Insights From CoreLogic Chief Economist Selma Hepp on the Housing Market, Affordability Challenges | February 2025 Data

Speaker A: 00:01:06

Welcome to Market Advantage, the monthly podcast from Optimal Blue. Tune in for valuable insights from the Market Advantage Mortgage data report and in depth conversations with industry experts.

Stay competitive and optimize your advantage in the ever evolving mortgage landscape.

Olivia DeLancey: 00:01:23

Welcome to the Market Advantage podcast. I have Brennan O'Connell joining me from where, Brennan? The beach, I believe.

Brennan O'Connell: 00:01:31

Yeah, yeah, it's a little warmer down.

Brennan O'Connell: 00:01:32

Here in a rental office, but in Marco Island, Florida, figured it's that time of year when us Midwesterners all flock to somewhere along the Gulf of Mexico in order to order to escape the.

Brennan O'Connell: 00:01:45

Place that we live, that we choose to live.

Olivia DeLancey: 00:01:48

Very good. Well, thank you for still taking time to give us a quick data update on, on what happened in February. And in a few minutes we'll welcome Selma Hep.

She is the Chief Economist at CoreLogic for the guest interview portion of the podcast. But first, Brennan, why don't you tell us what we saw in terms of volume in February.

Brennan O'Connell: 00:02:04

Yeah, thanks, Olivia.

Brennan O'Connell: 00:02:06

February was interesting. We had two different storylines. Overall, we were up 7% and that was driven by a 40% surge in refinance activity.

There was an improving rate environment, which we'll talk about, but refi activity surged and purchase volume was up a more modest 4%.

But I think what's important to note here, we're a couple months into the year in terms of data and we're seeing kind of like a bifurcation in terms of maybe where we would have expected given the rate environment, refi and purchase activity to go.

So as I mentioned, rate and term refinance up 40% we saw on a year over year basis over the first couple months, a year, very strong activity on the refinance side that's really in a rate environment that's much the same as it was a year ago.

So I think it's just a, it's a good indicator for the origination community for most of our listeners that there are these pockets of refinance mortgages out there.

So it's important to start focusing on that, that segment of the market now that some of the refinance activities coming back, I think we're at 22% of total originations or total locks in February were driven by refis. And then on the purchase side we had a really strong conclusion to 24, where every month we were seeing kind of like year over year increases.

ning towards the back half of: 2024

But the beginning of 25 has shown that we've been down on a year over year basis.

And like specifically looking at the numbers, purchase activity in February was down 5% year over year in, in terms of volume and it was actually down 9% if you look at just count. Right.

So, so some of that improvement, the five versus the nine that was due to just increasing loan amounts but we were down almost 10% in terms of count on a year over year basis. And so I think it's going to be really important to look towards the spring buying season to see if we get a little bit more of an uptick there.

Obviously that purchase volume is kind of like the steady driver of origination activity and so hopefully we can see a bit of an improvement there as we look towards the spring buying season.

Olivia DeLancey: 00:04:29

Okay, well you mentioned the rate environment several times. It sounds like we saw some improvement. Can you tell us a little bit more about that?

Brennan O'Connell: 00:04:36

Yeah.

Brennan O'Connell: 00:04:36

Bonds rallied in February. I think the treasury picked up 10 year, picked up 25 or 30 basis points despite some, some poor CPI numbers. But the mortgage rates followed.

So let's see some, some numbers. Specifically our benchmark 30 year conforming rate. I mentioned this a couple of times.

Now this is the rate that is the subject or the underlying price used in the CME mortgage rate futures contract which has seen some increase in volume over the last couple of months. We're really excited about that product being out there. That OB my 30 year conforming rate dropped 24 basis points, finished the month at 6.6%.

Jumbo rates were down 30 bips to 6.69. FHA down 15 bips to 6.35 and VA was down 28 bips and is hovering just above 6% now. Just just above at about 6.1.

So really nice improvement in the rate environment in February. And mortgage rate spread to the 10 year is sitting around 230 basis points.

