Broker intel: Navigating rate uncertainty and the new Fed era

Hello again and welcome to the latest edition of MPA TV. I'm Matt Sexton, mortgage journalist here in Mortgage Professional America. Today, we continue our broker intel series featuring discussions with the top mortgage pros across the US on the most important mortgage topics of the day. I'm honored to be joined once again by our three guests on today's episode. They are Damon Germanides, co-founder of Insignia Mortgage, Tom Ahles, president of Edge Home Finance, and Andrew Russell, founder of RCG Mortgage. Thank you all for joining us today on MPA TV. 

We'll get started with Tom today. Tom, since the last time we spoke, the mortgage market has been a bit turbulent with rates first dropping into the fives and moving back into the sixes as rates begin to slide a little bit again. What do you make of the current state of the market, and where do you see opportunities for success? 

My opinion is that the opportunities are the same ones that have been there for the last 25 years. People that have growing families, are going through divorces, outgrowing, um, getting to the point to where they've graduated college and are ready to start, uh, you know, paying their own mortgage instead of someone else's. 

You know, the biggest thing that I think as originators that we can do is to really—I see this a lot where people are losing deals due to thinking that they know what's best for the consumer. And to me, our job as mortgage advisors is to be able to present options to a consumer. If they're calling you, they're going to refinance, right? They're going to, if they're thinking about buying and you are the one playing consumer, our job is to put options in front of them to allow them to make the educated decisions while guiding them through that process. 

So, you know, to me, yes, rates did bump up a little bit, but it didn't really make that—I mean, to me, I've just become immune to “Yeah, rates go up, rates go down.” That doesn't change. What has to stay consistent for those that are wanting to adopt this business as a career and stay focused is: this is a contact sport, right? Mortgages are a byproduct of what we originate, which in my opinion is relationships. 

If you are out originating relationships, then you are going to have more mortgages that you're going to be able to do with building those and making sure that, one, you're a trusted resource to not only put those options together, um, but to help educate them, because we're in a state in our industry right now where everyone is using AI. And as much as I love AI, AI is wrong a lot of the time, especially when it comes to someone that's looking at or using it as a review tool for financial advice, right? 

They need to speak with you to understand: “Hey, you know, does this make sense that right now I could lose my PMI?” Right? AI doesn't know whether or not you have an appraisal waiver and can save them a couple thousand dollars this year. Our job is to make sure that, one, we're being the best advisors that we can and presenting the information for consumers that are looking instead of being so focused on “What is the rate?” Right? 

If I look and ask our viewers today even, you know, “Do you know what your car rate is?” Nobody cares, right? They care about what their payment is, and our job is to make sure that we're presenting options and providing guidance on what we know is factual, of what we can do and accomplish. 

Andrew, your thoughts? 

Yeah, for me, you know, I just felt from a a market perspective, it's twofold. One, um, non-QM. You know, I love non-QM. I love the feeling of doing a great job for a client and they really appreciate you. You know, nothing against two teachers putting 30% down rate shopping, but I have found that the non-QM space has been really just looking for a solution for them purchasing or refi-ing, especially from an investment perspective. 

So, to me, the opportunity is doubling down, 10x-ing, if you want to call it that—it's a bougie term—on non-QM. But also I think it's a perfect time to plant seeds. And I say plant seeds because in mortgage, you know, some of my biggest mentors told me there's really nothing you can do today to move the needle today. But if you plant seeds every day, the wins kind of stack over time. 

So to me, it's just the big non-QM gap is more education. So I feel I'm a big believer of either LOs, team leads, branches, companies really increasing their social media presence and doing more content. The good news is there's really no value anymore with the short form, especially with quality, you know, meaning you don't have to pay all this money and get all this crazy editing. Uh, it's just more getting out there. 

You know, phones right now, I mean, right? The iPhones. If you do a selfie video, it's better quality video than was available two years ago paying all this money. So I just think the opportunity is planting the seeds today, just working a little bit each day to build your presence on social media, become like the industry expert from an educational perspective. 

