Real estate: Rocket's plan to remake homebuying

Rocket wants to become a one-stop shop for the American homebuyer, said Paige Smith in Bloomberg. In the span of just three weeks, the Detroit-based mortgage lender "has thrown around $11 billion in a bid to reshape the way Americans buy, sell, and finance their homes." It first agreed to purchase the brokerage and online home-search platform Redfin for $1.75 billion. It followed that with a $9.4 billion deal to acquire Mr. Cooper, America's largest mortgage servicer. The deals "cement Rocket's position as a mortgage behemoth," now that many banks have "pulled out of the business." It also fortifies the company for almost any economic environment. Servicers like Mr. Cooper have done well when interest rates are high, because "borrowers are less likely to refinance." When rates fall, loan servicing is less profitable but Rocket's lending business "becomes more valuable."

The mortgage business has come full circle, said Felix Salmon in Axios. Banks used to originate mortgages and hold them. Then they sold the loans, and farmed out collecting the money to servicers. Now Rocket wants to go back to that older model, giving you the loan and then collecting your payments. The hope is to keep a steady train of customers that "choose the same company for their next loan"—or refinancing. Homebuyers shouldn't complain about the streamlining of "an often time-consuming and burdensome process," said Nicole Friedman in The Wall Street Journal, from finding an agent to securing a mortgage. Rocket could also offer "discounted fees for using more or all of the company's offerings" as part of "a bundled plan."

It's true that Rocket "appears to be rolling back to an earlier era of mortgage lending," said David Dayen in American Prospect. It's just not an era we should want to go back to. Rocket's plans were laid out in a lawsuit by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau last December. The company employed a kickback scheme to get agents to "push borrowers toward its products," something it will be able to do much more effectively by getting bigger. Unfortunately, the Trump administration chose to look the other way and dropped the case.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Building a "housing super app" sounds great, but Rocket may find it hard to achieve, said Pan Yuk in the Financial Times. Rival online property listing company Zillow has been trying something similar since 2022. It said at the time that its "super app could help deliver $5 billion of revenue." It ended up with about half of that last year. Homebuyers are used to going to "one agent to find a property and another to find a mortgage," and it may take more than clever marketing to change their habits.