I mentioned this because if you look back last year at the same time it was about 25 to 30 basis points higher. So we've seen some compression there.

So mortgage rates all else being equal or relative to a steady treasury number would be kind of better than they than they were at the same time last year. That 230bps though that's still above the long run average. So long run average. Think about it. Somewhere in kind of like the, the.

Brennan O'Connell: 00:06:00

High 190, 80, 90 maybe you know.

Brennan O'Connell: 00:06:04

Depends on who you ask. Somewhere between 175 and 200 basis points is kind of a long run average there. And so I do think there's still some room for compression.

Probably most of what we're seeing there in terms of the wider spread is a lot of it kind of prepayment expectation driven.

So we're in a rate environment where folks are expecting the loans being originated today to be more likely refinanced than kind of like relative to the long, long term average. So I do think there's still some compression.

So as, as we see rates in the market, the macro level come down, I do even think that there is still room for further compression for mortgage rates, which would be welcome news for lenders and borrowers alike.

Olivia DeLancey: 00:06:44

Excellent, thanks for that, that data overview, Brennan. Appreciate it. We'll let you, we'll let you get back to your vacation and don't forget your SPF today.

Speaker A: 00:06:53

Yeah, yeah.

Brennan O'Connell: 00:06:54

For this pasty Midwestern skin, going to need a lot of sunscreen.

Olivia DeLancey: 00:06:58

Excellent. All right, it's time to welcome this month's guest. We have Selma he joining us from CoreLogic. She is their chief economist. Selma, welcome.

Thanks for joining us.

Selma Hepp: 00:07:08

Thanks so much for having me.

Olivia DeLancey: 00:07:11

So I actually just met you in Dallas recently at the Housing Wire Housing Economic Summit. That was such a good event. So much good content. I, I learned a lot, which I pretty much do every day at Optimal Blue, which is, which is excellent.

And I do want to dive a little bit further into the topic you were talking about at that event, insurance costs and how that's impacting affordability. But first I thought maybe you could give us an overview of CoreLogic and your role and what your team does with data.

Selma Hepp: 00:07:40

Yeah, so let me start with, I guess my team first. So I'm the chief economist. I have a team of analysts or team of economists in my group. There's several objectives for our group.

One is to dig deep into the data and be sort of a canary in the data mine for CoreLogic and figure out what can be done and if there are any shortcomings in the data, figure that out before anybody else. The other role that we have is to be a thought leader in the field.

So we do take a lot of our data and we write thought leadership pieces and we try to fully understand the dynamics of the housing market from the entire sort of 360 degree perspective, which is sort of the idea behind CoreLogic is that we have 360 degree view of a property of all properties in the U.S.

the 360 degree view of property allows us to be able to See all aspects of a property, including, you know, simple things like location, structure, characteristics, history of sales and ownership, the neighborhood that the property is located in, what are some of the liens on the property, for example, valuation for the property imagery. That's been a big one, especially now as we talk a lot about AI. And then lastly, climate and hazard risk.

We've developed a hazard risk score for each property in the US So that gives us a really good sense of what's going on with things that we're going to talk about, insurance and climate. But that's, you know, one great advantage of CoreLogic.

Brennan O'Connell: 00:09:20

Yeah, it's the data. The depth of data that CoreLogic has is, is really impressive. And you know, the timing of this podcast is serendipitous.

We've got a partnership between optimal blue and CoreLogic at the corporate level where we're going to start to look at doing more joint ventures with data together, looking at cross selling. Some of our data products across our are sort of different audiences that both entities interact with. So it's really exciting.

We're really excited to start figuring out the origination data that Optimal Blue has. Mortgage locks, mortgage pricing and how that can fit into the 360 degree view that you've got around properties right now.

I think it's a really, really exciting partnership.

Selma Hepp: 00:10:02

Yep. Yeah, we'll look forward to it as well.

