool for making construction and trades workers far more efficient, and hopes that technology will incentivize more people to enter the construction workforce.  

“Construction might be one of the bigger, if not the biggest, net job gainers due to AI. I think people don’t think about that enough. There’s this narrative around job destruction, but in construction in particular, at least from my vantage point, I’m seeing a big labor opportunity. There’s going to be a bunch of reskilling and upskilling in the sector,” he said.

This post was originally published on here. 

The conversation around artificial intelligence has reached a tipping point. For many professionals, the barrier is no longer skepticism. It’s saturation.

AI is everywhere. Headlines, product demos, internal meetings and daily workflows. And yet, despite constant exposure, a large number of people remain stuck in the same place: aware of its potential, but unsure how to actually use it.

This is what AI paralysis looks like. Not resistance, but overwhelm.

The individuals and organizations making real progress right now are not necessarily the ones with the most advanced tools. They are the ones who have moved past that paralysis and started in a practical, personal and immediately useful way.

The real barrier isn’t technology. It’s starting.

Most AI conversations focus on large-scale transformation, focusing on automation, efficiency and long-term disruption. Those outcomes matter. But they can feel abstract to the people doing the work every day.

The loan officer managing a pipeline.
The real estate agent juggling clients.
The title professional navigating complexity and compliance.

For them, AI doesn’t need to start as a strategy. It needs to start as a solution to a frustrating problem. The most effective entry point is not learning everything AI can do. It’s identifying one friction point and solving it.

Start with what’s slowing you down

The simplest way to begin is also the most effective. Instead of asking, “How do I use AI?” ask, “What is slowing me down right now?” Say it out loud. Write it down. Record it.

It might sound like:

• “I spend too much time writing follow-ups.” 
• “I forget details from client conversations.” 
• “I’m buried in repetitive admin work.” 
• “I don’t have time to think strategically.” 

From there, the next step is straightforward. Take that input into an AI tool and ask a simple question: “How can I use AI to solve this as a beginner?”

This shift matters. You’re not learning AI in theory. You’re using it to solve your own problems. That’s where adoption actually starts.

What this looks like in practice

At an individual level, the use cases are immediate. 

• A sales professional can capture notes conversationally and have them structured into clear follow-ups.
• A marketer can turn rough ideas into polished content in minutes.
• A manager can transform scattered inputs into actionable insights without manual consolidation.

Even outside of work, AI is already functioning as a real-time problem solver by helping people troubleshoot issues, research decisions and move faster through everyday uncertainty. The benefit is not just time savings. It’s clarity.

AI reduces friction. It removes repetitive effort. It creates space for better decision-making.

From personal use to real-world execution

What starts at the individual level scales quickly across industries.

In real estate and mortgage, professionals are using AI to simplify communication, generate insights and reduce manual workload. In title and settlement services, it’s being applied to streamline workflows, improve consistency and surface risk earlier in the process. In Fintech, it is accelerating data analysis, improving customer experiences and compressing development timelines.

In applied environments, the impact is already measurable. In one example, a persistent challenge for sales teams was capturing accurate, real-time interaction data. Instead of relying on manual CRM entry after the fact, a solution was developed that allows representatives to record notes conversationally throughout the day. AI then synthesizes those inputs, structures them into usable summaries and provides actionable next steps.

This same approach extends into core production workflows. In practice, AI-driven automation has achieved zero input errors in certain title workflows, while reducing production time and cost by up to 15% per file, demonstrating how these tools can improve both speed and accuracy in day-to-day operations.

The takeaway is simple: AI is not theoretical. It is already delivering practical gains when applied correctly.

The psychology shift: From dread to utility

A significant part of AI paralysis is psychological. There is a tendency to frame AI as either too complex to understand or powerful enough to replace the user entirely. Neither perspective is particularly helpful for someone trying to get started.

What works instead is reframing AI as a utility. Not something to master all at once, but something to use incrementally. You don’t need to understand the underlying models to benefit from them. You only need to be willing to engage with them in a practical way.

The people making the most progress are not necessarily the most technical. They are the most willing to experiment.

Making adoption easier

There are also ways to make adoption feel more natural. Voice-based interaction allows users to speak instead of type, turning AI into a conversational tool rather than a technical one. AI-enabled tools and devices enable learning and application in real time without interrupting the flow of the day.

Even small investments in more advanced versions of AI tools can unlock more consistent performance and broader functionality. These are simple steps, but they reduce friction, and that’s what matters.

The advantage is personal

At the enterprise level, AI strategy matters. But at the individual level, adoption is what creates momentum. The professionals who integrate AI into their daily routines are already operating differently. They move faster, reduce manual work and spend more time on the parts of their role that require judgment and expertise. And that advantage compounds over time.

The takeaway

AI is not a single decision. It is a series of small ones. Use it to solve one problem. Then another. The goal is not to eliminate complexity overnight. It’s to reduce friction wherever you can. Because once you move past the initial hesitation, the pattern becomes clear: AI is not something to fear. It’s something to use. And the sooner that shift happens, the faster the value shows up.

Ryan Ozonian is Senior Director of Innovation and AI at MyHome, a Williston Financial Group company (WFG).
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of HousingWire’s editorial department and its owners. To contact the editor responsible for this piece: zeb@hwmedia.com.

This post was originally published on here. 

