The fall housing market is sending a clear message that sellers are adjusting expectations. The latest HW Data shows 42% of active single-family listings nationwide include a price cut. The median markdown is 4%, showing that many sellers are trimming just enough to bring buyers back to the table without significantly resetting market values.

Prices and inventory

Nationwide inventory totals 863,972 listings, equal to a 2.76-month supply at the current sales pace. The median list price holds at $444,900, while new listings entered the market at a lower $410,000 median. On a per-square-foot basis, the national median is $215.

This stability at the median, combined with widespread markdowns, illustrates how sellers are testing pricing and then repositioning to meet buyer demand. Cuts are concentrated at mid-range and higher price tiers, where affordability pressures are most pronounced.

Days on market trends

Homes are taking slightly longer to sell compared with early September. The median days on market is 70, up from the low 60s a month earlier. The average listing age has reached 112 days, underscoring the gap between well-priced homes that move quickly and overpriced ones that stall until reductions are made.

Pending sales and buyer activity

Buyer activity remains steady despite higher mortgage costs. There are 362,632 homes under contract with a median pending price of $399,990. Contracts are averaging 36.6 days in escrow, showing that when pricing aligns, buyers are acting decisively.

The Market Action Index stands at 34, keeping the market on the seller’s side of neutral but far from the overheated conditions of recent years.

Outlook and professional takeaway

The data points to a balancing market. List prices appear steady, but nearly half of sellers are making concessions in the form of markdowns. For real estate professionals, the takeaway is clear. Pricing strategy matters more than ever. Advising sellers to position homes realistically at listing, or to respond quickly with reductions if activity stalls, is critical to achieving timely sales.

Buyers should recognize that cuts create opportunities. With inventory near 864,000 homes nationwide, those watching carefully may find leverage in negotiations this fall.

For additional context on why inventory growth has slowed, see HousingWire lead analyst Logan Mohtashami’s Housing Market Tracker.

Cleveland-based CrossCountry Mortgage (CCM) has taken a different approach from competitors. Rather than pursuing mergers and acquisitions to strengthen its origination and servicing platforms, the company has focused on organic growth by acquiring mortgage servicing rights (MSRs) and building an asset management arm.  

“Our servicing portfolio by year-end will be approximately $200 billion, and we’ve acquired $72 billion in MSRs year to date,” Ron Leonhardt, the company’s CEO and founder, said in an exclusive interview with HousingWire. 

The company’s pro forma second-quarter 2025 MSR portfolio stood at roughly $143 billion, it claims. “We think it’s super important for LOs that they know that we retain all of our loans, and we’re actively marketing their databases for them and trying to get them back qualified customers.” 

CrossCountry’s strategic moves

Another strategic move was the creation of an asset management division a few years ago. This arm, which already manages $7 billion in assets, recently closed a $1 billion funding deal with Ares Alternative Credit and Hildene Capital Management, representing roughly $20 billion in potential new non-QM loans. “We created the asset manager and the non-QM seccuritization platform, and we view it as being an important piece of our future, as diversifying our revenue for the company,” Leonhardt said.  

At this stage, expanding the asset management business beyond loans originated by CCM is not part of the company’s immediate plan. But Leonhardt — a former mortgage broker who founded CCM in 2003 — doesn’t rule it out in the future.

CCM also recently completed the issuance of $900 million in debt, after previously considering but ultimately passing on high-yield offerings in 2021 and 2022 due to unfavorable pricing.

“We kind of kicked the can down the road,” Leonhardt said. “Our inaugural offering was over seven times oversubscribed; we had approximately 200 institutional investors. We did extremely well. Investors believe in the story and the financial makeup of the company.”  

The interview

Leonhardt went in depth on several topics during the course of a recent interview with HousingWire, which has been edited for length and clarity.

Flávia Nunes: Based on CrossCountry’s recent moves, it looks like the company is focused on strengthening its funding structure. When have you started to deploy these strategies? 