Brennan O'Connell: 00:10:04

Yeah, and thanks again, Selma, for being on. We were really excited to have you here.

your perspective on so far in: 2025

What sort of surprised you in the first, first couple of months of the year and how has the year kicked off in relation to what your expectations were?

Selma Hepp: 00:10:35

Yeah, so this is the part that maybe it's not so exciting right now is that housing market still continues to lag in many ways. You know, we, coming into this year, I think we were hoping.

Well, the hope was, you know, more present, you know, middle of last year when mortgage rates dropped in August, for example, and we saw a lot of refi activity and we saw a lot of home buyers coming back into the market. We do know that there's a lot of people sitting on the sidelines.

It's just, it's a lot of other things going on that's, you know, keeping people on the sidelines and one of them being elevated mortgage rates, the other is, you know, we did have the election and sometimes people hold off on their decision to buy a home or change location or whatever the case may be during that period. And then, you know, it was a really cold winter. It still is in some areas. Right.

We had natural disasters that hit some of the larger regions of the country and so that all sort of holds activity back.

So, you know, the first two months of this year haven't been as exciting exciting as we were hoping that they would be in terms of giving us an indication of where the housing market is going.

at we saw at the beginning of: 2024

still looking very much like: 2024

Brennan O'Connell: 00:12:06

Yeah. And I think we see some of the same in our data.

Certainly interest rates are, are actually, you know, where they were while we've seen a little bit of a rally, but in many ways in the same place that they were a year ago. Did see, you know, to start the year, a little bit of improvement in the refinance activity on a year over year basis.

Which I think just speaks to, there are, it's limited, but there are folks who have gotten new mortgages in the last 12 months. And so there's a larger subset of the outstanding mortgages who are potentially in a, in a position to refinance. Right.

So, you know, we've got this lock in effect, which obviously you're referencing.

You've got a lot of folks sitting on the sideline, but it is so somewhat encouraging just to know that, hey, look, there is some outstanding collateral out there that can be refinanced down even at a point when we're seeing rates really at the same place that they were a year ago.

And I guess the other side of this, right, so you have the, you have the lock in dynamic which is, is going to keep folks from wanting to get rid of that, that sort of financing asset that, you know, they stay in their homes, they're not looking to, to maybe upgrade like they would have traditionally. The other part is it's also very expensive to get the new home. Right.

So not only not wanting to get rid of that asset, but if you do get rid of that asset, you're looking at a market from an affordability perspective, which is I think most would consider not very good, but it would be great I think you have wonderful rich data set that could tell us a little bit about that affordability. And just in the context of, you know, over the last few decades, like, where are we? How bad is it today from an affordability perspective?

Selma Hepp: 00:13:40

Yeah, yeah.

You know, unfortunately we do sit at very low levels of affordability historically speaking, you know, compared to last 50 year period, we're as low as we were, you know, 40 years ago. So, so we really are at some of the historical lows in terms of affordability.

It's difficult really now to see how that is going to improve given that we're still not expecting home prices to decline. They have declined some in some areas, but very minimal really.

When you think about how much appreciation cumulatively we've had since the onset of the pandemic, we do not expect mortgage rates to drop anywhere near where they were during the pandemic.

You know, if anything, you know, forecasts right now are in a best case scenario in low sixes, in, you know, sort of more realistic scenario, you know, six and a half and above, 6.5 and above. So, you know, so not much help from mortgage rates in terms of affordability.

And then, you know, then there's these other components, you know, variable components of mortgage payment that now become more important and you know, really are playing a bigger role for some people than even principal and interest, which is insurance and property taxes.

So, you know, when you think about that decision to move, you know, one is that you have a higher mortgage payment just from higher home prices and potentially giving up the low mortgage rates if you locked in one. But you know, the other thing is that taxes have gone up proportionally to price increases in some areas.

So if you, if you don't have that, you know, sort of like a homestead or property 13 in California where your property taxes are locked, the increase is locked.

You know, you may be facing a much bigger property tax bill and then insurance, if you can even get in some areas, you know, and that puts a lot of people at risk to, if they, you know, decide, for example, to self insure and you have a, you know, you have a natural disaster that comes through and you're potentially losing a lot. So affordability is a big thing.