So, I always see it as like: what's the short term? It's non-QM business, I feel, and then the long term is planting seeds to really be that, you know, veteran online that has all of the educational content. 

Damon, your thoughts? 

Just to work off of what these two gentlemen have said—and obviously I agree with everything they've stated—is just, yeah, our company-wise at Insignia, we're focusing now on a model around tweaking our model around high-touch and high-tech. So we're trying to bring in what we consider to be a platform where sophisticated mortgage brokering is differentiated versus just a lead form where you take the content from the borrower and you give a rate offer letter or loan estimate. 

We're driving more inspired conversations with the borrower, whether it's a refi or purchase, try to find some connectivity, bring in the high-tech into the funnel, and then deliver, like these gentlemen said, options. And I think the big thing here is listening to the client—like, for instance, we had, I had a deal yesterday, just talking about an example, where a very, you know, very well-to-do borrower wanting to renovate their home, not sure if they should just take a home equity line, a new mortgage, or a construction loan. 

We went through all the scenarios, the plus and minuses. It took about 30 minutes. Some things he didn't even think of. But I'm pretty sure that guy trusts us that we know what we're doing and we're going to win that deal. So that 30 minutes up front probably saved us hours of chasing him, whether or not he wants to, or that borrower wants to, move forward with us. 

But it doesn't happen, as these gentlemen also alluded to, without knowing the products. And at the end of the day, you could have the greatest AI tools and the greatest bots and whatever else, but if you can't articulate your products to your customers on the first phone call, I promise you that leads to more dropoff than anybody. You can just see the loans fall off after that, when you don't know what you're talking about as a loan broker, especially in the market we play in because obviously we're dealing with a little bit more larger loans, a little bit more sophisticated borrowers. So they want to know who they're talking to knows what they're talking about. 

Yeah, it totally makes sense. Let's take a look at something going on, kind of current events. As we record this, it's the day of the Fed meeting, and this is in all likelihood the last meeting for Jerome Powell as Fed chair. By the time this airs, there's a good chance that Kevin Warsh will have been confirmed as the new Fed chair. We'll start with Andrew on this one. How do you think his appointment will change the path for the Fed as we move forward through the rest of this year, if at all? 

Yeah, I think, um, just everyone I've spoken to and just some of the diligence I've done, which is small albeit, but I don't think it necessarily means lower rates per se. I think it changes the tone. You know, I think there's a lot more involved than just one person coming in, right? Inflation and various, you know, things. So it's not necessarily—I just will say it's not necessarily a magic wand: he comes in, rates go down. 

I mean, it's obviously potentially good from a lower rate perspective, but especially as we've seen the last month, you know, I've coached clients like, “Listen, unfortunately, it's a horrible thing to say: if there's world turmoil, what happens? Rates go down, right?” Well, they didn't. They went up. 

So, I think, um, you know, it's like with my kids, it's opposite day, right? So you never know. But of course, everyone's looking forward to potentially this happening and lower rates. 

Damon, your thoughts? 

We'll see, right? I mean, I'm trying to remain optimistic, but there are clues that, uh, you know, higher oil for longer, some of the other data we're seeing, you know, the pain trade could be a rate bump at some point. Hopefully not, but you can't discount that as a zero probability. 

I think regardless though, the shock to the system when the Fed did the jumbo hikes—most of our clients are not balking anymore when we tell them your rate is this or that, as opposed to a couple years ago where it was literally like, “Oh, forget it. I'm not moving,” or “I don't know what I'll do, but I'm not doing that.” So we're kind of in a more normalized rate environment. So I don't really see, absent a major move up, that it's going to affect things that much. I think people have adjusted. 

But we'll see. I mean, Warsh is definitely a proponent of lower rates, might push the lower end of the curve down even though the 10-year is not cooperating. So maybe adjustable-rate mortgages get more competitive and are a bigger selling point versus 30-year fixed-rate money. 

It's just too early to tell. 

Tom, your thoughts? 

