In this episode of Optimal Insights, host Jim Glennon is joined by Alex Hebner and James Cahill to unpack the latest developments in the mortgage and macroeconomic landscape. The team discusses the reopening of the U.S. government, the delayed release of September jobs data, and the implications of widespread layoffs in October. They explore the evolving rhetoric around Fed rate cuts, inflation concerns, and the shifting stance of key Fed governors.

The episode also features the new Market Advantage segment with Mike Vough and Brennan O’Connell, highlighting October’s mortgage production trends, rate movements, and secondary market dynamics. Notable insights include the rise in non-QM lending, increased pull-through rates, and a shift in servicing retention strategies.

Key Topics Covered:

• Government shutdown resolution and data delays
• Fed rate cut uncertainty and inflation signals
• FHFA proposals: LLPAs, 50-year mortgages, assumable loans
• Market Advantage insights: lock volume, rate spreads, servicing multiples
• Emerging HELOC models resembling reverse mortgages

Tune in to gain valuable insights to help you stay ahead and maximize your results in the ever-evolving mortgage landscape.

Optimal Insights Team:

• Jim Glennon, Vice President of Hedging and Trading Client Services
• Alex Hebner, Hedge Account Manager, Optimal Blue
• James Cahill, MSF/MSR Account Manager

Market Advantage Section:

• Mike Vough, Head of Corporate Strategy, Optimal Blue
• Brennan O’Connell, Director of Data Solutions, Optimal Blue

Optimal Blue Production Team:

• Executive Producer: Sara Holtz
• Producer: Matt Gilhooly

Commentary included in the podcast shall not be construed as, nor is Optimal Blue providing, any legal, trading, hedging, or financial advice.

Mentioned in this episode:

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it does seem to be playing out differently where I think folks are realizing that we're not getting the extreme inflation that some would have mathematically calculated from tariffs, but we're certainly seeing some upward pressure and we're not seeing a drift towards 2%.

Welcome to Optimal Insights. I'm your host, Jim Glennon, Vice President of Hedging and Trading Client Services at Optimal Blue. Our clients and industry partners have long relied on Optimal Blue for trusted insights and commentary. And these podcasts are an evolution of our commitment to keeping the industry informed. Let's dive into today's episode.

Welcome everybody. November 17th. You're listening to this Monday afternoon. Welcome back from the weekend. much going on and we're here to help you focus on what matters for interest rates and your wallets. All right. So we'll talk about a lot of that today. We'll get with James and Alex. We'll talk about what's going on in the market, reopening of the government, what's going on with the Fed. What's the latest rhetoric about the Fed or the FHFA. then special treat. We're going to have the market advantage.

Okay, gentlemen, we are back. The government is Where should we start? We're going to get numbers this week. Finally, we're going to see a BLS report here Thursday. Odd day. It's going to be for September, right? We're not going to get an October 1 at all is the word.

Yeah, right now it looks like we're getting September jobs reports out this Thursday. We're in theory not gonna get October jobs and potentially not October CPI. We were just kicking this around before we hopped on, but it makes sense. They've really just missed the sampling window, right? It's hard to get that data back now where September, they might've had a lot more of it accumulated before the government actually went and shut down.

Mm-hmm.

So we should be seeing those September job numbers. think maybe October is a little bit more interesting and relevant now, but it's still, we'll take anything we can get just to see it and paint a little bit more of a picture here.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, I guess it'll be, I guess a little bit of a nothing burger coming in, but it'll give us some view into what kind of data was collected before the shutdown, right? We'll get an unemployment rate. We'll get probably a pretty skimpy job build number. We're looking for something close to zero this time, right? Maybe 22,000, I think is the consensus.

Yeah, that sounds just about right. It's not a very rosy picture. know, everyone looking at all the private numbers that were coming out during the shutdown just didn't like the labor market had improved. And obviously the shutdown didn't make that any better. Everyone was brought on board back again after the government just think the Q4 number is going look pretty ugly throughout this year.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah. Okay. Yeah.

I seen, we were talking about on the last cast that the Challenger report had come out. People were using that in place of the October jobs report and they had seen a job loss of 153,000.

which is, you know, it's a huge number, but looking over it, I was able to drudge up some of these numbers. So in October UPS laid off 48,000 employees, Amazon laid off 18,000, Nestle 16,000, Accenture 11,000, Microsoft 6,000 and Salesforce 4,000.

