In June ‘22, mortgage broker Brenna Carles, then just 32, told Bloomberg that she was embarrassed at how well she was doing financially. Carles was clearing $100K a month by turning regular folks into Smoky Mountain Airbnb moguls. All with the help of easy-money investor loans.  

Among her clients was a former grocery store manager who had quit her job to do short-term rentals full-time. With Carles’ help, Chelsey Jones had landed $1.1M in mortgages to acquire a slew of properties in the Smokys. Another client was so struck by the raw potential of STRs that she quit her healthcare job in CA to evangelize as a mortgage broker at Carles’s firm.

Business was booming. Unsophisticated real estate investors on forums like Bigger Pockets were bragging about how easy it was to use debt-service coverage ratio (DSCR) loans to buy/refi properties & use the proceeds to scoop up even more rentals.

Wall Street got a touch spooked.

“Right after that article was published, it caused pricing to immediately jump & some investors to pull back in the market,” recalled one non-QM mortgage pro in the Smokys. “There’s a big herd mentality on the investor side.’”

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In our premium subscribers-only Wed. edition, The Mortgage Scoop Insiders got the skinny on Tim Bowler’s exit from ICE Mortgage Technology & Bob Hart’s ascendancy. Sign up now w/ a free trial & check out the story.

VC-backed mortgage tech platform & top-10 servicer Valon has just landed a big fish. Large subservicer ServiceMac is leaving ICE’s MSP platform & transitioning over to Valon in ‘26, The Scoop can exclusively report. 

Andreeson Horowitz, WestCap & Jeffries-backed Valon has a fascinating story. The company endured many years of pain to receive all the licensing requirements needed to originate & service loans while simultaneously building a servicing software platform from scratch.

Now a top-10 servicer that’s raised $277M from investors, Valon is approaching other servicers w/ a highly unusual playbook. Valon has no branding, sales or marketing. Instead, its founders fly around the country & show big servicers how much better Valon’s software makes Valon as a servicer.

"The best marketing is our operating business,” COO Linda Du recently said on the Fintech Leaders Podcast. “We can show [that] we took a low single-digit, breakeven, sometimes losing-money business, & turn it into 70%+ operating margins. A servicer looks at that & says existentially, ‘I need that as well.’"

Du added that the company’s largest enterprise software contracts are $100M-plus in ACV. Not bad!

Neither ServiceMac—which subservices loans on behalf of a bunch of big IMBs—nor Valon responded to requests for comment. ICE said they don’t disclose clients or comment on them 🤷 .

If you’ve been reading The Scoop, you already know what you’re getting: real reporting, deep sourcing, & stories nobody else in mortgage media is touching. We’ve exposed shady lender tactics, examined ICE’s hate-love relationship w/ mortgage, broken dozens of tech stories, dug into UWM’s correspondent play, Rocket’s retail strategy & much more… Insiders get the full Monday/Wednesday/Friday edition—scoops, analysis, sourcing, & context you will not find anywhere else—plus early access to new features.

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Among the most intriguing questions in MortgageLand this week has been whether UWM keeps on Roundpoint’s port retention team. UWM has long been critical of other wholesale lenders w/ port retention teams, framing it as a form of retail & thus, inconsistent w/ the ethos of the channel. 

“Even as recently as 2 or 3 months ago, UWM was saying that you should not send loans to lenders that service b/c they're interested in keeping the servicing,” said one broker. 

Well, we officially have our answer. UWM’s Blake Kolo told Flávia Furlan Nunes that they’re going to get rid of the port retention team (team members will find jobs elsewhere in the org), though it’s still not clear how UWM will distribute leads from the servicing book to brokers.

The addition of Two Harbors/Roundpoint will give UWM steady cash flow while creating cross-sale opportunities for brokers.

SEC filings show that Two Harbors, which pretty much exclusively handles agency paper/MSRs, has endured some rocky quarters financially, most of which is tied to a $175M litigation settlement w/ Two Harbors’ former external manager.

Per Fannie & Freddie securitization data, of the roughly 680K GSE loans serviced by Roundpoint as of Nov. 30, UWM was the largest GSE seller at 165K loans. Fairway, whose CEO Steve Jacobson in the past has beefed w/ Ishbia, was second at 146K. Flagstar, whose servicing book was sold to Mr. Cooper in late ‘24, was at 84K & Rocket was at 52K. In short, UWM can better protect its own book while going after rivals. Smart.

Spotify Wrapped is a year-in-review feature that I used to really enjoy. It was a nice reminder that I found a great band called Fever Dolls in ‘18 or was really into Hugh Laurie’s blues-y jazz in ‘17. Then I had kids & it reminded me that the songs I most often hear are the “Paw Patrol” theme & Cheryl Crow's "Real Gone" from the Cars 1 movie (Side note: Cars 2 is bizarre - it’s a spy thriller w/ car murders, terrorism & even a torture scene. WTF??!!).

Lots of companies now imitate Spotify Wrapped. Most are pretty lame (lookin’ at you, LinkedIn).

But there is a mortgage data company that I think did a really good job w/ their version of the Wrapped. ModelMatch used Addy AI and FirstHome IQ to show every LO’s accomplishments on their Loan Officer Recap feature. It has stats on volume, product type, geography. It's free to use & they've gotten thousands of LOs to view it over a few days.

Big-money funds still love non-QM loans overall. Liquidity is strong, institutional investors are pouring into the space & the overall fundamentals look good. Bank statement loans in particular are strong performers, non-QM pros said. All of this is w/ roughly 40% of files having one exception or more.

But the DSCR investor loans that are underwritten on property cash flow – rather than borrower income – are viewed more cautiously by lenders these days.

The Scoop spoke to experts in the non-QM space to get a sense of the real-time dynamics. This one is for Insiders, so please consider upgrading your subscription if you’re interested in getting the scoop.