Most homeowners who obtain a reverse mortgage do it for one primary reason: to eliminate the required monthly principal and interest mortgage payment. And that makes perfect sense.

For retirees living on a fixed income, removing a large monthly obligation can dramatically improve cash flow, reduce stress and create more flexibility during retirement. In fact, that payment elimination feature is one of the biggest reasons the federally insured Home Equity Conversion Mortgage (HECM) has become such a powerful retirement planning tool.

But here’s what many homeowners never realize: The most common reverse mortgage product, the adjustable-rate HECM, has multiple advantages when making payments. Not required payments, but VOLUNTARY payments.

The hidden flexibility of the HECM

Most people assume a reverse mortgage works like a one-way street: once the loan balance starts growing, there’s no turning back. But that’s not true.

With an adjustable-rate HECM, borrowers can make what are known as “partial prepayments” at any time without penalty. And if those payments are made consistently, using the same interest rate, over the same time period, the reverse mortgage will amortize very similarly to a traditional forward mortgage. In other words, the loan balance would shrink instead of grow.

But unlike a traditional mortgage, the HECM offers two enormous advantages that many homeowners and even financial professionals overlook.

1. Every payment increases liquidity

This is where the HECM becomes truly unique. When borrowers make payments toward an adjustable-rate HECM, three things generally happen simultaneously:

• The loan balance decreases 
• Home equity increases 
• The available line of credit increases dollar-for-dollar 

That last point is critical. With a traditional mortgage, payments simply reduce debt. The money is gone. There is no future access to it unless the homeowner refinances or applies for a new loan.

With the adjustable-rate HECM, voluntary prepayments restore borrowing capacity. That means liquidity increases every time a payment is made. And for retirees, liquidity matters. Emergencies happen. Healthcare costs rise. Investment markets fluctuate. Having access to available funds later in retirement can be incredibly valuable.

Unlike many traditional home equity lines, the HECM line of credit cannot be frozen or reduced because of declining home values, as long as borrower obligations are met.

2. Payments are optional

With a traditional mortgage, stopping payments creates immediate risk. Miss enough payments and the home will be lost to foreclosure.

With a HECM, voluntary payments remain exactly that: voluntary. There is no required monthly principal and interest payment schedule forcing the borrower into a rigid obligation. That flexibility can be life-changing during retirement because income and expenses rarely move in straight lines.

A different way to think about home equity

This doesn’t mean every borrower should make monthly payments on a reverse mortgage. In many cases, eliminating the payment entirely is the right decision. 

However, sophisticated homeowners and financial planners are increasingly recognizing something important: The adjustable-rate HECM is not just a “last resort” loan. Rather, it is a flexible financial planning tool. 

Some homeowners will “pool” or “stack” voluntary payments into one calendar year when the borrower wishes to itemize deductions. Others will take their required minimum distribution (RMD) and make a large windfall payment to create an offsetting 1098 deduction. 

When used strategically, it can provide both payment relief today and liquidity growth for tomorrow, a combination that traditional mortgages simply cannot match.

Dan Hultquist is the Co-Founder of REVERSE plus.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of HousingWire’s editorial department and its owners. To contact the editor responsible for this piece: zeb@hwmedia.com.

This post was originally published on here. 

The spring housing market came in with genuine momentum. Mortgage rates had moderated. Affordability was improving at the margins. Pent-up buyer demand was real. And running beneath all of it, quietly reshaping what buyers could actually afford, was the continued rise of homeowners insurance costs.

A Pew Research Center survey conducted in March 2026 found that 71% of U.S. homeowners say their insurance costs have gone up in recent years, and 42% say it has gone up a lot. Homeowners paid an average of 24% more for insurance in 2024 than in 2021, and premiums increased in 95% of U.S. ZIP codes. Builders operating in any market are feeling the effect of buyer hesitation, budget recalculations and closing friction. The question heading into the second half of 2026 is not whether insurance is a factor in the sales process. It is how well prepared builders are to address it.

Some signals of stabilization

There is good news in the mid-year picture. AM Best’s 2026 Market Segment Outlook Report projected stabilization across the U.S. homeowners insurance segment, citing moderating premium growth, enhanced catastrophe risk management and improving reinsurance market conditions. A quiet Atlantic hurricane season in 2025 helped. Regulatory reforms in Florida are producing concrete results: The state’s insurer of last resort, Citizens Property Insurance, received approval for an average rate decrease of 8.7%, a reversal that would have been unthinkable two years ago.

For builders, broader carrier participation means more competitive options for buyers. New construction in particular carries distinct underwriting advantages over older homes. Tighter building codes, modern materials and lower claims histories all make newly built homes more attractive to carriers. Westwood is built specifically to surface those advantages, finding the most competitive, appropriate coverage for each buyer in each market, including markets where carriers have scaled back.

Where the market is still hitting hard

Florida and California remain some of the most impacted markets, but the story has shifted inland. According to the Insurance Information Institute, severe convective storms — tornadoes, hail, high winds — caused more than $51 billion in U.S. insured losses in 2025, the third consecutive year above $50 billion and more than any other category of natural disaster. States across the Midwest and Southeast that were once considered low risk are now seeing meaningful premium increases. Builders selling in those regions are encountering buyers who arrive already worried about what insurance will cost them.