If you chalk that together, that's 103,000 layoffs. hopefully there were some hires going the other way at the same time, but it does lend some credence to the challenge report, despite the fact that that's kind of noted to be a little volatile and maybe over the top, know, 103 loss, it's kind of in the ballpark of what they thought for October. So October was probably an ugly month.

Yeah. And that's just from a small list of high profile companies, right? Laying folks off and, a lot of them, you know, they came out and I think we went to, might've talked about this last week. A lot of them are coming out and saying, you know, some of this is due to AI. I don't know, seems like a little bit of a cop out. There's also some articles written that say that AI is going to continually or increasingly be used as an excuse to, just to cut jobs, which, you know,

Companies as large as the ones you just mentioned cut jobs all the time. It's just part of kind of reevaluating your labor force and reconfiguring who you need where. When you have six figure amount of people on your payroll, there's always going to be these cuts, right? And there's still some excess and circumstances that accumulated around the pandemic that are still kind of leading to some of these needs to cut some folks when...

Folks were hiring rampant back then and now you're kind of, you know, you have maybe have some poor performers or you may have some areas of the business that you're looking to shrink. So some of this is natural. It's really hard to triangulate that back to, you know, an economy nine figure amount of labor force, you know, trying to figure out exactly what that means for the unemployment report that's hovering around 4.3%. Right.

speaking of the shutdown, I mean, it might not be over, right? This part of the shutdown is over, but there's going to be, we're kind of leading up to another vote, which was promised bill that ended the shutdown also calls for a vote on the affordable care act, which is going to happen after Christmas, I believe.

Correct. Yeah. So, so what ended this shutdown was essentially a continuing resolution, which funded the government for another three, four months until the end of January. so I guess even less than that two and a half months or so. continued resolution, what they ended up with was, ⁓ that they will vote on the affordable care act.

at same time as when they address the budget deficits come the end of January. So I think we could see ourselves coming back into the same boat again at the end of because I don't think that the lines have really changed. The Democrats capitulate a little bit in my opinion not securing holdouts that they were holding out for. I do think nothing material has changed about the.

the budget deficit and getting things funded. So I think we could easily find ourselves here again at end of January, which means, and I don't want to be Debbie Downer, there's a chance we only get data for November, December, some of January, and then we could find ourselves in a blackout period headed into the early spring again, which would be really just want to put that out there as a potential, you know, what we could see happen here in the new year.

Mm-hmm.

⁓ We'll be watching that news. Hopefully, I don't know, these discussions don't just begin in January. They're having them right now and hopefully we'll reach some kind of resolution before then. we switch gears a little bit, talk about the Fed. There's been a, in my view, a ton of movement in the expectations for the December Fed meeting, right? Even last week on our podcast, we said, you know, it seems like it's baked in at this point. There's almost certainly going to be a cut. And as soon as we say that,

You hear about more dissenters on the board. hear just a little bit more worry about inflation. And now it's kind of 50-50 shot, whether we get a cut in December.

Yeah, even even less than that as of this morning, the chance for a cut per the CME FedWatch was is down from 93 % a month ago. So a full 50 % drop in the chances. know, Schmid, the governor of the Kansas City Fed really led this charge, I think, coming out. He was the one who dissented on the October cut.

And then we've had others come out since then, Kashkari, Daley, some big names, throwing some water on the fire for remains out there, and I believe there was a fourth, Bostic as well, Bostic v. Atlanta. Governor, he also said that he doesn't see the argument for an additional cut and that he is still concerned about inflation.

Yeah, it's weird. And meanwhile, the rhetoric around like attacking the Fed and specifically attacking Jerome Powell seems to have waned or disappeared, which this would seem like the time to get on it, right? When the tide is turning the other way, almost like squirrel, the folks on Twitter are chasing something else at the moment instead of calling for the immediate dismissal of Chairman Powell. Anyway, just such an interesting

saga that's gone on with that. at this point, it seems like there's a few folks in the Fed who feel like we should be pausing and certainly following Myron's lead and calling for drastic cuts to the other side.