I think they covered it perfectly. What I would say is, you know, with Warsh, obviously, you know, he isn't opposed to some of the QT as far as, you know, continuing to fuel the fact of what they want for lower rates. But it really just relies on inflation more than anything, right? 

When we look at what happened when we went too low, I don't think any of us, even though we all wrote a ton of mortgages during the COVID years, but at the same time, for most successful business owners and brokers that are in this industry, it wasn't necessarily good, because now what it created is people that are stuck in an unrealistic expectation of, you know, being able to get free money. 

And as Damon said, it's like now borrowers are back to what is customary, right? And if we look at what is customary, in my opinion, the banks are always going to have roughly a 3% margin. You have a, uh, whether it's a 10-year Treasury, I think a rate with where we're sitting right now is good because we're watching what it's doing for inflation. 

So, you know, for me, I stand on the lines of: would I love to see 2% interest rates again? I actually wouldn't. I think it creates such an imbalance, and especially in running a business that's so service-related. I want to make sure that if all of a sudden rates went to 2%, a lot of our service would deteriorate because you have everybody and their mother calling again, trying to get a loan, compared to being focused on why is this happening, right? 

And I think from an inflationary standpoint, you know, um, I don't see much changing other than I know that he is very, um, he's not opposed to the QT aspect in order to keep things stable. And I think that's the biggest thing that all of us, including consumers, want to see. You know, if they're even out house shopping and you have changes of 1% rate, that might make them ineligible for what they're trying to buy. 

So to me, I think he's going to bring a little bit more volatility to the market, you know, reduced expectations for easing through the rest of the year. Um, but for me, it's like: I need to control what I can control. And to me, that is one thing that I can't—what they're going to do with rates. It's just to advise and make sure you protect your clients and as soon as it's sold, lock them. 

Absolutely. 

Let's stay with Tom for this next question. Redfin released a story last week about 50,000 home purchase contracts falling through in the month of March. Is there anything brokers can do to try to help avoid a deal falling through at the last minute, or do you think current market conditions kind of make this thing inevitable to some degree? 

Uh, no. You know, the one thing—it's tough when you're getting data from Redfin because it's not, “How do we know that they weren't working with a, you know, a one-option shop?” Right? The biggest advantage for us as brokers with all of our prospective businesses is if a consumer wants to buy a home and they have the wherewithal, we normally have the options, right? 

So, you know, Andrew touched on non-QM 100%. Right? There are still a lot of business owners that from an education standpoint don't even know that that exists, right? When they're looking at it, they're still thinking, “Well, I write off the majority of my income. I have depreciation that takes my income to zero.” We're still—why we're seeing non-QM grow is from really an education standpoint. And for the three of us, we're the leading force of what is going to be the education for the consumer to understand that. 

So, you know, out of those 50,000 buyers that withdrew, as long as they didn't lose their job, my guess is if they were working with an independent mortgage broker, we would have brought that home. 

It's a great point. Damon, your thoughts? 

The broker model allows a lot of optionality from time to time. So what we'll do sometimes, kind of what Tom was echoing there, is underwrite to our best option for the borrower. And if that's not likely to happen, but maybe it could by an exception, also underwrite, you know, maybe we write the traditional bank loan, but the ratios are just kind of probably not going to work but worth at least a pre-flight, and then underwrite, you know, to a non-QM option or some option where maybe we don't have to provide every little detail and that option will work for the borrower. 

So we're trying to keep the deals, we're trying to give the comfort to the realtor on the pre-approval that we got this covered. And then in terms of the execution during the actual loan process, you know, just again, some of this stuff is just grindy, right? Like reading the purchase contract: is there like a mold issue? Like, are we going to get this resolved prior? Like, what's going on with that? And coming back to the client, you know, either through the processor or the underwriter or the loan officer, and addressing any issues up front so that it doesn't become fireworks at the close and you get a notice to perform or a cancellation and then it's all chaotic. 

