Mortgage needs a new productivity metric: Human attention per loan

A mortgage can move through a POS, LOS, AUS, pricing engine, document platform and several workflow tools and still consume hours of human attention. That should bother us. The industry has spent years improving individual steps in the mortgage process. Yet the economics remain difficult. According to the Mortgage Bankers Association, total loan production expenses averaged $10,936 per loan in the second quarter of 2026. That was an improvement from the first quarter, but still well above the historical average of $7,945. We measure cost per loan, cycle time, pull-through, defects and loans per employee. All of those matter. But as AI begins to move deeper into mortgage operations, I think we are missing one important measure: How much human attention does it take to complete a loan? Not headcount. Not touches for the sake of counting touches. Actual human attention. Where the work really goes A processor may spend a few minutes finding the right document, another few reconciling two values, then time checking whether a condition was satisfied. An underwriter may reopen documents because the information presented to them is incomplete or not trusted. A QC reviewer may repeat checks...