And I think, you know, when you ask younger people, I mean, that is the main driver behind them sort of waiting it out.

And a lot of people, you know, sort of who are not necessarily like experts in housing finance or housing economics, they think that, you know, just because home prices are so high right now, they're definitely going to fall. So they're going to definitely wait for home prices to fall to, to buy their home.

You know, so, so there's still that story there that people believe in, you know, which is sort of hard to, you know, it's hard to explain to people that we really don't see a reason for home prices to fall in most of the country because the supply is so low and it's been, so it's been low for a long time and we've underbuilt for many, many years.

And so there's no reason that home prices, even when the demand is weak and which is what exactly what we saw in the last couple of years, demand was really weak and home prices didn't fall. You know, if they fell, they fell for other reasons, which is, is non fixed costs of mortgage payments such as insurance and property taxes.

Olivia DeLancey: 00:16:47

Well, and one thing I think Logan Motashami had pointed this out at the Housing Wire event. There's millennial, many millennials are finally ready to try to buy their home, but they don't own a home already.

So that's not going to help the inventory issue at all. Because they're not selling a, a property when they're looking to buy as well.

Selma Hepp: 00:17:05

Yeah, exactly. I mean that's, that's definitely a challenge.

The other one is, you know, if they don't have help from mom and dad, you know, coming up with a down payment and competing in this market where repeat buyers do have equity and you know, we're at the highest levels of equity that you know, we've had historically for, for, among borrowers that, you know, they have to compete against that. So it's, it's a very hard proposition for first time home buyers right now.

Brennan O'Connell: 00:17:34

Yeah, it feels like, I mean there's rates can drop, incomes can go up, home prices could, could potentially fall and that could all lead to some level of affordability improvement. But the reality is we just need a larger supply of places for people to live, you know, and for homes for people to buy.

Selma, do you have any information, data that you're tracking around new construction or just sort of like density of residences maybe, whether that's geographic specific or nationwide. I imagine there's probably pockets of the country that are in particular need of, of more homes. Right.

Those areas that have seen particularly high year over year, multi year increases in home price.

Selma Hepp: 00:18:17

Yeah, so we do, you know, we have building permit data obviously and also sort of even before the building building permit we have this would call growth indicators. And that's when There are transactions indicated that a parcel of land is on a path of being developed in the future. Right.

So maybe it was an agricultural land, maybe it was some other type of land. And it's now being retitled into being a residential type of land or parcel.

So we do track that very closely and we do know that a lot of areas that, that are prone for new construction going forward do tend to be more exurbant areas simply because it's easier to build there. And you know, you can build sort of tracks of properties as opposed to infill development.

Infill development is very costly and difficult, especially when you have a lot of sort of NIMBY pushback, which we do have in many parts of the country.

So where we're seeing a lot of new construction, it's in these areas that are not necessarily in urban centers, for example, or closer to urban centers.

But what's interesting is that, you know, overall, when you look at where new construction is happening, the majority is still happening in Southeast and south.

So anywhere between Texas and, and sort of Southeast and down to Florida, or you're looking at markets in Mountain west and Desert west, like Phoenix, Vegas and, and you know, to some extent Utah as well, more recently. That's really where a lot of new construction is happening at the moment.

But where areas where we need a lot of new construction, that, and you can see that in home price pressure on home price appreciation are areas in North, Northeast, for example. You know, this is. Those are the area that still have, you know, almost close to 10% increase in home prices. You know, it's 7, really around 7.

But you know, like is it closer to 10 or is it closer to zero? Right. So it's, it's sort of one way to look at it. So it's, it's a lot of pressure on home prices still, and it's been persistent.

And it's a really function of lack of inventory. You know, when we look at where inventory is at the moment for those markets in northeast, there's like 60% below where they were pre pandemic.

You know, even with some increases in some markets, they're still that low.