Research from Florida State University found that a 10% rise in homeowners insurance premiums is associated with a 4.6% decline in housing prices in the affected area. For builders, that is a meaningful data point, but it is also an opportunity. New construction homes are consistently better positioned on insurance costs than comparable existing homes, which means builders who make insurance part of the conversation early can turn a market headwind into a genuine point of differentiation.

What to watch in the second half

The stabilization signals are real, but several pressures remain. The expense of imported building materials is pushing construction and repair costs higher. Because replacement value drives premiums, rising rebuild costs translate directly into upward pressure on rates that will continue to affect what homeowners pay for homeowners insurance coverage.

Westwood stays with buyers after closing, offering annual coverage reviews, re-shopping policies when better options exist and stepping in when a carrier issues a non-renewal. That continuity protects the buyer and reflects positively on the builder who put them in the right hands from the start.

What it means for builders going into the back half

The builders who navigate the second half of 2026 most effectively will not be the ones who avoid the insurance conversation. They will be the ones who own it, bringing coverage into the sales process early, giving buyers clarity on their full monthly payment from day one and working with an insurance expert who has the market access to deliver real options in any market.

Westwood Insurance Agency was founded by a home builder, and for more than 70 years, the agency has worked alongside builders, with a deep understanding of the sales process, the closing timeline and what is at stake when a deal stalls.

Today, Westwood provides insurance quotes for more than 75% of newly constructed homes across the U.S., working with a network of more than 50 carriers to give buyers access to broad, competitively priced coverage. When insurance enters the conversation at contract signing rather than at the closing table, buyers understand their full monthly payment from day one, and nothing is left to chance at the closing table.

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High rates and low inventories have beleaguered homebuyers for far too long. At a time when they should be exhilarated at the prospect of making their homeownership dreams come true, many instead feel stressed out, frustrated and uncertain as they face sticker shock, rate volatility, bidding wars, negotiations and, of course, the mortgage process itself.

Fortunately, lenders have the opportunity to create an exceptional borrower experience that transforms anxiety into confidence and empowerment. Step one of creating that experience is understanding what buyers want and need from their lenders. Step two is taking action to exceed their expectations and outperform peer lending institutions focused solely on rate competition.

The 2026 ServiceLink State of Homebuying Report provides a roadmap, offering information and insights that clarify the priorities of today’s homebuyers. This sixth annual report captures the perspectives of more than 1,500 U.S. residents (18+) who bought a home in 2024 or 2025. New this year, the report also shares the perspectives of over 500 loan officers, who provided valuable context around the challenges borrowers encounter during the homebuying and lending processes, and highlighted areas where knowledge gaps persist.

Step 1: Understanding the need for speed and demand in digital mortgage solutions

Urgency continues to define the housing market, with fast-shifting mortgage rates and intense competition pressuring homebuyers to make quick decisions.

Once in that accelerated mindset, they look to keep the momentum going through a streamlined mortgage process that gets them to the closing table fast, and with as little complexity as possible. Overall, 35% of the homebuyers surveyed for the State of Homebuying Report said they would expect to close in two weeks or less on a future home purchase, 36% in three to four weeks and 19% in one to two months. And the desire for speed isn’t exclusive to the home purchase process.

Respondents expect speed during home equity and refinance closings, too. Another 50% to 48% of respondents said they expected to close in two weeks or less on a home equity and refinance closing, respectively. Gen Z and millennials are particularly focused on speed during the home purchase process, with many anticipating one- to two-week closings. Older generations lean toward slightly longer timelines, three to four weeks, but still place a high value on efficiency.

In fact, baby boomers — more than any other generation — reported they had used eSigning technology for some or all of their closing documents. This generation’s 62% compares with 52% across all respondents (Gen X was the second-largest user, at 56%) and reflects a trend of rising digital expectations across all homebuying demographics.

These digitally fluent homebuyers, who are accustomed to managing life supported by apps, automation and instant access to information, expect a level of digital ease when buying a home — in some cases expecting a fully end-to-end digital mortgage experience.

Step 2: Taking action to meet and exceed homebuyer expectations

Here’s where the rubber meets the road. ServiceLink asked homebuyers which technologies would influence them to work with a specific lender. Adopting these digital mortgage solutions (eSigning, self-scheduling, eClosing, AI technologies, etc.) can help lenders not only attract borrowers but also deliver the kind of extraordinary experience that builds borrower satisfaction, loyalty and referrals.

→ eSigning. As mentioned above, 52% of respondents said they have used eSigning technology for some or all of their closing documents, yet a whopping 88% — including 92% of millennials and 91% of GenXers — would like to. This gap reflects an opportunity for lenders to work with a partner that can help them adopt plug-and-play technologies to enable convenient eSign and remote online notarization (RON) options.

→ Self-scheduling. Consumers prefer to control their own schedules and know what’s happening when. That’s why 87% of respondents (91% of millennials and Gen Xers) said they’d lean toward a lender that enables them to self-schedule their appraisal or closing appointment on their phone or tablet for the exact date and time they desire. This technology is readily available to lenders: ServiceLink’s EXOS provides borrowers with real-time scheduling capabilities and greater transparency into origination timelines.

→ Virtual closing. The opportunity to hold the closing virtually would influence the decision of 82% of respondents to work with a specific lender. Again, the right technology partner can help integrate these technologies into existing lender workflows to ensure seamless internal and external processes.

→ AI tools. Nearly four out of five homebuyers (78%) said they look for a range of AI tools and technologies to move the mortgage process forward, reduce steps and accelerate the timeline to close.