Ron Leonhardt: As far as the asset manager, you’re seeing the end product, but this started in probably mid-2022. We created the asset manager and the non-QM securitization platform, and we view it as being an important piece of our future, as diversifying our revenue for the company. 

The first deal was done with Hildene; since probably 2023, we’ve done 17 non-QM securitizations. We have the third overall non-QM securitization platform as a whole by volume. And, as you know, we’re retail, so it’s not like we’re buying from hundreds of people. It’s pretty important to go ahead and build that out. It’s an important part of our strategy going forward.

Nunes: How do you see the broader mortgage landscape right now?

Leonhardt: When you look at the landscape right now, every down market follows an up market. And I believe that we operate really well in bad markets throughout my history of owning the company, and we’ve always taken market share. We’ve reinvented ourselves in these down markets, and I view it as being extremely important to having multiple revenue streams to compete with some of the bigger companies we’ve seen be put together in the future.

Nunes: Will all these different revenue streams come from mortgage-related products, or can we expect CrossCountry to expand to other financial products?

Leonhardt: No, our extensions are, we have servicing. Our servicing portfolio by year-end will be approximately $200 billion, and we’ve acquired $72 billion in MSRs year to date. We see our income kind of growing — we have our asset manager, our servicing fee income and we also have our origination income.

Nunes: What is currently the most relevant area in terms of income for the company? 

Leonhardt: I would say origination and servicing are, in my eyes, equal because they fuel each other. The asset manager, I believe, we have close to $7 billion in assets under management. We’ve done extremely well since it’s been open, but that one’s only been going on for two and a half years. But again, having servicing is extremely important, for the future of the mortgage market, in the next five- to 10-year outlook. 

Nunes: Is your plan to expand the asset manager for assets other than non-QM loans? 

Leonhardt: We do plan on expanding it with some different product offerings that we’ll probably release later this year — residential transition loans, bridge, fix-and-flip, and this will be for resi multifamily. We’re going to do builder financing, resi and multifamily, and we’ll be offering the multifamily for up to 30 units. Those will be products that we will be offering by year end that will fit into that asset management bucket.

Nunes: What is the volume in the non-QM space for the lender?

Leonhardt: This year, our current lock volume puts us at almost a $9 billion-a-year run rate in non-QM locks. It’s a pretty significant piece for us, a great tool to attract a lot of good originators who do non-QM loans, because so many companies have a really broken process on it. We’ve sort of perfected it. And I think people look at us as the clear-cut leader in non-QM lending. 

Nunes: You mentioned the $7 billion under management, but how relevant can the asset management arm become?  

Leonhardt: The money that was raised by Hildene and Ares will give us an additional $20 billion of dry powder for non-QM loan purchases. When that $20 billion is done, we’ll go raise more. The $1 billion in capital commitments will fund $20 billion in origination, accounting for the risk retention requirements related to non-QM securitizations. 

CCM will act as the co-sponsor, and Ares and Hildene will be the retaining sponsors on each securitization. We get paid a management fee on the assets under management and an incentive fee on the performance of the securitizations.

Nunes: Could CCM look like a Rithm Capital in the future, more so than other origination and servicing competitors?

Leonhardt: Our core strategy is retail, but we feel that having these two two different revenue streams is going to really fuel our retail origination and really is good for the originator. It’s all about how you’re acquiring the loans. We don’t do correspondent or wholesale; we’re producing all of our own loans. But again, this will also give us a lot of pricing power to the originator.

Nunes: How competitive can you be on the pricing side when you have this structure?

Leonhardt: We’ve been extremely competitive already. If you look at the companies who have had a lot of issues since 2022, I would say the majority of them don’t have servicing or other revenue streams. 

I feel like we are extremely competitively priced. I don’t think there’s anyone who’s the clear rock bottom out there. I would say more in the coming years, we feel we will be shifting our focus from origination income to servicing income, which means that our main purpose of doing that loan is really for the service fee income. The ambition is to have 75% from fee servicing, and we think that we’ll be there, probably, in the next 24 months. 