So, you know, really, when you look at what's happening with prices and you sort of contrast it with what's happening with construction, it, it explains the story in many ways.

Brennan O'Connell: 00:20:47

Yeah, and during the pandemic, there was that storyline, the fact that folks could work from home, moving south, finding warmer climates, you know, getting out of some of the urban areas to live.

Do you track any population movement Today, just to see, like, are those folks who are up in kind of the Northeast and still experiencing that level of home price appreciation, are people still continuing to migrate, if you will, down to the south and the Southeast and looking for, you know, maybe warmer weather.

But in, in this case, maybe it's just becomes a fiscal decision where it's like, hey, I can only afford a home if I move down into South Carolina or Florida or, you know, what have you.

Selma Hepp: 00:21:28

Yeah, we do.

I mean, we still see, we, we track mobility data through mortgage applications, and we still do see a lot of people going to those markets that are, you know, affordability really being the key word and, and maybe warm to some extent because a lot of them are baby boomers or retirees. So that is a big driver behind, behind their migration.

But I would say that compared to where the migration patterns or to the levels of migration patterns that we saw during the pandemic, it's much less. So. So we don't see as many people going to those markets as we saw during the pandemic. So definitely slow down in those.

And during the pandemic, you also had other types of, you know, maybe folks that were in the middle of their careers but able to work from home, so they were, you know, they could move anywhere.

And now, you know, there is this sentiment that it's important again to be close to urban centers, close to employment center, close to your job, just in case, you know, you get called in and, you know, you have to come back into the office more, more frequently. So I think that's one reason why there is a lot of pressure on home prices in markets in like Northeast or Chicago, for example.

I mean, employment centers are still big drivers behind demand.

Brennan O'Connell: 00:22:46

Yeah.

So to some extent to parrot that back, you know, there was the migration, but to a large extent that it sort of slowed down and maybe even in some cases reversed a little bit. Where folks are recognizing, hey, I, you know, I.

It was nice, I could be away, but now maybe there's back to office orders or just sort of a feeling that you need to be closer to your employer. Yeah. So there's probably no way around needing to construct more homes around urban centers.

It feels like that that's the fundamental driver here that is going to push affordability into a better place.

Selma Hepp: 00:23:21

Yeah, yeah. I mean, and ultimately, you know, you were talking about what drives affordability, what, how can we get improvement in affordability?

And there's income growth, there's price declines potentially, or there's mortgage rate decline. Mortgage rate decline is really Going to only marginally help.

Even when we, you know, when we sort of forecast out of mortgages go down to 5%, you only get a little bit of improvement in affordability. Again, home price is, I don't see home prices falling enough to, to really help that improvement.

So it's really what you're sort of how the situation plays out in my mind is you see slower rate of home price appreciation and then catching up with income. So income growth being really the dominant force behind improvements in affordability.

Olivia DeLancey: 00:24:11

And I'd love to move back toward the topic of homeowners insurance and property taxes, which was the focus of your presentation at the economic summit.

One thing that I found really interesting was that homeowners insurance was rising a lot in what we call tornado alley, the Midwest, which is actually where I grew up, because I really had a perception that that was probably more prone to places with wildfires like California or hurricanes like Florida, where I live now. So could you talk a little bit about that?

Selma Hepp: 00:24:43

Yeah, yeah, that's very interesting.

You know, I, as I was saying in my presentation at the, at the housing summit is, you know, for housing economists, we really never worried about insurance costs until coming couple years ago because they were, you know, they were rising in, in levels of, in line with what whatever in rate of inflation was. So you saw like a 3% increase in your insurance premium on a year over year basis. But then, you know, a few years ago we saw the surge in, in costs.

And people don't understand necessarily that it's not all about wildfire exposure or even hurricane exposure because there are state laws that prevent rate filings or rate increases, you know, being sort of beyond certain. You know, it has, they have to get approved.

And so in the areas where there is less scrutiny over increases in these insurance premiums, you, you will have seen larger increases in tornado alley or middle of the country in general is one of those areas where relatively speaking the increase has been bigger. But also even levels are bigger to begin with. The example I was sort of showing is middle of the country, the tornado alleys in particular.

