On Monday, the client of a mortgage broker in Florida signed a $1.7M DSCR loan w/ wholesale lender Cake Mortgage. Seven days later & it still hasn’t funded 👀 .

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It’s a bad look for a lender that recently sponsored AIME FUSE & has been making a full-court press with mortgage brokers.

The broker in question said a Cake staffer told him the loan was to fund last Tuesday, a day after the due funding date. Then another staffer told the broker it would close either Thursday or Friday. Then the broker—as well as other brokers across the country—received a boilerplate email on Friday saying Cake had been experiencing “a temporary delay that is impacting our ability to fund loans this week. We expect to resume funding early next week.”

Brokers w/ loans in the Cake pipeline are aghast. A different broker in Florida said he had to scramble to find a different lender for a nonQM loan over a holiday.

“I have never seen in almost 40 years & 10,000+ transactions a lender be late funding over 48 hours,” one broker told The Scoop. “The worst part is just being lied to. If they had run out of credit lines, they should have never let these closings take place.”

Cake, which was founded in 2018 by a former professional video gamer 🎮️ , is focused on non-QM, hard money loans & turndowns from other lenders. One observer noted that at FUSE, several members of their booth had been in the mortgage game less than a year. Cake didn’t respond to a request for comment. But it did post this on LinkedIn on Monday 👇

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Absolute Home Loans has acquired Maryland-based Fidelity Direct Mortgage in an asset sale, The Scoop can exclusively report.

The deal gives Matthew VanFossen’s Absolute a  ≈ 30% increase in origination volume & provides Fidelity Direct’s leaders a seat at the table. VanFossen said the partnership will expand product availability, improve operational efficiencies & create a more competitive position for their LOs. 

Led by founder & CEO Maria D’Souza-Datta, Fidelity Direct has originated roughly $400M over the last 14 months, per RETR. They have 57 producing LOs.

NFM Lending’s Greg Sher penned a controversial post on FICO price hikes over the holiday weekend. In short, he says the MBA has let the industry down. Sher said that 10 months ago he approached a higher-up at the trade group & asked why it didn’t eject FICO. “Why not declare: ‘We're not taking another dime of FICO's money until they agree to stop the hikes.’” He said the answer he got back was, “If we kick them out, where does it end?”

Kicking FICO out would be largely symbolic & it’s worth noting that discussions on credit costs at the MBA would likely start at RESBOG & potentially get kicked up. It’s apparatchiks all the way down. 

As for taking the money: MBA accepting a couple hundred thousand dollars a year in mortgage blood 🩸money arguably gives them a seat at the table w/ Will Lansing. All of that is to say it’s 100% bad optics to take money from the organization that critics say is bleeding your members dry.

The MBA of course is pushing for a single-file credit pull, which pits them against not just FICO but Experian, Equifax, TransUnion, CRAs & others. The proposal doesn’t appear to have resonated w/ the FHFA, which still favors a tri-merge.

More on credit report intrigue in Wednesday’s edition…

Zillow has quietly removed a feature that showed climate risks from listings. Earlier this month Zillow stopped displaying FirstStreet climate risk scores after complaints from agents at CRMLS, one of the nation’s largest MLSs. Real estate agents complained they hurt sales & questioned their accuracy.

I find this particularly interesting b/c Zillow has never been afraid to piss off agents in support of transparency for consumers. Does this represent a larger mentality shift? A retreat from “woke-era” initiatives? Or simply that they need the support of MLSs in the war against Compass & this was relatively low-hanging fruit 🍑?

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