Nunes: How does this strategy differentiate CrossCountry from competitors, especially those who have recently engaged in mergers and acquisitions such as Rocket, Mr. Cooper, Bayview and Guild? 

Leonhardt: When you look at those deals, and when you look at what we’re doing, it’s very similar. We are the largest retail lender in the country and we’re growing a pretty sizable servicing portfolio. 

If you look at my direct peers who I’m competing against, no one’s close to us in servicing. When I look at it, you’re putting a massive origination team together with a very scaled servicing platform. And I’m talking about Mr. Cooper and Rocket, and I’m talking about Bayview and Guild – again, we didn’t have to do an acquisition. We just did it organically.

Nunes: Is CrossCountry still looking at M&A transactions with smaller competitors, like AmCap?

Leonhardt: We’re always looking at M&A opportunities. I don’t think any fit our criteria, or would have been a good fit so far, so we’ll keep exploring that. We feel good. Our branch network has done a great job helping us grow. So, at this point, we don’t feel like it’s something we need to do. It’s more, it would be more opportunistic in nature.

Nunes: How aggressive has CCM been in terms of hiring and retaining LOs? 

Leonhardt: We’ve had great success attracting and retaining top LOs. If you just look at some of the LOs we’ve taken on over the last two to three years, we haven’t lost one top 10 LO in the last six-plus years. I believe our retention of the top 250 in the last six years is approximately 98%, and that accounts for about 40% of our total volume. 

But when you see these big names moving companies, they’re coming here. We’ve had great success in doing that. That’s why there’s really no need to force an M&A deal.

Nunes: How has CrossCountry Mortgage invested in its operations? 

Leonhardt: We have the best platform in the industry. We’ve put the work in over the last three years in a down market to expand our proprietary tech. 

Our product lineup is unmatched by anyone under one umbrella. Everything’s done in house, whether it’s construction loans, non-QM loans. We have over 50 institutional investors in our CROSS securitization shelf, and we keep expanding that. We’ve grown our marketing team over the last three years instead of downsizing it. We’re pouring money into all different departments. Operations still have 30% capacity. We always want to make sure we have enough room to grow into it; it comes down to our benefit. We check the box in every department. 

Nunes: How is the company investing in technology amid the AI revolution? 

Leonhardt: We’re using some vendor AI tools, but we also have developed a slew of them ourselves in house. I would say our focus is more on the operation side, to go ahead and lower our cost to originate. We are exploring throughout the organization, every department, and how we can improve that department with AI.

I believe just figuring out how you’re going to deploy and use certain technologies in the future in the mortgage world is going to be important. It’s changing so rapidly that guys who developed what they thought was proprietary tech just two, three years ago, I hear these guys, ‘Oh, I developed this proprietary tech. It’s irrelevant. It’s not native.’

I do think that that’s probably the biggest challenge: figuring out how everything is going to shake out with the use of technology and AI in the mortgage industry. There appears to be multiple use cases for it in our business, from sales to operations to HR to marketing. It’s going to hit every department.

The NSW government is under pressure from the construction industry to wind back some of the tough legislative requirements that came in the wake of the Opal Tower and Mascot Towers calamities.

The Master Builders Association of New South Wales (MBA) says the legislation introduced “negative impacts” on the residential sector.

“The pendulum has now swung too far the other way, resulting in an unnecessarily complex and often confusing legislative framework which in turn is increasingly elevating the front-end costs of construction projects,” it suggested.

“NSW now has one of the most administratively burdensome and expensive regulatory systems for the construction of apartment buildings in Australia.”

MORE: Aus pub’s $500m collapse, staff owed $7m

The Public Accountability and Works Committee of the NSW parliament is conducting a review into the Design and Building Practitioners Act 2020 and the Residential Apartment Buildings (Compliance and Enforcement Powers) Act 2020.