Average insurance premium is, you know, 4,000 to $5,000.

llion home and you're paying $: 1500

But the other Reason is that claims are actually more frequent in tornado alley because there's so much, so many wind and hail claims that are happening that that's one of the reasons that you already would have had higher insurance premiums in, in those parts of the country. Actually when you look at all the insurance claims, almost half of them are due to wind and hail.

So, you know, so that too explains why the premiums are higher.

Olivia DeLancey: 00:26:58

Sounds familiar.

Because when I lived in Nebraska, you always waited to get a new roof on your house until the next hailstorm came through because it usually wasn't very far away. And we, we actually did get a new roof after a hailstorm at the house I owned when I lived there. So it rings true.

Selma Hepp: 00:27:15

Yeah.

Okay, well that's good to know because you know, I sometimes talk about these things, but I haven't experienced it, you know, so, so it's good that you know, to be validated or the data is validated by real life examples.

Brennan O'Connell: 00:27:31

Selma, are you able to tease out kind of like whether or not some of the increases in homeowners insurance costs in some of these non regulated states are subsidizing climate risks that have increased in some of the regulated states.

So, you know, effectively, if, you know, say hypothetically like California or Florida for flooding or fire reasons are running into larger climate risks, but you're not necessarily able as the insurance company to increase taxes at the level that you'd like to reflect that risk.

Do you find that the insurance companies, to the extent that they are offering plans in other states, might leverage some of those other states to effectively subsidize what they're not able to cover in premiums in those states that are regulated?

Selma Hepp: 00:28:20

Yeah, well that's, I mean that's a. Theoretically, that's, that's how insurance, all types of insurance, even health insurance, you have to spread your risk, you know, exposure.

And so no matter type of insurance you're thinking about, there's ways in which the insurance companies are going to be looking to spread that risk.

So I imagine, you know, and there have been papers suggesting that I don't have insight into how insurance companies decide their, you know, their premiums.

But you know, I imagine similar to health, like I said, that there would be some spreading of risk, you know, so you ideally want to have coverage in high risk as well as low risk areas too, you know, and, and so that you can offset. So I think for that reason some of the insurance companies that are more sort of have wider coverage across the U.S.

you know, tend to perform better than Those that you know, are concentrated in certain areas. Well, unless those areas are very low risk areas.

Brennan O'Connell: 00:29:20

Unless those areas. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Right. And so to your point, that's sort of the nature of insurance.

Be interesting to see just is that, you know, does that end up being sort of a state by state story? Obviously there's kind of like the general rule of insurance and then there's these kind of unique scenarios that are sort of like regulatory driven.

The climate risk topic, we're kind of already at it. It's one of the areas we wanted to get to with you as well. Know that CoreLogic has a really rich climate data set.

Anything you'd want to provide for our audience around climate risk? Like should lenders be thinking about this? How should lenders be reacting?

And is there, you know, any reports that CoreLogic is putting out that folks could, could take advantage of?

Just so that if you think about even like a loan officer or a lending institution when they're talking to borrowers and trying to communicate what the risk might be of moving to a new location or even, you know, in a location that's, you know, because there's the climate risk dynamic is one that's probably hyper local I would imagine. Right.

So there, you know, even, even in like the same zip code, you might have parts, census tracts that are much more risky than others, for example. So do you have data around that, any, anything on that topic that you think would be relevant for the origination community?

Selma Hepp: 00:30:33

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. You know, we do have the climate risk score that we've developed for each individual property in the US and that's both residential and commercial.

And, and you know, the advantage of sort of all the modeling that went into this scoring is that we have all the property characteristics, for example.

And so to your point of having two properties in same zip code but having very different risk scoring that could be due to, you know, more updated materials on a home where, you know, they're more wild fire prone or even, you know, in terms of hurricanes, you can have a higher first level floor being higher than say neighbor's home. And so flooding is less of a risk. So all of that goes into our development of risk scoring for each individual property.