→ End-to-end process. Another 78% said they would embrace a fully digitized mortgage process where they don’t need to participate in any in-person appointments.

Delivering the exceptional borrower experience

The overarching takeaway of the 2026 State of Homebuying Report for lenders is that today’s homebuyer values speed and clarity as much as price and rate. Buyers don’t just want competitive financing — they want faster approvals, shorter timelines, fewer unknowns and clear, consistent communication.

Lenders should focus on eliminating friction and waiting wherever possible by integrating technology-enabled services to streamline approvals and processing, improve response times across all touchpoints and keep deals moving at speed, from appraisal management to digital mortgage closings.

However, it’s not all about the digital experience; buyers continue to crave educational support and direct, one-on-one human guidance from their lenders. Take the time to explain the paperwork, legal jargon and fees. Provide educational resources and answer questions that arise. It’s all part of developing trust and helping borrowers enjoy making the purchase of their lifetime.

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Word that Eastwood Homes would acquire Atlanta-based Peachtree Building Group on Tuesday came as any private-to-private combination might.

An energized, well-led, fast-growing Carolinas-based private homebuilder was expanding its reach and deepening its foothold in one of America’s most strategically attractive housing markets.

What we learn as the story behind the transaction – the one that emerged in exclusive conversations Wednesday with Eastwood Homes CFO Kevin Hutchins and Peachtree Building Group principal Doug Cotter – is what makes us love waking up and showing up at work each day.

Contrary to time-honored truisms that homebuilder M&A is always and only driven by the tangible land assets being traded, this one was not simply a land-and-lots deal.

Rather, the Eastwood-PBG deal speaks deeply of a strategic combination forged around two increasingly powerful forces reshaping American homebuilding: the urgent economics of scale and the enduring value of culture, trust, and good old you-know-it-when-you-see-it operating fit.

Those forces may explain why private-to-private transactions have become one of the most meaningful, if less flashy, dynamics in today’s homebuilding M&A environment.

According to JTW Advisors’ latest industry M&A analysis, private builders accounted for 39% of homebuilder acquisition activity in 2025 through April 2026 – surpassing public builder acquirers at 26% and Japanese strategic buyers at 30%.

That marks a striking shift in industry power dynamics.

And Eastwood’s Atlanta move offers a revealing case study in why.

Scale is no longer a public builder luxury

For years, the conversation about scale in homebuilding belonged primarily to the public builders.

The publics’ advantages need hardly be mentioned … again: lower capital costs, national purchasing leverage, deeper infrastructure, broader operating footprints, and the ability to spread overhead across much larger production platforms.

Private builders have counterpunched through the cycles. They seize on the off-market parcels, draft off the traffic-driving public communities’ promotions, play off price- and personalization, and product spec, with agility, entrepreneurial decision-making, intimate knowledge of local markets and cultural cohesion.

Inexorably, however, the math is forcing even private operators to confront a set of harsher realities: higher-for-longer capital costs, construction trade uncertainty in “datageddon,” direct cost inflation and volatility, cost-of-living-constrained households, and jittery people.

Scale has become operationally a non-negotiable.

“Atlanta – 30,000 to 40,000 permits a year – and you just got to have scale to get your part of the market here,” Hutchins said. “For us, this is part of our strategy to help move that forward and get scale.”

Hutchins’ take may apply to the specifics of the Eastwood-PBG combo, but it underscores more than Eastwood’s Atlanta ambitions.

A strategic shift has already taken hold among a growing class of well-capitalized multi-regional private builders that increasingly recognize scale not as nice-to-have, but as competitive table stakes.

Eastwood’s acquisition of Peachtree instantly transforms its Atlanta operating relevance.

The combination takes Eastwood from roughly 120 annual closings in Atlanta to something approaching 350-400 homes, depending on the production cadence.

If you think that’s just about bragging rights, consider this:

“When you look at scale, you look at operational scale – not employee scale,” Hutchins said. “We can now go to our trade partners and say, ‘Hey, Eastwood, we were doing 120 homes. Well, now with this acquisition, we’re up to close to 400 homes. What kind of pricing do I get today versus that? What kind of crews do I get today?’”

The Eastwood team’s ability to jump that fence may be among the most operationally important takeaways from this deal. Why? Scale is not merely about lower pricing.

It’s about the doors that open to a favored-nation partner whose business dashboard spans 12-, 18-, 24- and 36-month project commitments, investment, and operational horizons.

“It’s not only just from a reduction of what trades can do a little bit better on pricing,” Hutchins said, “but just as important are the crews that you get from those trades.”

Experienced operators understand exactly what Hutchins is getting at. Top builders  – by volume – often secure top trade capacity. Smaller operators may get the same vendor – but they may see some differences in capability, responsiveness, scheduling priority … ultimately, first-time right velocity.

That translates directly into construction cycle time, customer experience, rework risk, warranty performance and margins.

Hutchins was equally direct about the broader strategic reality.

“Being relevant to trade partners, being relevant to banking partners, as a regional, there is really, really something there that we have to pay attention to.”

This is the real-world private homebuilders inhabit, and they’re taking to it like it’s their second nature. That’s because at a certain rung of the production homebuilding natural order, being too small has become expensive.

Sellers still care about more than price

If Eastwood’s logic centers on scale, Peachtree’s choice to sell to Eastwood reveals another critical – and highly complementary – dynamic in private-to-private dealmaking.

