Revenue fell to $74.5 million, down from $78.3 million a year earlier, marking the 11th-straight quarter of decline, according to financial results posted by RE/MAX Thursday after the markets closed.
FHFA Director Bill Pulte tells “crypto influencer” he’s signed more than 80 orders revamping policies and procedures at the mortgage giants, only 12 of which have been made public.
In a sweeping interview from his Chicago office, @properties co-CEO Thad Wong shared his high stakes pursuit of Christie’s and selling his company to Compass after being one of its critics.
Alex Seavall and Candace Adams will be taking on roles at HomeServices as chief financial and operations officer and executive vice president, respectively. Brenda Maher is being promoted to president of Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices New England and New York Properties.
The company was among the remaining large brokerages that had yet to reach a settlement agreement before it announced it had reached settlement terms on Friday.
David Rands, chief financial officer at housing nonprofit Enterprise Community Partners, is taking on an expanded role as the organization’s chief operating officer and chief financial officer. The move was effective May 1.
The move comes as Enterprise combines its finance and operations functions following the recent departure of former COO Drew Warshaw.
Consolidation is intended to streamline leadership and improve coordination across the organization’s core divisions, which include capital, community development and housing solutions, leaders said.
Rands joined Enterprise in 2024 with nearly three decades of experience in financial and operational leadership roles. Before coming to Enterprise, he held senior positions at Volkswagen Financial Services and Citibank.
The new “COFO” said he looks forward to helping Enterprise respond to increasingly steep housing costs by supporting its internal teams and driving organizational efficiency.
“I joined Enterprise Community Partners last year to work alongside passionate individuals looking to address our urgent housing affordability crisis, and I’m grateful to have the opportunity to now take on an expanded role as chief operating and financial officer,” Rands said in a statement.
“As the affordable housing crisis deepens, I look forward to helping strengthen Enterprise’s core mission of providing sustainable homes and communities for millions of families across the country.”
Before joining Enterprise, Rands served as CEO and managing director of Volkswagen Financial Services Mexico, where he oversaw banking and financing activities for eight automotive brands and more than 300 dealerships.
He previously held roles as CFO and executive vice president of Volkswagen Credit, where he led major process improvements and cost-saving initiatives. Earlier in his career, Rands worked at Citibank as a finance director.
Rands holds an MBA and a bachelor’s degree in political science from the University of Utah.
Enterprise Community Partners recently announced that the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) had reversed a decision to terminate nearly $10 million in technical assistance funding, reinstating two key federal agreements tied to affordable housing efforts.
California-based real estate investment trust Redwood Trust is expanding its role as a liquidity provider in the jumbo mortgage market while policymakers continue to debate the future of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
Redwood’s jumbo loan lock volumes totaled $4 billion in the first three months of 2025, surging 73% compared to the the previous quarter. That figure represents its highest quarterly volume since the third quarter of 2021, a period marked by aggressive quantitative easing from the Federal Reserve.
“This is very much market share,” CEO Chris Abate told HousingWire in an interview.
Following the regional banking turmoil in 2023, when institutions like First Republic, Signature Bank and Silicon Valley Bank collapsed, depository lenders began pulling back from holding mortgages on their balance sheets. In turn, Redwood is working to activate the previously “dormant” jumbo market.
Redwood now estimates its share of the jumbo space at 6% to 7%, up from 5% in 2024 and a long-term average of about 2%.
“The housing market remains tough; we think 6% [mortgage rates] as the fulcrum where you start to see demand pick up a lot in housing. Mortgage rates have been closer to 7%, so there’s been limited new production activity,” Abate said. “But there’s over a trillion dollars of seasoned jumbo mortgages on bank balance sheets.”
To capture this opportunity, Redwood has partnered with regional banks, many of which lack broker-dealer capabilities or capital markets infrastructure. Unlike larger banks and broker-dealers — often viewed as competitors — Redwood positions itself as a collaborative partner to these institutions.
Redwood’s business model is similar in structure, although smaller in scale, to that of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The company doesn’t originate or service loans but acts as a liquidity provider, purchasing loans and selling them into the secondary market through securitizations. Over its 30-year history, Redwood has completed 140 securitization deals.
Despite market volatility, investor appetite for jumbo assets has been “surprisingly robust,” Abate said. But he pointed to regulatory hurdles that could be eased to attract more international capital — particularly from Europe and Asia. These include risk retention rules and restrictions around public securitization platforms.
Meanwhile, private capital could increase participation in the mortgage market with a retreat from the government-sponsored enterprises.
“We’ve gotten tremendous inquiries from private credit institutions who are underinvested in residential mortgages because of the government’s dominant share — there’s more capital today to crowd into the private sector than there ever has been in my experience,” Abate said.