And then on top of that, and I think something that's going to become even more relevant going forward, just in case of California, for example, California Department of Insurance is now allowing insurers to look into advanced catastrophe modeling. Not a forward looking, advanced catastrophe modeling, not backward looking.

And why that's important is because things are changing rapidly In a climate, in the climate world, you know, and the fact that you didn't have, for example, a lot of risk in one area doesn't mean that you have, don't have exposure to much more risk going forward.

In our modeling, we're able to look at weather event data and, and estimate future catastrophe losses and environmental impacts based on the different, you know, representative concentration pathways. You know, the RCP there is like three different scenario of like greenhouse gases going forward.

And so we, we have a different scoring based on what happens with greenhouse gases going forward for each property.

So you know, it's, the information is so detailed, but what matters is that you have all this background behind this model really give you a true sense of, you know, your risk exposure.

So you know, I think especially now with what happened in LA or you know, even Carolinas lenders are looking at this, you know, and so yeah, you know, I think it's, it's to me one of the most important things to think about going forward in terms of how we, where we see population or people moving to.

You know, I do think people are going to be less prone to be moving into high risk areas because they will, the knowledge is going to be there to, to understand what, you know, really the true risk coming out of.

Brennan O'Connell: 00:33:15

The climate change and then financially disincentivized. If the insurance premiums are significantly higher at, you know, that particular geography than they would be somewhere else.

Selma Hepp: 00:33:27

Yeah. And I imagine, you know, in the housing finance world that you're going to see premiums on mortgages that are located in those areas.

So it's going to be more cost to have a mortgage or. Yeah, to you know, to have a mortgage in those areas or to be a consumer of that mortgage. On the flip side, I think that.

Olivia DeLancey: 00:33:46

Might be a great segue into kind of what we call our bonus question. Selma.

So, as you may know, at Optimal Blue, our company's mission is to help lenders maximize their profitability on every loan transaction through the software and the data that we provide to them.

So with that in mind, I would love your opinion on this question I ask every guest, um, what is one thing that you think mortgage lenders could or should be doing in today's market to help maximize their profitability?

Selma Hepp: 00:34:15

That's a, that's a wonderful question.

I know, I, I, I, it's a very challenging market right now and as we talked about, you know, originations are at historical lows and you know, and, and the macro economy is not helping in terms of mortgage rates. So it's it's very difficult. I always go back to, you know, sincerity of relationships.

You know, if I have a relationship with my lender and he comes across to me and seriously caring about, you know, my well being or well being of my home, you know, it, it makes me more likely to go back to him for questions about refi, you know, to question, for questions about, you know, should I maybe, you know, sell, buy another home or buy a second home or you know, whatever the case may be, but like having that real connection, you know, I think, you know, in this, in this bots world it's so hard to connect. But having the relationship, I think it's at the end really what matters the most.

Olivia DeLancey: 00:35:14

What a terrific answer. I like the juxtaposition there of technology but maintaining the relationships. So Brennan, any closing thoughts from you on that?

Brennan O'Connell: 00:35:24

I just think there's a lot of originators who are going to be listening to this that are going to be pounding the table in agreement with everything you're saying, Selma, that there's still in human element, human element to this, the, the mortgage and the real estate transaction and for the vast majority of Americans is going to be their largest financial transaction that they're involved with in their lifetime. So it's really important to have, have the white glove treatment.

Selma Hepp: 00:35:49

Absolutely.

Olivia DeLancey: 00:35:51

Couldn't agree more. Well, Selma, this has been terrific. Can't thank you enough for, for taking time to join us.

You're welcome back anytime and looking forward to seeing how the optimal Blue and CoreLogic partnership continues to blossom. So thank you so much.

Selma Hepp: 00:36:04

Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. It was pleasure. And I also look forward to all the fun things we do together going forward.

Olivia DeLancey: 00:36:12

Take care.

Selma Hepp: 00:36:13

Take.