Doug Cotter made clear that financial terms alone were not the deciding factor.

“My partner and I, Scott Schmidt, are in that season of life where it was time to make a change,” Cotter said. “Our biggest concern was to make sure that if and when we made that change, we made it with a family-run company where our employees, who we love and want to take care of, could transition into a similar environment that we had.”

Doug Cotter’s punchline warms the heart.

“We wanted to keep them out of a meat grinder.”

That kind of language, nor even the conviction, doesn’t typically show up in M&A decks. For founder-led sellers, succession and exit are not purely financial decisions.

• They involve people.
• Legacy.
• Culture.
• Relationships built over decades.

Cotter doubled-down on the notion

“100% we wanted to merge or be bought out by a relational company, and not a transactional company,” he said.

That framing – relational versus transactional – may increasingly explain why some private sellers prefer strategic private buyers over public consolidators or institutional capital-backed alternatives.

Public builders may offer scale and financial firepower. Global strategic buyers may offer extraordinary capital depth and growth runway for an energized, entrepreneurial team.

Still, for many of the cycle-seasoned living-and-breathing-and-leading characters you’ll meet among homebuilding’s owners and stakeholders, founder-to-founder cultural alignment remains a distinct advantage for certain private acquirers.

The asset Eastwood was really buying: capability

The transaction, it should be noted, did include approximately 1,000 assets across land, pipeline and work-in-progress inventory. It also should be noted that that WIP significantly deepens Eastwood’s Atlanta operating position.

But Hutchins repeatedly emphasized that Eastwood was buying something arguably more valuable than land.

Local operating intelligence.

“The long-term play is that we have also found ourselves a very, very good and very, very capable development partner in the Cotters,” Hutchins said.

That relationship continues, with Cotter Properties remaining an active development partner. For Eastwood, that dramatically reduces one of the greatest “brain-damage” risks of expansion.

“Local talent, local knowledge,” Hutchins said, adding, “There’s a learning curve there that we’ve been able to really kind of move the needle on, and not – not have to, I hate to pay the dumb tax, but pay the dumb tax.”

That’s one of the hardest truths about geographic expansion. Buying land is the easy part. Understanding entitlement pathways, development economics, municipal expectations, and submarket execution risks in unfamiliar geographies is the hard part, where many organic expansion efforts pay a heavy, sometimes disastrous, dumb tax.

Eastwood’s acquisition appears designed to accelerate that learning curve by bringing proven, trusted, tried-and-true people on the ground.

Sophisticated private buyers are acting institutionally

Another revealing aspect of this transaction is how professionalized the process has become. This was not entrepreneurial, gut-instincts improvisation. It was institutional-grade execution.

Cotter credited Tony McGill – longtime Senior Managing Director and Head of Investment Banking at Zelman Associates – as instrumental in identifying Eastwood as the right strategic fit.

“When Eastwood was brought to us [by] Tony McGill … it was just a good place to mesh,” Cotter said. “I could have not done any of this without Tony. He was such a great asset to us.”

On the buy side, Eastwood leaned on JTW Advisors, led by CEO and founder Chris Jasinski. Hutchins described JTW as indispensable in handling a transaction of this scale. Williams Parker served as legal counsel.

Taken together, the deal reflects how serious private acquirers increasingly operate with the same advisory sophistication once associated mainly with institutional buyers.

That’s another marker of how much the landscape has evolved.

Joe Stewart’s enduring influence and impact

Even as Eastwood scales, Hutchins repeatedly returned to culture. And specifically, to Eastwood Homes founder Joe Stewart. Stewart remains an advisor to the business, bringing nearly 50 years of homebuilding experience to Eastwood’s leadership team.

“One of the things that he’s always preached … is that we’re going to do smart business or no business,” Hutchins said.  “We are going to continue to grow our footprint without really sacrificing who we are as a builder,” Hutchins said.

That becomes harder as companies grow.

“When Justin and I started, we probably had 70 employees,” Hutchins said. “Today with this acquisition we’re up in the 450 range. It gets harder and harder to continue to preach that culture.”  

This post was originally published on here. 

While Chicago-based federal Judge John Tharp, Jr. did order Midwest Real Estate Data (MRED) to restore its listing feeds to Zillow on Friday, amid the listing portal giant’s antitrust lawsuit against the Chicagoland MLS and Compass International Holdings, Zillow’s Chicagoland listings may still be at risk.

The order partially granted Zillow’s motion for a temporary restraining order against MRED, while also requiring Zillow to include the nine MRED listings it had previously removed from its portal as well as any listings that were in the MLS’s system as of May 21 in its listing display. Moving forward, the judge also ruled that Zillow may not ban listings within ZIP codes nationwide where MRED has had listings between April 2025 and April 2026. But, that order is exactly what it says: temporary. 

According to the ruling, the temporary restraining order is set to expire 14 days from May 22, meaning that after that date, either party could potentially choose to resume the behaviors banned in the order if they so choose. However, in a ruling on Tuesday, Judge Tharp granted the parties’ motion for expedited discovery regarding Zillow’s preliminary injunction motion and set a schedule for the discovery as well as the hearing regarding Zillow’s motion.

