“What happened with the DSCR appraisal issue in Baltimore earlier this year?” Good question. Baltimore is not alone: This week we have investors either pricing themselves out of, or ceasing loans from, the Philly market for certain non-owner loans.) The whole Baltimore thing seems to have quieted down, and up until recently the last news coming in October although this week along came, “Baltimore is striking fear into private lenders across the country.” “Over the past three years, businesses connected to Benjamin Eidlisz purchased more than 700 houses in Baltimore. Through a subsidiary called Loan Funder LLC, Roc Capital financed at least $35 million of these deals, according to a Banner review of property records. That money was used to purchase and refinance at least 224 homes in Baltimore. Today, 70 percent of those homes are in foreclosure, records show.” (Today’s podcast can be found here and this week’s are sponsored by Lenders One. Lenders One is dedicated to helping independent mortgage bankers, banks and credit unions reduce costs, improve profitability, and operate competitively in the mortgage industry and within their communities. Hear an interview with iEmergent’s Bernard Nossouli on why mortgage demand is better predicted by bottom-up, borrower-level and local-market signals than by national macro assumptions, while still requiring vigilance for structural inventory gaps, demographic shifts, and policy shocks that lenders and policymakers must factor in to understand true housing opportunity.)

Lender and Broker Services, Products, and Software

ServiceLink is proudly celebrating a banner year, driven by a team committed to Linking What Matters™ for lenders, investors, and servicers. In 2025, ServiceLink employees were recognized by multiple industry organizations and publications. We congratulate all winners, including the HousingWire Women of Influence Award winner Eva Tapia, Senior Vice President, Auction; HousingWire Tech Trendsetters Award winner Amit Kulkarni, Senior Vice President, Product Management; Women in Housing Industry Partner Impact Award winner Miriam Moore, Division President, Default Services; HousingWire Vanguard Award winner Dave Steinmetz, Division President, Origination Services; and 2025 Valuation Visionary Award winner Liz Green, Senior Vice President, Valuation Solutions, to name a few. Organizationally, ServiceLink is proud to be the recipient of the 2025 MortgagePoint Tech Excellence award, the 2025 Progress in Lending Tech Titan award, the HousingWire Tech100 award and the 2025 Game Changer award by Progress in Lending. Check out more from ServiceLink’s newsroom here.

“Correspondent-in-a-Box (CIAB) powered by Black Lake is the mortgage industry’s answer to that moment when you open your pantry, stare at random ingredients, and somehow expect dinner to assemble itself. Lenders keep doing the same thing: hoping a correspondent channel, a bid desk, or a non-QM strategy will magically appear. Spoiler: it won’t. So, we built a solution that does assemble itself. Think of it like the modern air fryer of correspondent lending: drop in your loans, push a button, and voilà: pool-level best-ex, loan-level best-ex, Non-QM hedging, investor discovery, and a fully-contained execution engine powered by AI/ML that never burns the fries. Agency, non-QM, second lien, whole loan… it handles the whole menu. Unlike kitchen gadgets that charge you upfront, we’re your partner, not a subscription with recurring minimum fees. Serve up correspondent excellence, without the smoke alarms. Contact: info@blacklakeinvestments.com or book a demo to learn more.”

The Chrisman Marketplace is a centralized hub for vendors and service providers across the mortgage industry to be viewed by lenders in a very cost-effective manner. We’re adding new providers daily, so check back often to see what’s new. To reserve your place or learn more, contact us at info@chrismancommentary.com.

STRATMOR on Borrower Psychology

Mortgage lenders spend a lot of time focused on rates, products, and technology. But what if the biggest opportunity is much simpler, and much more human? STRATMOR Group’s latest InFocus article, “The ROI of ‘Why’: Fixing One Defining Borrower Moment Can Transform Your Business,” looks at how fixing one often-overlooked borrower interaction can have an outsized impact on pull-through, trust, and long-term loyalty. It’s not about adding another tool or redesigning the entire process. It’s about understanding — and responding to — the borrower’s “why” at the moments it matters most. Based on real-world experience and borrower insight, the article challenges lenders to rethink how empathy shows up in the mortgage process and why that shift can deliver measurable ROI. Read the firm’s latest Insights Report here.

Capital Markets

Despite a 25-basis point rate cut and the launch of $40 billion per month in T-bill purchases, investors have fixated on the 2026 “dot plot,” which shows only one rate cut next year, an outlook increasingly at odds with Powell’s caution that payroll data may be overstating job growth and that true job creation “may actually be negative.” With the BLS set to backfill two months of missing employment reports due to the shutdown before the next Fed meeting, the labor picture is unusually murky. Additionally, the dot plot’s projection of lower 2026 core PCE inflation (to 2.5 percent) sits uncomfortably beside rising evidence of labor-market deterioration. As a result, the dot plot may prove too optimistic: the risks to the policy path skew toward more, not fewer, cuts, especially if the weak labor momentum extends into early 2025.

The recent steepening of the Treasury curve, driven by short-end strength and aided by the Fed’s shift of mortgage roll-off toward the front end, has widened the 2s/10s spread to its highest level since early September, benefiting agency ARMs but pressuring lower-coupon 30-year MBS and favoring Treasuries in relative-value terms. How far this curve move extends will depend on the scale of forthcoming “reserve management purchases,” which Fed Chair Powell (during his press conference) noted will be supported by removing limits on standing repo operations. Outright T-bill purchases financed by newly created bank reserves expand the money supply, unlike simple balance-sheet asset swaps, and therefore carry the classic inflationary risks associated with central bank debt monetization.

Treasuries still remain range-bound, with 10-year yields repeatedly failing to hold above 4.20 percent and 2-year yields anchored near 3.50 percent, reflecting investors’ reluctance to embrace the Fed’s projections ahead of next week’s pivotal CPI and payroll releases. For now, the market’s consolidation (and the Fed’s own shift toward emphasizing the “extent and timing” of future adjustments) suggests a nearing pause in rate cuts, but the data arriving in the coming weeks will determine whether that pause is brief or even feasible. Yesterday’s 30-year Treasury auction went smoothly. It ended with a slightly better-than-expected yield, and most of the buying came from investors outside the big Wall Street banks. Demand was roughly in line with normal levels, and although bonds had cooled off a bit before the auction, prices didn’t move much afterward.

We learned yesterday that jobless claims rose sharply to 236k, the highest since September, while continuing claims unexpectedly fell to their lowest level since April, though both series were likely affected by seasonal Thanksgiving distortions. At the same time, the trade deficit narrowed far more than expected to $52.8 billion, its smallest since June 2020, as exports posted their strongest monthly gain in over two years and imports edged higher, contributing to an overall mixed but steady set of data that has kept markets in a range-trading pattern. And after getting within 3-basis points of the year-to-date lows in the prior week, mortgage rates rose for the first time in three weeks in the latest week’s Primary Mortgage Market Survey from Freddie Mac. For the week ending December 11, the 30-year and 15-year mortgage rates rose 3-basis points and 10-basis points to 6.22 percent and 5.54 percent, respectively, though they remain lower by 38-basis points and 30-basis points from a year ago.

There aren’t any scheduled economic releases on today’s calendar, but Fedspeak resumes, with at least three speakers: Philadelphia’s Paulson, Cleveland’s Hammack, and Chicago’s Goolsbee. Without any data on today’s calendar, we begin Friday with Agency MBS prices slightly worse than Thursday’s close, the 2-year yielding 3.54, and the 10-year yielding 4.17 after closing yesterday at 4.14 percent.