He sees the Trump administration as willing to “just, philosophically, level the playing field” between the private sector and the GSEs. Realistically speaking, however, he believes that releasing the enterprises from conservatorship won’t happen before 2027 or 2028 due to several reasons. These include the 2026 midterm elections, a potential recession and the need to build capital.
In addition, the government has to convert the Department of the Treasury’s senior preferred shares into common equity and obtain credit ratings for the GSEs’ securitizations. There will also be some political opposition, Abate said.
“There’s going to be a lot of battles,” he added. “You wouldn’t want to see a big shock to mortgage rates or big impediments to home access, with respect to things like loan limits or guarantee fees. Gradual changes make sense.”
On the macroeconomic front, Abate said the economy is clearly slowing, which will make the credit market more challenging in the second half of the year. He also pointed to the historically wide spread between the 10-year Treasury yield — approaching 4% — and mortgage rates, which remain in the high 6% to low 7% range.
“That [gap] could close if spreads tighten,” Abate said. “But ultimately, the drivers of mortgage rates are going to be a function of the broader economy and the impact of tariffs, tax legislation and government borrowing.”
Redwood is preparing accordingly, ensuring it doesn’t hold excessive risk on its balance sheet while maintaining a consistent presence in the securitization market. The company posted net income of $14.4 million in Q1 2025, compared to an $8.4 million loss in the prior quarter.
Russell Vought, the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB), submitted the president’s fiscal year 2026 budget request to the chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee on Friday and is calling for $163 billion in non-defense spending cuts.
If the cuts are approved, roughly one-fifth of these funds, or $32.9 billion, would come from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), according to HousingWire‘s review of the proposal.
The budget proposal released on Friday is non-binding, but it could be indicative of the direction that President Donald Trump and his allies in Congress will aim to take the debate over the next several months. The current government funding deadline is Sept. 30, at which point Congress must pass a funding package to keep the government open.
Proposed HUD cuts
The largest proposed cut to HUD by far would target the State Rental Assistance Block Grant program. It would trim $26.7 billion across a variety of programs, including tenant-based rental assistance, public housing, project-based rental assistance, housing for the elderly and housing for people with disabilities.
“The budget empowers states by transforming the current federal dysfunctional rental assistance programs into a state-based formula grant which would allow states to design their own rental assistance programs based on their unique needs and preferences,” Vought said in the document.
“The budget would also newly institute a two-year cap on rental assistance for able bodied adults, and would ensure a majority of rental assistance funding through states would go to the elderly and disabled.”
A state-based formula program would “also lead to significant terminations of federal regulations,” he said, adding that the effort is related to broader moves to include federal land in the development of new housing.
The document also calls for the elimination of the Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) program, cutting $3.3 billion in total. Vought calls the CDBG program “poorly targeted,” saying it is used for “a variety of projects that the federal government should not be funding.”
The document also calls for the elimination of the HOME Investment Partnerships Program ($1.25 billion); Native American and Native Hawaiian housing assistance block programs ($479 million); cuts of $532 million in “homeless assistance program” consolidations; and $296 million in surplus lead hazard reduction and healthy homes funding.
Additionally, it calls for cuts of $196 million in self-sufficiency programs; $100 million to eliminate the Pathways to Removing Obstacles (PRO) Housing initiative; and $60 million in fair housing grants, including the elimination of the Fair Housing Initiatives Program (FHIP).
HUD, organization reactions
HUD Secretary Scott Turner praised the budget proposal as one that “rightfully provides states and localities greater flexibility while thoughtfully consolidating, streamlining, and simplifying existing programs to serve the American people at the highest standard,” he said in a statement.
He added that it “creates the opportunity for greater partnership and collaboration across levels of government by requiring states and localities to have skin in the game and carefully consider how their policies hinder or advance goals of self-sufficiency and economic prosperity.”
Reactions from housing advocates, however, were far more mixed. Some organizations, like the Community Home Lenders of America (CHLA), want to see more details before making a wider determination.
“CHLA’s main budget focus is on ensuring adequate funding and staffing for FHA and Ginnie Mae,” said Scott Olson, CHLA’s executive director. “Since the ‘skinny budget’ only provides broad policy proposals, we will have to wait for a more itemized budget and action by appropriators to determine how those programs will fare.”
The National Housing Law Project (NHLP) blasted the budget proposal shortly after it was released on Friday. The plan “cuts life-saving programs that keep poor and working people housed, fed, and healthy,” according to NHLP executive director Shamus Roller.
NHC: Plan is likely ‘dead on arrival’
David Dworkin, the president and CEO of the National Housing Conference (NHC) called the budget proposal “draconian,” but added that it comes with a silver lining.
“The good news is that the housing budget is likely dead on arrival,” Dworkin said in an interview on Friday. “The depth of the cuts would create both a massive homelessness crisis and a real estate crisis where owners of apartment buildings that rely on Housing Choice Vouchers would be going bankrupt at a breathtaking pace.”