Preliminary injunction

Similar to Zillow’s temporary restraining order, the preliminary injunction motion asks the court to prevent MRED from suspending its listing feed. The motion was filed the same day MRED notified Zillow that the MLS would suspend its listing feeds unless it cured what the MLS called a “material breach of its license agreements.”

According to the minute entry on the court docket, the parties have until Friday to file their document and interrogation requests. However, the entry notes that only two information custodians per party can be served interrogation requests. The following Friday, the parties must file their document production and responses to written discovery, with depositions of the custodians needing to be completed by June 12, while expert depositions need to be completed by June 22.

From there, the court has set aside July 1 and 2 for the hearing on the motion, with post-hearing briefs on the hearing due by July 9 and replies due on July 13. 

In addition, Judge Tharp also noted that Zillow must respond to MRED’s motion to compel arbitration by June 25, with MRED’s reply due on June 29. MRED filed its motion to compel arbitration last week, claiming that in the licensing agreement Zillow signed for access to the data feeds, it agreed to arbitration in regard to any disputes. 

For a preliminary injunction to be awarded, parties typically must show that they are reasonably likely to win the underlying lawsuit, will suffer harm that cannot be adequately fixed later with money damages alone if the injunction is not granted and that granting the injunction would be in the best interest of the public. 

Zillow responds

In an emailed statement, a Zillow spokesperson noted that “the court already ordered MRED to restore our listing feed.”

“We look forward to continuing to show how MRED and Compass colluded to harm not just Zillow but every home buyer and seller who uses Zillow to access the housing market in Chicagoland,” the spokesperson added.

Compass did not wish to comment and MRED did not return HousingWire’s request for comment.

This post was originally published on here. 

Realtracs appears to be the latest MLS with plans to potentially pull Zillow’s listing feed if the listing portal giant fails to comply with the Tennessee-based MLS’s updated IDX display rules. 

On Wednesday morning, Realtracs sent an email, obtained by HousingWire and confirmed by the MLS, to brokers informing them that it updated its IDX display rules on April 29, adding a requirement that “if a seller wants their listing publicly marketed, it must appear in search results that match a buyer’s criteria.” 

This means all listings entered into Realtracs that match a consumer’s search criteria must be returned in a vendor’s or portal’s consumer search results unless the seller has specifically elected to not include their property listing or address in public displays. 

According to the email, all platforms that receive Realtracs’ data feed were notified of the rule change, which went into effect on May 13, with compliance with the rule required by May 31. The email then goes on to state that as of Wednesday, Zillow was the only platform to not be in compliance with the agreement terms. 

“We do not expect that to change, given Zillow’s own rule [listing access standards] that prevents sellers from choosing how their properties are marketed and has resulted in dozens of banned Realtracs listings,” the email states. 

According to the MLS, if Zillow does not comply with the terms of the agreement, Realtracs will suspend Zillow’s access to the MLS’s data feed on June 1. 

“We understand this may create disruption for some brokers, agents, and sellers,” the email states. “If a seller specifically wants their property displayed on Zillow, brokers can still make that happen. The Broker Only Export, via [MLS] GRID, allows brokers to send listings directly to Zillow outside of the Realtracs data feed.” 

Additionally, Realtracs notes that listing distribution via Homes.com, Redfin, Realtor.com and Realtracs, as well as other “compliant sites” will remain unchanged. 

Taking a stand

The MLS said it is taking this position because it believes that “no entity” outside of the relationship between a seller and their listing broker should be able to “determine the seller’s go-to market strategy.”

“Realtracs remains committed to protecting broker and seller choice and supporting market transparency consistent with the IDX display rules,” the email concludes. “We will share additional information about the status of Zillow’s non-compliance on June 1. In the meantime, we encourage you to contact Zillow and demand it remove the display ban.” 

In an emailed statement, a Realtracs spokesperson told HousingWire that the MLS “hopes that Zillow will comply with our display rules by the May 31st deadline.” 

Zillow responds

In response to this news, a Zillow spokesperson told HousingWire that Realtracs’ decision to cut off Zillow’s listing feed is “the same playbook already documented in federal court: a coordinated campaign, initiated by Compass CEO Robert Reffkin, to pressure MLSs across the country into pulling sellers’ listings off Zillow.”

“Nashville’s MLS has threatened to cut Nashville-area sellers off from Zillow, the most-visited real estate platform in the country, unless Zillow abandons the standards it has put in place to ensure buyers can trust what they see on our platform,” the spokesperson wrote. “A judge on Friday just ordered the MLS in Chicago to restore our listing feed. Nashville sellers and buyers deserve access to a full, transparent market. Zillow’s listing access standards exist to protect that. We will not abandon them.”

If Realtracs ultimately suspends Zillow’s listing feed next Monday it would be the second MLS to do so in recent weeks. Last week Midwest Real Estate Data (MRED) suspended Zillow’s listing feed over a “material breach of its license agreements.” On Friday, however, a Chicago federal court partially granted Zillow’s temporary restraining order, forcing MRED to restore the listing feed by the end of the day. This dispute was part of a larger legal battle between Zillow, MRED and Compass International Holdings, in which Zillow has accused MRED and Compass of colluding. 

Earlier this spring, both MRED and Realtracs announced plans to expand nationwide, with both securing national listing feed agreements with Compass, as well as with United Real Estate for Realtracs. 

This post was originally published on here. 

For the past several years, mortgage rates have largely dictated the direction of the housing market.

