Technology is not culture

A few weeks ago I read an interview with the leader of a big IMB. His argument was that our only hope is to cap the rising cost of closing a loan and eventually lower it, and that technology is how we’ll get there. He’s right. Everyone reading this agrees with him. That’s the problem. This has been the consensus for as long as I’ve been in the business, and the number has gone the wrong way the whole time. The sentence has “eventually” in it, and that’s how an entire industry gets to agree with something and change nothing. The last time I spoke at a HousingWire conference, in 2024, it cost me $12,500 to make a loan with only $10,500 of revenue. I was just like everybody else. The only difference was that I had decided not to wait for rates to get better. I stood up and said the job was simple: If the industry was generating $10,500 a loan in revenue, we had to get our costs below that. We did that. Today our costs are about $10,500 a loan, and the industry averages $12,500 in revenue. And we’re paying our originators $1,500 more per loan than we did when our costs were $12.500. And now I’m speaking at the HousingWire Mortgage Banking Conference on transparency. But to me, it is th...