So, I think just, you know, having a good process in place and realizing that addressing things that people may not want to talk about always upfront sometimes is the best way to go to handle it, you know, because there's usually a solution if we know what's going on. I tell our real estate brokers, for example, like if there's a comment from the appraiser that the foundation looks—something wrong with the foundation, maybe like potential, okay. Well, let's not just not talk about that. Let's go get an engineer out there and get it resolved. And nine times out of ten, it's nothing. It's just a crack or something, it's nothing, you know, structural; it's just cosmetic. 

So those are the things that I think can really make you a problem solver. And if you want to build a purchase-oriented organic business and really get a great reputation in your markets, those are the ways you do it. 

Great point. Andrew, your thoughts? 

I don't have to tell you guys: sometimes these headlines are media-driven, right? So, like, you know, “click on this,” in this world of dopamine and short form. So, the article said—I had notes around this—it was like 13–14% of homes that went into contract. Clyde knows an example: you work with a lender. Ideally, you want submission-to-pull-through from, you know, submitting a client's loan to actually getting it approved, 85–90% or more, or you might be at risk of getting kicked off the lender because you're submitting loans and not doing the right job. 

I can tell you in New York, pull-through from a purchase contract to closing sometimes is 65–70%. So I think nationally, the statistic isn't really all that alarming. But to the points of the gentlemen, what they said is—to me, I always said “garbage in, garbage out,” meaning if the loan officer or the originating team didn't do a good job, of course there's going to be potential fallout. 

And there's all the reasons why they don't do a good enough job: maybe they're so excited to get a transaction because business might be down, or to the point like there might be a new mortgage product they just aren't that well-versed in it. 

So I would just say it's the fiduciary responsibility of the loan officer who does very well financially to potentially do a great job up front so on the back end there's no issues. But I saw these stats and I just thought it was more like “click me, click me,” and it's not necessarily the end of the world. 

It tends to be the headlines we get rolling in are the ones that are going to draw the clicks, and if you don't dig into it, you don't actually find out what's really going on there. 

Kind of the tie-in, and I'll start with Damon because I feel like his answer kind of covered some of this ground, but, you know, another thing we hear brokers talk about is working through challenging files. And this could be something on the purchase contract side or it could be just something working with underwriting. I want to ask all of you, but we'll start with Damon. What's the best advice you could give brokers when they're really dealing with that difficult file and they want to get it through to closing? What's some advice to give them to try to get that thing across the finish line? 

I think first and foremost, don't panic and start banging off a bunch of emails before you really identify the issue and getting everybody involved. 

Um, obviously these are kind of on a per—I mean, I'll focus this question more on purchases, because on refi you have time to work through things and you have a little bit of a heads up and it's not as time-sensitive. But on purchases, you know, you're nearing a close and something pops up out of the blue like in—you know, the natural inclination: get everybody, call the whole underwriting department, call, get everybody, you know, riled up to get this done. “It's do or die.” 

I think the thing to do is to not do that. Understand the problem, get some context from the underwriting department or the lender or whatever, you know, really understand what the issue is, and then come up with a plan and then try to solve for that issue, and then also get in front of it, right? Don't think that this is going to go away, which I've seen so many times, and not address it right away, and then at the end it becomes like a huge blame game, even if it wasn't an issue of the actual lender; it was something out of our control. At the end of the day, the lender gets the heat on everything. It's us who have to go track down the insurance. It's us who's got to go get the operating agreement, the addendum to the operating agreement or the amended operating agreement. It's us who's got to grab that last K-1 or tax return or whatever the heck's missing, even if we've asked for it a million times. And even if the escrow's got the vesting incorrect, it still comes on us that we didn't know. 

So you gotta—you’re really the quarterback of the deal in a lot of ways because you're controlling the cash. So that's kind of the way I approach it, is just be methodical and get in front of it once you have a strong understanding of what the problem is. That way you're not getting, you know, that way you can articulate that issue to the parties and come up with the solution. 

Andrew, your thoughts? 