The MBA submission accuses strata owner corporations of issuing “unjustified defects lists and noncompliances, some even after 10 years.”

It suggests “construction is not perfect,” and even cars that are built in a controlled environment don’t have endless maintenance obligations to their purchases.

“Most defects and noncompliances are not material and are issued as extortion to gain a cash settlement,” the MBA claims.

MBA suggests the legislation goes against one of the NSW government’s mainstays in “reducing red tape” and hinders the ability to meet new housing supply quotas.

MORE: Locked in – these borrowers miss out on rate cut relief

The MBA says the heightened requirements arose from “too much focus being put on Mascot and Opal Towers, that tarred the remainder of industry with the same defective brush.”

Initially the DBP Act focused on new large-scale apartments higher than four storey, but now encompasses three storeys and lower.

In December 2023, the investigation and enforcement powers of Building Commission NSW were extended to include single dwelling houses.

The legislation also applies to the renovation and maintenance of existing buildings.

The MBA alleges builders are quitting the industry in part because of an inability to obtain indemnity insurance. “It is so risky that insurers won’t participate despite assurances before the commencement of the DBP Act.”

The MBA is concerned that the builder bears the majority of the liability for other trades, consultants, designers, engineers, certifiers, architects, shortfalls, “as they are not held to the same level of accountability.”

MORE: ‘Absolute chaos’: Rate cuts’ instant impact

“Many established builders in NSW are considering leaving the industry,” it notes.

“The constant complaint we hear is that state and federal governments have changed so much legislation that the industry participants cannot keep up with this change.”

The MBA supports reforms including increased focus on training, formalising supervisory skills requirements and developing quality assurance programs.

The post ‘Too expensive: pressure on to roll back ‘Opal Tower’ laws appeared first on realestate.com.au.

Australia is on the precipice of a mould epidemic, and if you’re like the vast majority of your fellow Aussies, you’re dangerously unprepared.

With a “wetter and warmer” forecast promising a bumper season for this insidious invader, millions of homeowners and renters are unknowingly living on the edge of a financial and health catastrophe.

The shocking truth? A staggering number of us have no idea how our home insurance actually covers mould, leaving us wide open to devastating costs and, as one celebrity’s terrifying ordeal reveals, serious illness.

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New research from insurance comparison site iSelect has exposed a gaping chasm in our collective understanding, painting a grim picture of national ignorance.

Across every state and territory, a terrifying majority of residents simply don’t grasp the fine print of mould coverage in their home insurance policies.

The figures are alarming: 73 per cent of NSW residents, 72 per cent of QLD residents, 64 per cent of ACT residents, 88 per cent of NT residents, 63 per cent of SA residents, 72 per cent of TAS residents, 73 per cent of VIC residents, and 71 per cent of WA residents are completely in the dark.

This widespread confusion leaves a staggering number of Australians vulnerable to unexpected clean-up costs and irreparable damage to their belongings, especially as recent heavy rains and humid conditions transform our properties into prime breeding grounds for mould.

The country’s ‘mould capital’ regions are particularly at risk, facing a perfect storm of environmental conditions and homeowner unawareness.

The hidden health hazard: Rachael Finch’s terrifying ordeal

But the financial hit is merely the tip of a much more sinister iceberg.

The health consequences of mould exposure are profoundly disturbing, a reality brought into chilling focus by former Miss Universe, model, TV host and wellness advocate Rachael Finch.

In a raw and candid social media post, Finch recounted her daughter Violet’s harrowing battle with a mysterious, relentless cough that emerged shortly after they moved into a Coogee, NSW, home.

“When we lived in Coogee I was coughing non-stop. It started randomly when we moved to Coogee a couple of weeks in,” Violet bravely shared.

Rachel elaborated on their desperate, months-long quest for answers: “We couldn’t, for the life of us, work out what it was. When she was playing tennis, she would be coughing. When she woke up, she’d cough. During the day, she’d cough. She’d cough in the shower.”

