Mortgage lenders often frame their MLO strategy as a build vs. buy choice: Build producers from within, or recruit proven producers from somewhere else. There is a third way: do both, with better data.

When is a data release from last year a big deal? When it's a baseline data set that defines something at a granular level. The American Community Survey data is like this - it baselines every person and household in the US. HMDA is another example. It baselines every mortgage loan in the US (save for those from very small lenders below the Reg C threshold). When we're talking about "every" and "baseline", we're talking about a data set that gives you something you can't get anywhere else. So this week a tip of the hat to the HMDA Operations team at the CFPB for publishing a gem of a data set on time: the 2025 HMDA data: every loan (application outcomes + purchased loans) from 4,770 lenders, with detailed loan, property, applicant, geography, channel, and pricing attributes. Lenders use it to see - in every market - how successful their strategy was and where they got outmaneuvered - essential input back into the top of the strategy funnel. My company puts this data in a cloud engine that puts every single one of these 138 million loan records from the last 8 years - including 2025 as of today - at your fingertips. See the new baseline leaderboards on our website - link in replies.