Terry Schmidt believes she surprised the mortgage industry.
Schmidt, the director and CEO of Guild Mortgage Co., was referring to the June 2025 announcement that the company would be acquired by Bayview Asset Management. The transaction officially closed in November.
“Many found that this was very surprising because we’ve been independent for so long,” Schmidt said on stage Tuesday during a session at the Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA)’s IMB26 Conference in Florida.
Bayview already owned a stake in Guild and had closely monitored the lender’s performance since its 2020 initial public offering. Because of the potential synergies between the companies, the deal moved quickly — closing just 45 days after talks began, Schmidt said.
Prior to the acquisition, Bayview ranked as the nation’s second-largest mortgage servicer, with a $770 billion portfolio to generate potential leads for Guild’s loan officers. Guild, a pure distributed retail mortgage lender, originated about $5 billion in mortgages in the first quarter of 2025, providing Bayview with a strong origination engine to help retain servicing customers.
Schmidt said the transaction was driven more by growth opportunities than cost savings. Guild will continue to operate as a standalone lender and retain most of its workforce, although it is reviewing vendor relationships.
“They want to keep Guild separate and keep our management teams,” Schmidt said. “They [loan officers] will have access to a lot of capital, and we’re trying to be really creative — trying to get some new loan programs out for them so they’ve got more to offer their Realtor partners and their customers.”
To gauge whether the strategy is working, Schmidt pointed to Guild’s historical servicing performance.
“We have had servicing forever and we drive leads back to our loan officers,” she said. “In the last three times we’ve had these refi surges, our recapture rates have been 60%.”
Spanning lenders of all sizes
The Guild-Bayview transaction is one high-profile example of a broader industry trend toward consolidation.
Over the past two years, the number of nondepository mortgage originators has declined by roughly 100 companies, according to Marina Walsh, the MBA’s vice president of industry analysis. Despite the contraction, these lenders increased their share of total origination volume during the same period to 67.5% — up more than 5 percentage points.
This cycle of consolidation is notable due to the level of involvement from large lenders. Deal discussions now span institutions of all sizes.
“Prior to now, the small-to-midsize conversation was pretty consistent whenever there were various rate cycles or rate adjustments that were creating marginal compression or different sorts of pressure points that large enterprise owners benefited from,” said Rick Roque, vice president of new growth at NFM Lending.
Roque said pressure is now reaching the top of the market for several reasons. These include misallocated capital to underperforming teams, the absence of clear artificial intelligence strategies, leadership succession as founders consider retirement and the diminishing protective value of geographic footprint.
He also pointed to the rise of nondelegated correspondent lenders. Of the roughly 190 independent mortgage banks (IMBs) originating more than $1 billion per year, more than two dozen operate in this channel. And many are supported by United Wholesale Mortgage (UWM), allowing them to scale rapidly without hiring underwriters, closers or funders, Roque said.
John Bosley, president of mortgage lending at Planet Home Lending, said infrastructure built during the boom years is another driver of consolidation. From a Planet standpoint, he said, scale is crucial. “Everybody expanded their infrastructure to a level and the volumes weren’t there,” Bosley said.
Julia Brown, founder of Teloscope Advisor, added that prolonged market stress has weighed on even strong operators.
“There’s been a lot of great operators and brilliant visionaries who have been beat down for the last couple of years,” Brown said, citing pressure from warehouse lenders and other capital providers. “I am seeing a lot of people having to do this — especially on the smaller side — out of absolute necessity.”
Will RESPA be modernized?
As megadeals reshape the mortgage landscape, smaller and midsize lenders are increasingly focused on how to compete with larger, scaled platforms.
Bob Tyson, CEO of NFM Lending, said the company evaluated roughly two dozen merger-and-acquisition opportunities — most of them asset purchases — before completing the Homespire Mortgage acquisition in November. Cultural alignment was a decisive factor, he said.
Tyson added that NFM has remained disciplined on costs—an area where some lenders have struggled and a reason they ultimately chose to sell. Maintaining that discipline is also critical to competing with mega-lenders formed through large-scale consolidation. Success increasingly depends on intellectual capital and delivering a personalized borrower experience, he added.
At the same time, the rise of vertically integrated mortgage companies — spanning origination, servicing and real estate services — has renewed industry scrutiny around the Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act (RESPA).
“It’s important that consumers have transparency,” said Eric Wilson, vice president of business operations at Zillow Home Loans. But he noted that RESPA is now more than 50 years old and was designed for a very different marketplace.
“Tools were different, the way the consumer shop was different. It’s probably getting to the point where — and the MBA is doing great work on this — we look at evolving RESPA, and that’s going to be crucial.”
Zillow attracts roughly 2 million home shoppers each month to its platform. It’s expanding its tools that focus on affordability and offering greater access to information throughout the homebuying journey.
The company has also been active in M&A over the past five years, a trend that benefits Zillow Home Loans as part of a broader ecosystem. Still, Wilson said the firm’s primary focus remains on ensuring the lending arm is positioned effectively within the overall consumer experience.
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