Their arduous journey eventually led them to a respiratory specialist, where the horrifying truth was finally uncovered.

“One of the main reasons why we moved out of Coogee was because of mould,” Rachel revealed.

“We noticed it growing through the garage.

“What the people before us must have done is just painted over the walls to make it nice and fresh and we started smelling and seeing mould through the walls.”

The sheer scale of the infestation was stomach-churning; Violet remembered her bedroom fan turning “black and green,” while Rachel’s own dresses were consumed by the “disgusting” growth.

“So that’s when we thought, maybe the cough is from the mould,” Rachel concluded.

A subsequent mycotoxin test confirmed their worst fears: Violet tested positive for gliotoxin, an immunosuppressive mycotoxin produced by certain moulds, necessitating a strict 12-week detox protocol which helped her get on top of her illness.

Their story is a visceral, terrifying wake-up call that mould is not just an unsightly nuisance; it’s a potent, health-destroying threat.

New data from Airtasker recently reveals a startling 12 per cent surge in mould removal tasks.

Sydney’s exclusive eastern suburbs topped the list but several other Sydney districts also feature prominently in the top 10, including the City and Inner South, North Sydney and Hornsby, the Northern Beaches, and the Inner West.

Queensland’s tropical and subtropical havens, Cairns, the Sunshine Coast, and the Gold Coast, along with northern New South Wales’ Richmond-Tweed region, also rank among the nation’s top mould hotspots.

The insurance minefield: Don’t get caught out

Sophie Ryan from iSelect issues a stark warning: with the Bureau of Meteorology forecasting a “wetter and warmer next three months,” Australia is poised for a “stronger than usual mould season.”

This means vigilance is not just recommended, it’s critical.

“When it comes to mould caused by those heavy rain, damp conditions, we really found, unfortunately, a real lack of understanding about it,” Ryan stated, underscoring the urgent need for Australians to arm themselves with knowledge.

She emphatically stresses that while the intricacies of insurance policies can be baffling, comprehending the fine print is absolutely non-negotiable.

“Home insurance and contents insurance, it’s one that you really do need to read that fine print… because otherwise, you’re exposing yourself to potential financial pain, not knowing these things and you don’t want to be left underinsured, or not insured altogether if you do need to make a claim.”

Ryan highlights that exclusions are a common trap, particularly for “long term or preventable mould.”

This means if mould flourishes due to poor ventilation or a lack of cleaning, such as in a perpetually damp bathroom, your insurer might leave you to foot the entire bill.

For the millions of renters across the country, the situation is equally fraught with peril.

While landlords typically hold insurance for the building itself, the responsibility for mould remediation often hinges on its origin.

A structural issue, like a leaky roof, usually falls squarely on the landlord.

However, mould that arises from a tenant’s failure to ventilate adequately or clean diligently could become their costly burden.

“That’s why renters should really check their obligations and what the landlord’s insurance covers when it comes to mould,” Ryan advises, urging tenants to clarify their position long before any dark spots appear.

Prevention is key: Simple steps to protect your home and health

Amid this grim outlook, there is a glimmer of hope: prevention is often both simple and affordable.

Ryan implores all Australians to adopt proactive measures: ensure robust ventilation by regularly opening windows, especially after showering or cooking; diligently use exhaust fans in bathrooms and kitchens; dry clothes outdoors whenever feasible; and consistently wipe down surfaces in damp areas.

For those residing in particularly humid climates, a dehumidifier can prove to be an invaluable investment.

Crucially, if you discover mould, immediate action is paramount.

Report any issues to your landlord or property manager without delay, meticulously document all damage with clear photographs, and maintain detailed records of all communications.

Most importantly, do not wait for disaster to strike.

Review your insurance policy now. Understand precisely where you stand, what is covered, and what isn’t, before this silent, insidious enemy takes hold, threatening both your financial stability and the very health of your family.

The post Revealed: Shocking number of Aussies at risk in looming mould crisis appeared first on realestate.com.au.