Yeah, I've always seen this as more of a communication thing. So I feel like it's communication on the front end specifically. There are scenarios and situations where, you know, we always say, “Matt, hey, you know, Matt, you're going to buy this house and we're going to take this ride together on JetBlue and it's going to be amazing and we're going to land, it's going to be awesome.” Sometimes it has to be communicated out like, “We're going to land, but man, it's going to be bumpy. People might be screaming. No one's going to die.” 

But, um, you know, sometimes [clears throat] that has to be communicated because in the wholesale space there are some lenders who have really cool products, and I'm not going to tell you their service levels and the execution on the conveyor belt is as good as like UWM, for instance, and it is bumpy. And things happen, and communication doesn't make sense, and all of a sudden you think you're ready to close, and there's a QC, a second sign, a this, a high five, the borrower needs a pint of blood, “What's your favorite color?” 

So I think the communication on the front end is important because sometimes loan officers, they kind of communicate out, “Oh, it's going to be a breeze,” and it's not. And that's okay. I just think they have to be honest. But even then, more so on the back end, I feel like loan officers, we have like this OCD thing going on where we just can't come to terms if a loan is not going to work out. And I think sometimes there's a lot of loan officers that I've seen—it just takes them a really long time to communicate that, like, “Listen, it's just not going to work. These are the reasons.” 

They spend days and weeks and, even worse, maybe they don't even say anything and they just kind of like disappear. So sometimes there are scenarios where the loan is not necessarily going to close. But I think it is again our fiduciary responsibility to be very proactive with the communication. Because if I was a client and some guy was just like leading me along, and maybe they made a mistake, maybe something happened with the property, my credit—I just think proactive communication is always the best. 

I'd like to add on to that, Andrew. I think it's very, very important if you feel the loan has got a probability of happening but a probability of having bumps along the way, or high probability of happening but there are going to be some things that are not going to go as smooth, or we're going to need to get multiple signatures on this exception, upfront communication I think is so important so that everybody's aware that, “Hey, we're going to land this plane, like you said, but there's going to be some bumpy air on the way down.” So it's a great point. 

Tom, your thoughts? 

It's hard to add more to that because communication solves all problems, right? And I think where a lot of loan officers fail at this is sometimes you have to have the confidence to even get the deal right out of the gate. The borrower doesn't want to hear, “I don't know if this is going to work.” So you have to try to—like, I've always looked at this, I don't know if it's Michael Jordan or Wayne Gretzky, you know, “We miss 100% of the shots we don't take.” Okay? 

So, having that tough conversation, you know, my job—and I joke with clients and realtors all the time—“Come to my office, the vault is not here, right? I'm not standing in front of the money.” My job is to help structure everything in a way to where, you know, on a lot of these, when we talk about challenging deals, if you're saying it's a challenging deal, then you know what is challenging. Is it the income? Is it the credit? Is it the reserves? Is it gift? 

You know, address it right away. Get into where then I need to make sure I'm putting a cover page—like, our job as originators: what does that submission look like? I think it was Andrew that said not everybody has a good conveyor belt to where they do a great job on the execution piece of it. It's our job to make sure then: “Hey, here's my concern. I think this will work. This is what I need your blessing on,” and know that we are addressing it right away. 

The part where you see people that do a horrible job at this is they throw it against the wall, and then they wait to let their processor try to clear it, and then the processor is stuck on it, and you're literally throwing against the wall. And to me, that's a losing strategy. 

Communicating upfront with the agent—uh, and this is where it becomes tough, because if I'm calling a listing agent and saying, “Yeah, yeah, this buyer, I don't know if they're going to work or not,” that's not selling confidence, right? And our job is to make sure that, “Hey, you know, I want to make sure that I'm talking to the buyer's agent. Leave us an inspection contingency window long enough that I can address this one issue that's really up for underwriter determination.” 

And what you don't want to do to get yourself in legal trouble is continue kicking that can down the road to where you're past, if you're in a state with due diligence, or it makes their earnest money nonrefundable. Like, this is where your communication plays a role—to where there are people that have built their business off challenging deals, right? 