He said that the budget as proposed would provide no “better way to put more businesses into bankruptcy than by slashing Housing Choice Vouchers.” He added there would be “no better way to undercut the president’s entire housing affordability agenda than this HUD budget.”
The proposals bring him a feeling that members of Congress, including Republicans, could not support such cuts.
“That would be consistent with past budgets going back to President Reagan, where OMB recommended cuts, but the process ultimately led to negotiations that preserved many key programs,” he said.
This is unlikely to be a year that brings new affordable housing money flowing from government coffers — and funding will in fact be cut, Dworkin said. But Republican lawmakers are increasingly representing constituents “who are struggling with housing affordability for this budget to pass.”
Dworkin called Vought a “committed libertarian” who believes that the government should have no place in the programs he has targeted for cuts.
“I respect that — but he won’t be the one held responsible for what happens,” he said. “In practice, those who vote for the budget are going to be held accountable.
“Ultimately, the HUD secretary will be left dealing with what’s left. That’s the dynamic where we move from the ideological to the practical, and the practical is where legislation actually gets made.”
eXp Luxury, the upscale division of real estate brokerage eXp Realty, is teaming with MORE Seller Financing to give luxury home sellers new tools to attract buyers and improve listing performance in a high interest rate environment.
The partnership, announced this week, will give eXp Luxury agents access to the MORE Seller Bridge Loan Program — a short-term seller financing option that lets sellers convert their existing low-rate mortgages into income after selling their home.
“Luxury sellers are looking for every advantage to sell faster and maintain a higher sales price, especially in today’s rate-sensitive environment,” said Ryan Leahy, founder of MORE Seller Financing.
“Partnering with eXp Luxury allows us to offer our turnkey, compliant, and seller-controlled financing program to a wider network of top-tier real estate professionals and their clients.”
The program provides seller-financed loans to buyers at interest rates below the current market average, typically for terms of three years or less.
These rates — as low as 3.99% — can make listings more competitive without requiring sellers to lower the asking price, MORE explained.
In addition to making properties more affordable for buyers, the arrangement can generate ongoing income for sellers from their original mortgages, which are often at lower rates than what new buyers can currently obtain.
As part of the collaboration, eXp Luxury agents will be able to offer clients marketing materials that highlight available seller financing and attorney-reviewed financing agreements. They can also obtain support from licensed mortgage servicing companies that handle monthly payments, property taxes and year-end tax documents.
The nomination of Jonathan McKernan to lead the besieged Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) remains uncertain. While his nomination was passed out of the Senate Banking Committee nearly two months ago, it has remained on the executive calendar of the Senate without being scheduled for a vote.
There is not an abundance of hard facts related to the potential for the nomination to move forward, but some in the housing space have spoken about it. Tim Scott, the chair of the Senate Banking Committee, said last month that he expected McKernan could be confirmed in May. But there have yet to be signs of progress on a vote to seat him.
Tim Rood, the founder and CEO of Impact Capitol and a former executive at Fannie Mae, recently took to social media platform X to suggest that the nomination will take longer than previously thought — or it may not happen at all.
Rood said there are “rumblings” that a Democratic demand for 30 hours of floor time prior to the actual vote taking place could effectively push out the nomination. This is because there are several other outstanding issues that the Senate would want to take up first.
When reached by HousingWire on Friday, Rood said that it appeared to him that Democrats would seek to make the vote for McKernan a referendum on Russell Vought — the acting CFPB director and head of the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) — and the cost-cutting efforts he has undertaken.
Rood also suggested in his post that McKernan may not have been consulted on some of the recent actions taken regarding CFPB staffing cuts, or a recent memo outlining revised bureau supervision and enforcement priorities.
“The new priorities and [reduction in force] will result in an agency that is fundamentally different than the one he signed up to lead in the first instance,” Rood said in his post. “The lack of consultation would also say a few things about potential misalignment between the administration’s plan for the agency and McKernan’s.”
This could lead to McKernan choosing to withdraw his name from consideration — which would likely lead to an outcome that CFPB defenders would not like to see happen.
David Dworkin, president and CEO of the National Housing Conference (NHC), told HousingWire that CFPB defenders — namely Democrats — should be moving to support McKernan’s quick nomination.
“If you care about the mission of the CFPB, you want a guy like Jonathan McKernan in there as soon as possible,” Dworkin said. “And Democrats should be bending over backwards to help him get confirmed. He is not going to be their ideal candidate, but he will be the best person they could hope for.”
McKernan will follow the broader agenda of the Trump administration and the president himself, Dworkin said, but he would avoid “gutting everything” that the bureau has previously done.
“Jonathan is committed to following the statute,” he said. “That is a reasonable expectation that everyone should be behind.”
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