Tribal knowledge built this business. It can’t carry it.

Most people working in the mortgage industry today couldn’t pass a basic exam on the industry they work in. I was guilty of that myself, for my first several years originating loans.

For me, it wasn’t because I didn’t have the aptitude or didn’t care. I cared, but about the things I knew would benefit my sales the most in that given month: rate sheets, guidelines, borrower DTIs, which files were CTC.

The mortgage business is a century-old, multi-trillion-dollar industry that touches the largest financial transaction most Americans will ever make. We train our people the way blacksmiths trained apprentices: sit next to someone who’s been here a while, watch what they do and hope you absorb the right lessons before they retire.

Introduction to the tribal knowledge era

My first real job in mortgage was at a mortgage brokerage in Brooklyn, New York, in 1997. I was barely twenty years old. By that time, my mother had been a loan officer in a mortgage brokerage for a decade, and I’d spent a lot of after-school hours in her office helping her package FHA loans to be sent for underwriting. Yes, we mailed loan files back then to nameless, faceless HUD underwriters. Turn time? About 4-6 weeks. So when I walked into that brokerage for the first time, I had some knowledge of how a mortgage worked.

After spending all those afternoons with my mother, I wasn’t surprised to learn that my training program was going to consist of me shadowing the brokerage’s sales manager, Norm Katz. He was an industry veteran with a solid book of business, a love of the game and an enormous amount of patience for a kid who didn’t know much.

Norm helped me get my first loan, and that was no easy feat. While I had some innate sales talent, I was totally green, and why should anyone trust a kid who still lived at home to captain their home-financing experience? But I somehow did it. When it was time to get that loan approved, I learned I’d graduated the first level of my training, and I was now going to deal with Drew Cardinal, the brokerage’s no-nonsense ops manager.

My first lesson was that he wouldn’t look at any file that wasn’t in the correct stacking order and wasn’t clipped on the correct part of the page. Good grief. After he made my life miserable for a bit, we got the loan approved and then closed. I had finally graduated. I was expected to do it myself and do it right after that. My experience is similar to that of many.

Why the 1997 playbook fails in 2026

The tribal-knowledge model didn’t develop by accident. It developed because, for a long stretch, it was just how we did things. Careers were thirty-year arcs at one shop. Volumes were relatively stable. Product complexity was manageable: conventional, FHA, VA, jumbo, done. The Fannie conforming limit was around $250K when I first started originating loans. Simpler times. You could shadow a senior LO for a few weeks, learn her patter on sales calls, take some applications and become a competent loan officer by the time you’d been on the job for a year.

That might have been fine for 1997. The product set is broader and more layered than anything Norm was teaching me nearly thirty years ago. We have non-QM and bank statement loans, over 2,500 DPA programs across the country, an ARM resurgence, AI-assisted AUS pathways and MSR considerations that impact how companies make decisions. The regulatory perimeter seems to shift every quarter, or at least the discussions around it do. The borrower across the table, or, more accurately, across the screen, has done more research on their own loan than most LOs do in a typical month.

Tribal knowledge is, by definition, inconsistent, and its quality is largely dependent on the deliverer; we can no longer rely on that model to keep us moving forward. This is true on both the sales and operations sides.

The data behind a widening credibility gap

Per the data platform Model Match, roughly 230,000 originators have closed at least one loan in the last fourteen months. That sounds like a lot of originators until you remember the industry was supporting nearly double that headcount at the volume peak just a few years ago, and that the contraction has fallen hardest on the people who carried the most experience.

Producing LO counts cratered through 2023 and bottomed somewhere around 94,000 by early 2024, per industry reporting drawn from NMLS data. The Bureau of Labor Statistics counts roughly 301,000 loan officers across all categories of lending. The MBA’s 2026 forecast calls for $2.2 trillion in origination volume. We will be originating that with a bench that is older, smaller and less credentialed than it ever has been.

About credentials: the Mortgage Bankers Association recognized 40 new Certified Mortgage Bankers at its 2025 Annual Convention. Forty. In an industry of over 200,000 originators. 

The skew on the people side is just as steep. Industry data pegs the average loan officer at 45 years old, with roughly two-thirds over 40 and only about one in ten under 30. The median first-time homebuyer is now 39. The customer is younger (though that number is trending higher every year), more digitally literate and asking sharper questions than the median originator is equipped to answer. That is not a sustainable shape.

Mortgage is, again, the largest financial decision most American households will ever make. The borrower we serve in 2026 has Googled rate sheets, watched TikTok explainers on PMI, and asked ChatGPT to compare a 2-1 buydown on a 30-year fixed to a 5/1 ARM. The credibility gap is widening.