I think off the top of my head, Ashley Bedford—she doesn't even work for my company, but I've known her because her whole thing was manual underwrites and taking turndown files. And what she was great at is managing not only the communication with the client and agents, but with the underwriter: “Here's what I see. Here's why I feel this is my interpretation of that guideline to make it work.” And this is why those that succeed in this industry are like good attorneys. You know how to argue a case to the point of where I'm looking at guidelines—you know, they're not making their own determinations. They kind of are, but you also have the right to put yours in there. And if you just throw it in and wait for a determination, you have to structure your case from the beginning to make sure—and I forget who said it on here—is “quality in, quality out,” right? 

Take the time up front because, if not, I will tell you there is nothing worse than taking on a deal that, one, you spent time and money on, and then the client that you didn't, that you didn't get the job done—they tell ten people how bad you are, right? You get ten times more press on a bad deal than you do on somebody that you did a great job for. 

However, I want to help make homeownership a possibility for those people that have challenging loans. That's why, you know, I would say for all of us that are on this call, making another commission check doesn't give us the same dopamine hit as it does from helping actually someone achieve homeownership that other people told no. That's what drives most successful people in this industry. Once you've gotten to the stage that you've made enough money to pay your bills, drive the car you want—now, I actually love helping those kind of people. I'm going to fight for you. 

But you need to do it in a way that, regardless of the outcome, your communication put the path of: “This is how it's going to go. I'm going to submit the loan. In three to four days, we're going to have a solid answer based on the thing that I'm concerned about.” If it gets three or four days and the underwriter came back and kept asking you for things and it's still not resolved, reset the timeline. You got to move the goalpost a little bit. 

But this is where a lot of people just bury their head, give it to their processor—“Communicate this for me.” That's weak. You're not going to build a sustainable referral business with that type of communication and process. 

Outstanding insights from everybody on that. Thank you so much. 

Last question. The mortgage landscape continues to change through mergers, acquisitions, and partnerships. We'll start with Andrew for this final question. We've seen servicing companies get scooped up, a lot of changes right now overall, the big picture. Do you think these moves are good for the industry overall, and how do you think these moves will impact mortgage brokers? 

That's a great question. I think for me, you know, living the micro life in New York, I think consolidation's inevitable. You know, margins—everyone talks about margin compressions—they got crushed a little bit. Volume went down a little bit. So I understand, you know, mergers; you know, people can't necessarily survive independently. But, um, like the two harvesting naturally, but I feel that the servicing play for me—it's just, I understand where they're coming from. You want the client obviously for life. I think everyone was positioning: if you get the client for life, that there's going to be better cash flow for these places. 

So, to me, I just hope that all the money that they're going to make in the future on cash flow will then go into this magical AI stuff so that we as a platform can get better by working with them as partners. So I'm wishful-thinking that I'm going to trust in our partners: by them, you know, getting all this servicing, hopefully over the next handful of years it's going to give them all this future free cash flow which will help us collectively as a group and a team. Because it's always going to come back to us, right? 

Absolutely. Tom, your thoughts? 

You know, it's kind of a fun question for me because, obviously, the news aligns for myself: we were just acquired, right? So I think we've had the first, um, you know, partnership with private equity entering the broker space, right? So to me, when I look at where's the money going, the money's coming into the broker channel. When we see mergers and companies that are just consolidating together, there isn't necessarily fresh money that sees the advantage in the broker space. 

So to me, what we've watched over the last 10 years consistently, outside of 2021 or 2020 where we had a little dip from wholesale compared to what would be classified as retail originations, the broker channel's growing. And the reason for that is really simple: you know, better execution, you've got better partners, you have scalability. 

Ten years ago, there was no such thing as mega brokers, right? It didn't exist, right? If you go back to where I know all of us on this call have been in the industry quite a long time, you know, even before—I will say for me before I found our trade association, AIM—I didn't even know any other mortgage brokers unless they worked for me. 

