Jay Bacow, Morgan Stanley Managing Director and Co-Head of Securitized Products Research, joins Josh Lipton to explain how AI could help address the housing affordability crisis by reducing inefficiencies across the housing market.
AI, we think it's going to help. It's going to help in a bunch of different ways. and there's the obvious methods that people have talked about a lot on the lender side, the originator side. It can make the process faster, it can save them money on the compliance costs. But where we think it's under appreciated is homeowners can just get a lot more efficient refinancing their mortgage.
If we think about over the past almost 50 years, when homeowners have had the ability to save their mortgage, drop their mortgage rate by 100 basis points, they've only done that at about a 30% annual rate. That's not very high. And when they do call up lenders, about 54% of homeowners per lending tree survey, they only call up one lender.
You can say that stat again. That's that surprised me. 54% call up one lender. And is that how do we explain that, is it just such a pain the process?
Yeah, well because, you know, if you have a mortgage, you probably know this. When you when you want to get the mortgage, you have to fill out all the paperwork, you have to go submit all the documents, it's going to cost you some money to go do the application. And so a lot of homeowners they might just say, I'm going to get this rate. They know more about this than I do, the lender, so the lender's going to give them the best rate. But
what we think could change is, let's fast forward sometime in the future, three to five years from now. If you're comfortable, you you've done your taxes on your phone, maybe you allow, you know, whatever AI model you're using in the future, if you put all those documents on an AI model on a phone, and it did your taxes for you, if rates fall, that AI model, that could sit there and just say, hey, Josh,
I just noticed you had a 6 and a half% mortgage. Now you can get a 5 and a half% mortgage. I went and emailed 30 lenders. I found the best rate for you. You might have just asked for a 30 or fixed rate, but here are the other options. This is the one that I think is best for you. Click this button, we'll save you $174 a month.
The average consumer, they're not unfortunately, they should be watching Yahoo Finance every day, but they're probably not taking advantage of the opportunities that they have. And so if they do if they don't have to do it themselves, but the AI model on their phone can do it for them, then you're going to get much more efficient refinancing to save them money. And it's not just going to save them money on their mortgage, but you can imagine a world where rates are lower, it could consolidate their other debt too. It can be their credit
card debt, their student loan debt, their car debt, all of that can be consolidated and then they can just consumer will be in a better place if they are adopting this personal finance in the future and they're comfortable with that.
That that's the thesis in