When mortgage rates rose sharply, demand slowed. When rates eased, buyers returned. Inventory, pricing power and transaction activity often moved in predictable patterns tied closely to affordability pressure.

But the latest HousingWire data suggests something more nuanced may now be happening beneath the surface.

Mortgage rates briefly reached 6.75% last week, approaching levels that historically created meaningful housing slowdowns. Yet pending home sales remain above last year’s pace, inventory growth is hovering near flat year over year and price-cut activity continues running slightly below 2025 levels.

“Even with mortgage rates up as much as 0.76% from the year’s lows at one point, housing demand, for the most part, has held up well in 2026,” HousingWire Lead Analyst Logan Mohtashami wrote in this week’s Housing Market Tracker.

Rates are still shaping housing activity, but markets appear to be responding differently than they did earlier in the cycle, with sellers adjusting pricing expectations faster and transactions continuing at healthier levels than many expected under higher borrowing costs.

The market is adapting faster than it did in 2022 and 2023

The clearest signal may not be demand itself, but how market participants are responding to pressure.

During earlier phases of the rate shock cycle, higher mortgage rates often created a freeze effect. Sellers pulled listings, buyers stepped back and transactions slowed sharply as both sides struggled to recalibrate expectations.

Today’s market appears to be adjusting more quickly.

National inventory growth remains restrained at just 0.9% year over year, while pending sales are still running nearly 10% above last year’s levels.

At the same time, pricing behavior is shifting.

National price-cut activity came in at 36.77% last week, slightly improved from roughly 37% during the same period last year.

That suggests sellers are increasingly adjusting to affordability realities earlier in the transaction cycle rather than waiting for the market to force deeper resets later.

The result is a housing market that is continuing to transact despite elevated borrowing costs.

Seller behavior is becoming a more important signal

One of the clearest shifts in 2026 is that similar mortgage-rate environments are no longer producing uniform market outcomes.

Some markets are maintaining healthy transaction flow through faster negotiation and pricing adjustment. Others are seeing weaker demand conversion despite relatively constrained inventory.

That divergence suggests behavior is increasingly shaping market outcomes alongside rates themselves.

In markets like Phoenix, Orlando and Cape Coral, buyer activity remains relatively healthy even as price cuts stay elevated. Buyers are still engaging, but they are negotiating more aggressively and pushing sellers toward faster price discovery.

Meanwhile, some tighter-inventory markets are not seeing the same transaction strength.

New York, Sacramento and parts of coastal California continue showing more constrained inventory conditions, but weaker demand conversion and larger gaps between list prices and pending transaction prices suggest affordability pressure is still limiting activity beneath the surface.

The distinction is increasingly important for housing professionals trying to understand what today’s market signals actually mean.

Low inventory alone no longer guarantees pricing power.

And elevated price cuts do not automatically signal market weakness.

Instead, the latest data increasingly suggests housing markets are being shaped by how quickly participants adapt to current affordability conditions.

One signal worth watching: pricing acceptance

One of the behavioral signals HousingWire is watching more closely is the gap between active list prices and pending transaction prices.

That gap can help reveal something inventory levels alone often miss: whether sellers are successfully meeting the market or still pricing ahead of what buyers are willing or able to absorb.

In several major metros, pending prices remain meaningfully below active list prices, suggesting buyers are still active but negotiating more aggressively under higher-rate conditions.

That matters because pricing acceptance can help separate markets where sellers are adapting from markets where pricing resistance may still be slowing transaction flow.

In today’s market, the question is not only how much inventory is available.

It is whether that inventory is priced in a way that allows buyers and sellers to reach agreement.

Deal flow is still holding together

Another sign the market is adapting rather than freezing may be what is happening after homes go under contract.

HousingWire data suggests transaction flow remains relatively healthy despite elevated mortgage rates, with absorbed listings continuing to track above pending activity from roughly six to eight weeks earlier.

That matters because earlier phases of the rate shock cycle often saw transactions stall between contract and close as buyers and sellers struggled to adjust to rapidly changing affordability conditions.

Instead, today’s market appears to be processing transactions more consistently, even as affordability pressure remains elevated.

At the same time, pricing adjustments continue happening gradually rather than abruptly.

National price-cut activity has risen modestly over the past four weeks, but weekly movement has remained relatively stable rather than showing signs of accelerated stress.

Taken together, the data suggests sellers are increasingly adjusting expectations earlier in the process instead of resisting market conditions outright.

That behavioral shift may be helping preserve transaction activity even as mortgage rates remain near levels that historically created sharper slowdowns.

Why this cycle looks different

Several structural dynamics may be helping explain why housing is functioning differently under higher rates than it did earlier in the cycle.

First, many existing homeowners remain reluctant to sell and give up historically low mortgage rates, continuing to constrain seller participation nationally. Those choosing to list today are often more motivated to complete transactions rather than hold out indefinitely for peak-era pricing.

Second, buyers operating in a mid-6% mortgage-rate environment appear increasingly decisive when pricing aligns with affordability expectations. The result is less speculative activity and more transaction focus.

Third, several years of operating in a higher-rate environment may be helping buyers and sellers adjust expectations more quickly than they did during the initial 2022 rate shock period.

Mohtashami noted another important dynamic supporting market stability this year: mortgage spreads remain materially improved from prior stress periods.

“If we had the worst mortgage spread levels of 2023, mortgage rates would be 7.86% today, not 6.65%,” he wrote.