So now you've got multiple people running very successful, high-dollar businesses that have shown that it can be scaled. It's cheaper for the consumer, it's better for the originator, and you're looking at speeds of execution, right? I think ours last year, you know, we did $10 billion in volume, we averaged 13.3 days from submission to clear-to-close. Right? I know that is not abnormal. That is what the industry on the wholesale side is doing. 

So, you know, to me, it shows massive opportunity. The subset of that—buying servicing or the companies that are doing that—great. Here's what I say with any of those things that are going on: I have a little bit of tunnel vision because it doesn't matter to me, right? I don't have servicing. So if they do or they don't, I have relationships. I have relationships with my team. My team has relationships with their clients and referral partners. And what can we do to make sure that when someone thinks of a mortgage, they think of me, they think of these guys, they think of independent mortgage brokers? 

Which you're watching now, even from—you know, I'll plug in on the AI side of it—if you're watching this call and you haven't ChatGPT’d in your own neighborhood that you live in, “I want to get a mortgage, who should I get pre-approved through?” and you're not showing up, now is the time to start planting those seeds and realize: what does it take to be on the forefront of where everyone is starting to use us? And they're using it to even shop you, right? 

One of the things that we went over today was really opening that dialogue with your client: “So I know you probably—do you use Claude? Do you use Chat? What did you do to help educate yourself on this process, and what were some of the questions that it pulled up that you were uncertain about?” And watch what happens. You're taking away the defensive tool that they think they know it all. Right? Same as I do even from a legal perspective. I think all of a sudden now, like attorneys, like—and then I take what I did through ChatGPT or Claude, show it to my attorneys. Like, no, there's still a need for the real-world experience that we have as professionals in an industry where things are still left up for underwriter discretion as well as knowing how to put the client in the best situation. 

But, you know, to me, a lot of those—the Two Harbors deal, you know, I think it was somebody else just bought a sub-servicing company—that's great. For originators, you got to focus on yourself. What is it going to be for you to continue to see what is growing? Broker channel is growing. How do I make sure that out of the 120,000 purchase agreements that are in your own market that are being done, how do I get 1% of that? How do I get 2%? Right? Focus on what you can control. Dominate your day. 

Totally makes sense. Damon, wrap us up here. What do you have for us? 

As a boutique, you know, these mergers and acquisitions—I mean, it doesn't affect us. It's not surprising, obviously, when you, as an example, I was talking to friends of a friend of mine in the business who ran like a big refi shop for years. And, you know, at the peak they were doing three or four hundred million a month of FHA and VA loans, and that's down to 20 or 30 million. 

So what do you do when you build this big, big, big enterprise and then you get kneecapped and you got all these fixed costs and, you know, maybe you merge, you obviously got to thin it out. So those seem to be on the really good times and the really bad times—that seems to be where people try to come together by either a big payday or by necessity. 

But in terms of where we are and what we do as a small boutique, bigger companies—normally, not every time, but in a lot of situations—you know, that's good news for us, especially if it's happening in our local market, because we can typically outfox the big guys. We have more flexibility with how we can structure loans. We can add new lenders if need be. We can charge less to keep the deal going. The borrower is paying the fee. All kinds of different things that we'll be willing to do as a boutique versus a bigger platform that would not be willing to do that. 

So, kind of agnostic to it all at the moment, because we're not there yet. But speaking to what Tom said, yeah, just very fascinating what's going to happen with agentic AI and automations, and we are being careful how we're bringing it into our org, both from a financial standpoint and also from a compliance standpoint. But there's a path to, like, a very different business model here, I think, in the coming years where you can literally leverage your sales team and your ops teams in a way that was not possible without these new very interesting tools. And that could lead to more—I mean, potentially more consolidation or different types of brokering, potentially, who knows, it's all open. 

So, but anyway, that's where my head is on that. 

Going to be an interesting time for sure. Never a boring time in the mortgage industry, but it could be very interesting going forward. Outstanding perspective, as always, from three of the absolute best in the business. 

A huge thanks to my guests once again for joining us on this edition of MPA TV and a big thanks to you for watching. We really appreciate it. For all of my guests, I'm Matt Sexton saying so long. We'll see you next time.