Editor’s Note: The Mortgage Mix is RISMedia’s biweekly highlight reel of need-to-know mortgage-industry happenings. Watch for it every other Friday afternoon.
– Mortgage rates ticked up slightly during the second week of June, from 6.48% to 6.52% per findings from Freddie Mac, but mortgage applications also creeped up due to so-called “pockets of opportunity” (e.g., rates are still comparatively lower than recent rates).
– Fannie Mae’s monthly housing outlook for June projected lower loan origination volume over the next two years, as well as a projection for interest rates to rise by the end of 2027.
– Mortgage lender Better and Coinbase have officially closed the first Fannie Mae-supported mortgage backed by Bitcoin, a major first step in the ongoing integration of cryptocurrency into mortgage financing.
– ICE Mortgage Technology found that American homeowners pulled about $47 billion in equity from their homes during the first quarter of 2026. This was the highest amount of pulled equity for a Q1 period since 2021, but it was also a slight drop-off from $49 billion equity pulled during Q4 2025.
– Retail lender OneTrust Home Loans has filed a lawsuit for theft of trade secrets against United Wholesale Mortgage, E Mortgage Capital and 31 individual defendants. The lawsuit claims that the defendants, former employees of OneTrust now employed at E Mortgage, stole business from OneTrust by diverting $31 million in business to E Mortgage and that UWM was “willfully blind” in funding these loans. “E Mortgage Capital maintains a clear and firm policy: individuals who join our company are not permitted to bring leads, borrower information, or any loan opportunities that belong to a former employer,” said the company in a statement.
– Recent data found that 89% of homebuyers would be comfortable sharing their financial information with a lender’s AI tools, suggesting growing acceptance of AI among homebuyers—53% of buyers said they would be comfortable buying a home without any human involvement, even.
– The Mortgage Bankers Association of America and subsidiary the Mortgage Industry Standards Maintenance Organization (MISMO) have released a new toolkit, dubbed FRAME, designed to establish unified policy oversight for the use of AI in mortgage lending. “As artificial intelligence becomes increasingly embedded throughout mortgage operations, mortgage companies face growing pressure to establish governance structures capable of managing AI-related risks while supporting innovation. FRAME was developed to help organizations meet that challenge,” read the association’s statement.