That spread improvement is helping cushion some of the pressure from elevated Treasury yields and may be contributing to the market’s ability to continue functioning in the mid-6% mortgage-rate range.

None of that eliminates affordability pressure.

But it may be changing how that pressure moves through the housing market.

The market is not ignoring rates. It is processing them differently.

What housing professionals should watch next

The next phase of the housing market may depend less on whether mortgage rates move modestly higher or lower and more on how market participants continue responding to those conditions.

If sellers continue adapting pricing expectations early, transaction activity may remain more stable than historical rate relationships alone would imply.

If pricing resistance returns, inventory could begin building more rapidly later this summer.

Several signals remain important to watch:

• Pending sales relative to new listings
• Price-cut activity
• Withdrawal and relist trends
• Days on market
• List-to-pending pricing gaps
• Purchase application trends as rates remain elevated

The broader takeaway is that the housing market may be becoming more behavior-driven than rate-driven.

Mortgage rates are still setting the affordability backdrop. But increasingly, transaction outcomes appear tied to how quickly buyers and sellers adapt within that environment.

That behavioral shift may now be one of the most important forces shaping housing in 2026.

To track these trends and current pricing, demand and market signals at the national, metro and ZIP-code level, explore HousingWire Intelligence. For deeper context on rates, demand signals and the macro backdrop shaping housing activity, read HousingWire’s Housing Market Tracker weekly analysis.

HousingWire used HousingWire Data to source this story. This article is based on single-family residence data through May 22, 2026. For enterprise clients looking to license the same market data at a larger scale, visit HousingWire Data.

This post was originally published on here. 

Nationwide Mutual Insurance Co. is suing mortgage lender Nationwide Mortgage Bankers (NMB) for allegedly profiting on the “goodwill and sterling reputation” associated with its name and trademarks.

The lawsuit, filed May 20 in an Ohio federal court, brings accusations of federal trademark infringement, unfair competition, dilution, cybersquatting and violations of Ohio state law. Nationwide Insurance claims the actions have caused “unquantifiable damage and irreparable harm.” National Mortgage News first reported on the topic.

Nationwide said it began providing insurance products and services, as well as other financial services, under the NATIONWIDE mark in 1955. It has offered residential mortgage services under the mark since 1998, although it left retail banking in 2018. Since 2012, when its annual sales exceeded $30 billion and assets exceeded $160 billion, Nationwide claims it has spent many millions of dollars on advertising, marketing and promotion of its brand.

Nationwide Mortgage Bankers said that as of Tuesday, it had not yet been served with the legal paperwork related to the matter and has not had an opportunity to fully review the claims asserted.

“For more than 15 years, helping families across America achieve the dream of homeownership has always and continues to be the mission of our 500 employees across the country,” Tom Butler, a spokesperson for the company, said in a statement given to HousingWire.

“We were surprised by the filing of this lawsuit, particularly given that we have worked with Nationwide Mutual for several years now in an effort to avoid any potential confusion, and our company will continue to do so, responsibly and professionally.”

Butler added that “there will be no disruption to our operations or the services we provide.”

Alleged history of conflict

The insurance company noted in the complaint that in 2012, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office found that the lender’s mark would create a likelihood of confusion with the NATIONWIDE marks.

A final office action rejecting the lender’s intent-to-use “NATIONWIDE MORTGAGE BANKERS” trademark application was upheld and the application was abandoned in January 2013, according to the suit.

The lawsuit details several specific instances where customers were confused about which company they were interacting with.

In one example cited in the complaint, a consumer wrote to Nationwide Insurance to report a “fake imposter.” The consumer claimed an NMB representative answered the phone with caller ID that read “NATIONWIDE” and asked for the consumer’s Social Security number.

“When I refused he said I would never get approved and told me good luck finding another lender. Very rude and unprofessional!” the consumer wrote, according to the complaint. “After some research I realized this was all fabricated and they are using the name NATIONWIDE MORTGAGE BANKERS to pose as the actual NATIONWIDE.”

Another person trying to reach Nationwide about an insurance policy ended up calling the lender. “The reps answer the phone as this is Nationwide, we’re a big company I’m sure you’ve probably heard of us,” the person reported. “As soon as I asked if they were the real Nationwide he hung up on me.”

A third example in the suit described an existing Nationwide Insurance policyholder who received calls from NMB representatives making deceptive claims. According to the complaint, the representatives told the consumer things like: “As an existing Nationwide policy holder you must complete a refinance with Nationwide in order to maintain your current rate and coverage.”

Nationwide Insurance mentioned it attempted to solve the dispute by reaching out to the lender, which said it would change its mark to NMBNow.

“Defendant’s representation led Nationwide to believe that Defendant would change its branding to the NMBNow mark, but Defendant has failed to do so,” the lawsuit states. “The parties worked on a settlement agreement but ultimately did not reach resolution.”

According to the insurance company, the lender’s “failure to completely rebrand to the NMBNow mark has left Nationwide with no choice but to file suit to protect its valuable intellectual property by seeking an injunction to prevent further infringement of its trademark and related rights in the NATIONWIDE Marks.”

Mortgage data platform RETR shows Nationwide Mortgage Bankers originated $1,7 billion over the past 12 months, most of it tied to conventional and purchase loans. Its loan officer count was 247 as of May 25, according to RETR.

This post was originally published on here.