If a loan officer can’t explain how GNMA pooling affects pricing, what an AUS recommendation is actually evaluating or why DTI thresholds drift between investors, we risk losing the moat that’s protecting originators from extinction in a world of agentic AI. 

So how do we move from a culture of tribal knowledge to one of education, advocacy and expertise?

Elevating the bar from CE to true expertise

It starts with the assumption that learning your industry is part of the job, not a thing your company’s executive leadership team is supposed to keep an eye on while you crank out volume.

The professionals in adjacent industries, financial advisors, CPAs and attorneys, operate on the assumption that continuing education is a permanent feature of the work, not just something done to satisfy NMLS or state requirements. Mortgage has convinced itself that licensing CE counts as professional development. It’s the minimum, and to be frank, in most cases somewhat useless in terms of building real expertise.

What ownership actually looks like is short and not particularly mysterious. Pursue a designation. The CMB if you qualify, the CRU if you sit on the underwriting side (only 500 or so have gone through the program since its inception in 2003) and a credential from your state MBA. Read the primary sources, or have Chat summarize for you. FHFA scorecards, the MBA’s weekly chart book, the GSE seller guides, CFPB rulemaking notices, Fed minutes. Read HousingWire, National Mortgage News, National Mortgage Professional and Mortgage News Daily. Subscribe to Chrisman Commentary.

Twenty minutes a day puts you ahead of nine out of ten people you compete with. Attend at least one substantive conference a year. Learn one adjacent function annually. If you originate, learn how an underwriter thinks. If you process, learn what happens to the loan after it ships to the warehouse line. Ask the seniors in your shop what they know that you don’t, while they are still here to ask.

This is the bar for a mortgage professional in 2026. The shape of the next decade in this business will be determined by the people who decide they are responsible for understanding it.

The individual side of this only goes so far. Shops, trade organizations, and the industry as a whole carry the rest of the weight, and most are not carrying enough of it.

The corporate mandate: Invest in true expertise

What real investment looks like, in plain terms: build a real onboarding curriculum, with content, assessments and someone whose job it is to make sure new hires actually know what they need to know before they get in front of a borrower. Pay for designations. Companies in adjacent industries fund MBAs and CFAs without blinking; mortgage rarely funds the CMB for its own people. Build cross-functional rotations into career paths, so the originators understand capital markets, servicing, secondary, MSR economics and what happens to a loan from the day it funds to the day it pays off, and so the operations team understands what an originator actually does for a borrower.

There is also the matter of advocacy, which most of us have outsourced to other people and most of us never think about. The decisions that govern how each of us makes a living are made in Washington, in state capitals and through regulatory rulemaking.

The MBA’s Mortgage Action Alliance runs a national advocacy program that costs nothing to join and asks little of your time, and most of the industry has never heard of it. State MBAs run their own programs that move state-level legislation and rule changes that directly affect how loans get made and serviced. MORPAC is funded by the same handful of contributors every cycle while the rest of the industry sits out.

Knowing what is in the policy pipeline that could reshape your business model in twelve months is part of being a serious professional. Helping shape that pipeline is the other part.

Building the next bench of industry leaders

The last piece is the one we talk about least and need most. This industry is going to need a generation of leaders that does not yet exist, because the bench we have today is going to retire on a faster timeline than most companies are planning around. We can build that bench on purpose, or we can wait and hope; waiting and hoping is not a viable strategy. Try that the next time your dishwasher breaks.

The leaders we need will come from people who decided, early in their careers, that they would learn the whole business, show up for the work that does not pay commissions, mentor the people coming up behind them, write and speak about the issues that matter, serve on committees and put themselves in the rooms where decisions get made. Whether you intend to be one of those leaders is worth deciding on purpose. The industry will need you either way.

Tribal knowledge built this industry. We owe a real debt to the people who carried it and to the people who taught us. They sat next to us, answered our dumb questions and trusted us with deals we probably weren’t ready for. That model carried us a long way. The next generation deserves more than the same hand-me-down apprenticeship plus a longer list of products to memorize.

The test for everyone reading this is simple. What did you learn about your industry in the past year that you didn’t know the year before? If you can’t answer, that is the work. If your company can’t answer on behalf of its team, that is the work.

We are the industry. We are responsible for understanding it. And we are responsible for what it becomes.

Coby Hakalir is a mortgage industry consultant, podcaster, writer and content creator.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of HousingWire’s editorial department and its owners. To contact the editor responsible for this piece: zeb@hwmedia.com.