Yeah, I mean, even Myron was obviously he's had, ⁓ I don't want to it extremists, but he's been the most extreme in favor of cuts so far. Even he seemed to almost soften his tone a little bit in regards to it. said, I still think two is the best course of action, but I'd be happy with, you know, with a quarter point.

which, which for him so far, you know, he's only a pint, a pine on, on two or three, ⁓ federal reserve decisions now, but even that, you know, going down to a quarter point, he's saying he'd be happy with that. think is maybe him, ⁓ bargaining with reality a little bit and seeing that, you know, the fed governors are leaning the other way now. but I think as to, know, they're not really going after, pal as much anymore. You know, you know, they got two cuts this year. They're looking for more obviously, but, you know, you he's.

Yeah, two points they were looking

for.

Yeah,

he's out in the first half of next year. term ends at the end of February and he said he's not going to come back. He's going to retire. So as we were talking about back in June, you know, it's really only a matter of time before they get the cuts they're looking for. ⁓ So yeah, maybe this is just taking a backseat for the time being, as you've said, there's been the government shutdown and a number of other fronts of drama ⁓ in the country at the moment.

Mm-hmm.

There's also just over the weekend, right? There was a lowering of some of the tariffs on food imports, right? So there's kind of this implicit admission from within the administration that prices are a little bit higher than they want them to be. lowered them on, I have ⁓ beef, this made me laugh, it was coffee and avocados. So I know a lot of people in DC and San Francisco, gonna be excited to see that one going down. know, my breakfast is on that, but.

There's a, you know, during this time where we didn't get a lot of data, we don't know how the inflation is doing, how the jobs are doing, but there is from the people who do have more of an insight into it, they are putting the brakes on whether or not we're going get an interest rate cut and they are trying to lower the tariffs to bring a little bit of a cooling to what's been going on with food prices. So there is kind of a, if you're looking for it, a statement that's out there quietly.

Yeah. And quite a, I don't know, quiet capitulation from back at you mentioned June, back in June, were and others pundits out there were calling that by now the Fed would basically be owned by the white house, right? Like the tide was so hard in that direction, but it does seem to be playing out differently where I think folks are realizing that we're not getting the extreme inflation that some would have mathematically calculated from tariffs, but we're certainly seeing some upward pressure and we're not seeing, we're not seeing a drift towards 2%.

couple odds and ends here just another barrage coming from Pulte and the FHFA and then a barrage kind of coming back from the mortgage community and just other economists and folks who generally opine on all things mortgage lending. So the, had the LLPA.

discussion where there was, we were all kind of holding out hope there for a week or two that there would be some significant changes to LLPAs and maybe even G fees to help with the spread between mortgage rates and treasuries. Then we had the 50 year mortgage brief kind of saga. then, then it was assumability that came up last week as well. It was, I think Bill Pulte that tweeted that the White House was looking into assumable loans, which that would be basically a portable loan, right? Think about it as.

You have this 3 % mortgage on your house that we think is kind of locking people in. We know it was locking people in and keeping them from moving or refinancing. There's this thought that you could take that mortgage then to your new house and keep that 3 % rate. And that was generally, again, kind of not well received by the community, the mortgage folks kind of shot down. Mostly because it doesn't directly help the first time home buyer. Obviously they don't have a loan, so there's nothing to assume.

But some could argue that it would unlock some additional supply that there's, still a debate out there about how healthy supply is right now, right? And supply of existing homes probably is a bit low. Uh, whereas the supply of new homes is, kind of reaching a Anyway, you guys have any thoughts on, I don't know what might be next coming out of the FHFA or, just kind of what the intentions might be for this sudden barrage of, of ideas. Again, I applaud.

that there's ideas coming out about this. Cause I think we need to get more creative to help with affordability. But I don't know. Do you guys think there's any, there's anything hidden, any signals hidden in this barrage?

do like that they're throwing stuff off the wall see what sticks. I'm with you. I think portables are probably not the best. And I think it was just poorly communicated. could see how it would, you know, it would increase the volume of transactions in the industry in that houses are changing hands, this is the industry that thrives on new originations and the fees, you know, therein on new paper.

