What’s the landscape look like in 2023? What best practices can we use in 2023 to be successful? What is the industry going to look like?

Looking back, in the second half of 2019, interest rates start to come down. Things are getting good in the industry again, and then in early 2020, we have that COVID – 15 days to slow the spread. The Federal Reserve starts buying mortgage-backed securities, and we’re just off to the races.

But what happened in 2022? The Federal Reserve stopped buying mortgage-backed securities, and interest rates more than doubled. We found ourselves at the end of the year during the slowest origination period, probably in 25 years, maybe longer, because 25 years ago we had fewer people in this country. When we look at 2023, what’s projected to be a little over 2 trillion. Overall, that’s down from 2022. But when you look at the run rate, what were the last six months of 2022?

We’re going to tick up a little bit in 2023, and we anticipate that we’ll start to feel that at the beginning of the second quarter is what’s been predicted. We will have roughly 90 days of hand-to-hand combat, face-to-face, and belly-to-belly sales.

It’s going to be a challenging time in January, February, and March.

As we enter that spring market, we should look for those origination wins. People are more used to the interest rates that we’re at right now. They don’t want to miss out on a spring buying season. For 2023, we think we might be touching six, maybe a little bit less for the second six months. We might get down to the mid-fives, perhaps the mid to low-fives, as we get towards November.

Use this time wisely.

Are you taking this time to plant seeds? Get more referral sources? Talk to more Realtors? Get in front of more financial planners or work on your online presence. We have this time right now to commit ourselves to improve our technology stack and tackling social media. Overall, we do anticipate things improving and becoming significantly better in 2023. If there is anything we can do to help you in any way, feel free to reach out to us.

Please tune in to Owen Lee’s “State Of the Industry” to hear his take on what we might see in the Mortgage Industry in 2023 – you won’t want to miss it.