Mm-hmm.

and then I think when I, when I say there was a bit of a communication problem with it, think, you know, when we're having the affordability conversation, it's not about folks who've been in a home for half a decade and they're sitting on a 3 % rate. Like, like that's a story of the you know, when we're having the affordability conversation, I think what a lot of people are concerned about it's the have-nots. Those like you said, they're, they don't have a loan, but to assume, know, and if you're at an open house and there's two other couples, they're sitting on a 3 % from.

2020 and you and you're looking at you know, a 6 know, that's gonna be demoralizing ⁓ then and like I said, it's just you know, if you don't have the orders to assume it's It's not helping the first time homebuyer. So Could definitely use some some better communication on that one

Yeah, that's a really good point. So it could even put the first time home buyer at a distinct disadvantage because they're competing for a home with folks who have a payment based on 3 % and they're looking at six, six and a quarter.

Yeah, and of

course, you know, I think, you know, if those folks are moving, you know, with their 3 % in the house that you means that they're going to be opening up their old property. I think in a lot of cases, you know, these properties are of a higher value. I don't want to say, you know,

it's there's there's there's no chance that that series of transactions could follow through to you know a first-time home buyer moving into a home but generally speaking I think those that have already been in a property it's it's appreciated quite a bit in value maybe they're looking to downsize and they could then be competing with a first-time home buyer but you know that that's getting into the micro of it and the case-by-case basis but again I think

Mm-hmm.

First time homebuyers, neither the 50 year or the affordable mortgages is really gonna fix things.

No, in fact, I could even argue, I've said this a couple of times when folks have talked about what happens if there's a new quantitative easing round or the rates dip well into the fours. Somehow I think you could have a similar effect with this portability issue. Suddenly all of these existing properties were unlocked. I think that could lead to a severe drop in home prices. Suddenly you have these, maybe you have

an aging population that's looking to downsize. And then you have these families that have been looking to buy a bigger house, but haven't been able to find the right one. And suddenly there's all this opportunity to like swap houses basically, right? On macro and macro terms.

yeah, yeah, that's what I was kind of getting at there is the two transactions that have to take place for some swapping to occur.

But if you have millions of homes suddenly where you can like, can look across the street and I can buy my neighbor's house and keep my 3 % mortgage. You might have the least home sales volume ever with very little new origination and mortgages, but suddenly everybody gets what they want. then prices start dropping 10, 15, 20%. And then what happens then?

Exactly.

Yep. And like you said, the first half of that statement there, the industry shot this idea down because home swap volume can go through the roof. It might not help the industry too much.

That's true. Very true.

Okay. What else are we missing here? I don't know. One little item we thought was interesting. We were kicking around on the desk a little bit the other day we need to do a little more research on this because the websites that we've looked at so far a little bit, uh, scant, but there's this idea of a type of HELOC that to me kind of reads like a reverse mortgage. So you can get this HELOC, you can get a line of credit for 25, 50, a hundred thousand dollars, but in exchange, instead of

Thank

a loan and paying interest on that loan, you're actually giving the bank or the lender a ⁓ percentage of the value of your home. So that when you sell that house down the road, they get a piece of that appreciation and that then is how they get, how they make their money. So that was interesting. anyway, you know,

If you're watching this on LinkedIn or on YouTube, just put something in the chats if you're familiar with this. I don't even know if it's a new idea or if it's something that spun off of reverse mortgages, but I thought it was interesting to have kind of a, for a borrower to have the opportunity to give fractional ownership of their property to a third party in exchange for cash today. Again, feels very much like a reverse mortgage, but kind of an interesting concept that

could be seen as, I don't know, questionable depending on how that is used, or it could be maybe it's a really good tool for folks who have submit current equity in their homes.

it

Definitely is, you know, as we were given some roses, hey, the administration is trying some out of the box ideas. It's good to keep throwing them up. Like right here's the private market is trying to step in and a different and unique way to, Hey, I can help you get into that first house and get money back out of it. so that's all like, that's good. It's good to see that whether or not we think it's a great idea to do this as a borrower is its own thing. And I'd be a little bit worried about a non-bank,

entity kind of assuming these loans and how are they actually gonna make sure that whoever they're selling them onto or the SPAC that picks it up is getting this cash in a reasonable time flow. I'd be very curious about that. Again, the website's kind of scant to try and see how their business model is really working, but it's an interesting idea to be able to, hey, we'll give you 50 grand right now. ⁓

Mm-hmm.

10, 20, 30 years down the line when you sell this house, we think it's gonna appreciate this much so you owe us 100 grand. Get that back out, we're taking 10 % of the loan with you. That's all good, but it does remind me of first time home borrower, you've got a certain amount that you should be downpaying, but if I'm borrowing this from someone else, I could have a

Mm-hmm.

That could work with you.

down payment, yeah, I

could have negative equity and then what happens when the market turns and I don't want this anymore? Well, I was defaulting anyways, right? This is even more incentive. It takes even longer for me to build up equity, have a reason to stay. It's kind of the same issue I would have with a fifth year mortgage.

Good point.

All right, gentlemen, did we miss anything? Did we cover all the bases today?

I think so. We got to everything. Hopefully we'll have a little bit of data we can digest next week, a little appetizer of September jobs data. But until then, I think that covers it.

Good. Yeah. Don't expect the levy to break gang. We're going to get little bits and pieces here of data. Some of it has aged quite a bit. Like the, the BLS report that we'll get this week from September. then when we get into December, we should start seeing some real time, some data like early December, we should see November jobs and so on. All right, James, Alex, thanks for the time and the wisdom today.

Thank you.

Thanks, everyone.

All right. As you may know, Optimal Blue publishes a monthly data report. It's called the Market Advantage, which includes mortgage rate locks, secondary marketing data, just tons of interesting data that comes out of all of our systems. And we've been releasing a monthly podcast with that report featuring like some data analysis, some interesting tidbits. So we've got a super exciting update to share about that. Going forward, we'll be merging the Optimal Insights podcast with the Market Advantage podcast. So basically once a month, we will have a Market Advantage segment.

right here on the optimal insights podcast. It'll likely be first week of the month. today we're going to, we're going to share a segment from our final standalone episode of market advantage where our data experts, Mike Vogue and Brennan O'Connell are going to talk about October data. So it's a little bit later this time, but typically going forward, it's going to be the first week of the month. So super excited about it. You know, one thing that you'll get from this is

You'll actually get a sneak peek into this report. So typically the report comes out kind of mid-month. So because the podcast is a week sooner, you'll get access to that data just a little bit earlier than usual. So here's the segment. Enjoy.

So the headline for October is that lock volume is down 4%, but that really has a lot more to do with the September comp than it does any sort of pullback in production. So September, if you look at it, was the highest month for production we've seen in the last three years. October was the second highest. So we are, we are still in a very good place from a production standpoint on a year over year basis. October was up 18%. Purchase volumes dropped a nominal 1.5%.

Out of the mortgage rate environment, the OB-MMI 30 year conforming fixed index, OB-30C, this is the underlying for the CME futures contract that dropped 16 bips across the end of September into the end of October. So finished the month at 6.16%. That's 63 bips better than the same time last year. FHA dropped four bips, VA rates fell 15 and Jumbo took off another 11 bips and finished the month at

just a little bit over 6.35%. I think what's interesting, so we had a rate cut in October that was largely built in from a pricing perspective into the market. So the 10-year really didn't improve all that much from the end of September until the end of October, we just saw a five basis point decrease in the 10-year treasury. But a lot of the pickup that we saw on the mortgage side was actually related to the spread. the spread between the mortgage

Few other odds and ends here in terms of production and credit. FHA in conforming picked up some share at the expense of VA. I think it's actually just sort of a timing dynamic. We see VA production in particular, URLs on the VA side increased very quickly as rates dropped. So think we saw this very material uptick in VA refis in September, which continued into October, but FHA in conforming sort of.

sort of caught up, they're maybe a touch behind in terms of speed of refinance. And so as FHA and Conforming joined the show, they took a little bit of market share. then really we were pretty flat on the credit side of things, or from an affordability perspective, both DTIs and first time home buyer percentages were flat. And finally, non-QM share, which we continue to track, there's a secular trend towards non-QM, non-agency production. did see

a little bit of growth there driven primarily by some increases in both investor and bank statement loans. So I think all in another very productive month, something that I think was reflected. We were all out at the MBA conference in Vegas and I thought the energy out there was great, better than it has been in the last few years. And I think there's plenty of reason for that given what we're seeing in the numbers. Mike, pass it over to you for.

a few insights on maybe the secondary side of things.

Yeah, appreciate it, Brandon. I would echo that. think that the vibe at the annual MBA conference was pretty positive, definitely more positive than some of the previous conferences in the last year or two. So I think things are trending up there to build off your point. Just starting with some of our secondary marketing trends, we saw on average, best effort versus mandatory spread, decrease a smidge on a 30-year conforming down about two basis points.

So still at 33 basis points of a spread there. So plenty of excess profit to be made for folks who want to hedge and then sell their loans in the secondary market. One of the big things that really jumped out to me though was the change that we observed in pull through over the course of the month. We saw pull through for purchase loans increase almost a point from 83.5 to 84.5%. But the big jump was in rate term refinances.

where we saw the pull through drop increase almost 10%. So it was at 60 odd percent, 60.18 to be exact, and end of the month almost 72%. So, you know, I think what we saw there was as rates kind of ticked up a little bit in October, we saw folks really get off the sidelines and do a little less shopping around and really trying and make sure at that rate that they locked in during that rate decrease in September, they actually

you know, got to the table and refied, you know, throughout the course of the month of October, right? You think of that 30 to 45 day lag between application or lock till closing. And that makes a ton of sense given the directionality of rates this month. A couple other trends to note, we continue to see MBS share increase for loan sales. About a year ago, this was about a third, a third, a third between bulk cash and mortgage backed securities. But we see that share of

lenders securitizing now, closer to 46 % of the overall loan sales observed in the system, where cash is down about 22 % and bulk aggregator bidding is down about 30%. Both of those down about 2 % over the course of the month. And we still see that best effort share about 2 to 3 % of loan sales there. It's not really a lot of change there. Another area that Kaz also spoke to me was this continued trend

of lenders selling to the rank one loan sale execution. About six to 12 months ago, this was 69, 70 odd percent of the time sold to rank one. It was 78 % last month, 81 % this month. So we're seeing lenders really chase, continue to chase that profitability, right? They're not thinking about some of the softer eligibility guidelines from a loan sale perspective. Maybe they're even moving away from retaining servicing rights if it's not the rank one execution.

A stat that I've been observing the last couple of months that we want to add to the market advantage is the percentage of loans that are actually sold retained, meaning that the lender is holding on to the servicing rights and the relationship with the borrower versus selling it released, which means that they're selling the servicing rights and that touch point with the borrower to the investor. And this month we saw quite a shift in September was 63 % of the loans sold were actually servicing retained. And it was 56 % this month.

So a 7 % decrease in the amount of loans sold, which correlates to that trend of lenders kind of chasing that best price, kind of that addiction to cash, right? Cash today versus the promise of cashflow in the future with servicing rights. A couple other things to chat about, with on average, OBMMI up throughout the course of the month, we did see servicing right valuations increase about three basis points on average, ending the month about 1.12 on a 25th.

25-bips servicing rate, which is almost about 4.5 % multiple. You think of that 1.13 divided by 25 basis points, and you get almost 4.5 from a multiple perspective. Historically, folks usually always grounded themselves to 4 multiple on servicing, right? 25-bips equal 1 point. During COVID, that dropped almost down to a 2 multiple, spiked closer to 5.5, 6, maybe about a year ago, and now is in that 4.5 range.

just so folks get a feel for that. And then in general, we saw our investor count kind of again, stagnant at that 11 number the last three, last four months, where on your average loan sale, lenders are interacting on average with 11 investors. And typically when we see that spike up or spike down, that's a good proxy for just the demand of mortgages out there right now.

Okay. Another great podcast. Thanks to everybody for their contributions today. Alex, James, Brennan, Mike. Remember, going forward, first week of the month, look for the market advantage segment on this podcast, Optimal Insights. And that's it for today. Join us next week for another episode of Optimal Insights, where we'll continue to provide you with the latest market analysis and insights to help you stay ahead. Check out our full videos on YouTube. You can also find each episode on all major podcast platforms.

Thanks again for tuning into Optimal Insights.