I don’t know Trevor enough to give two fucks one way or another, but I don’t think he should single-handedly shoulder the blame for being so far removed from the “actual” underwriting process. He’s just doing the job that his superiors dictate for him.

The lack of an effective training regimen is more likely the long-term result of pathological underachievers biding their time until they become “leaders” on the training team. Having achieved that, they can then just coast through life while gleefully backslapping each other after winning another “top training team” award from one of the many puppet organizations bankrolled by UWM just to provide the illusion of third-party endorsements/recognition.

Even so, can you really blame any of them for not giving a fuck? Nobody at UWM is paid enough to give a rat’s ass about the quality of their contributions to the company. Meanwhile, Mat’s too busy sucking his own dick to realize that UWM is a zombie company operating under the haphazard direction of his dad’s otherwise unemployable friends. But he’s happy letting the company rot from the inside out as long as he can keep minting money for himself to the tune of ~$150 million per quarter in dividends by selling the company’s equity/MSRs.

Mortgage brokers are a lot like mercenaries: you can hope to win their loyalty by training them and arming them with all the tools/technology they could ever ask for, but their loyalty is ultimately to whomever pays the most in the moment.

Once the Fed stops unloading Treasury and MBS holdings (in mid-2024, maybe), spreads will decline back toward the historical 80 bps, and mortgage lenders will become much more eager to originate wholesale loans. As the strain of maintaining Mat’s dividend acts as a ceiling to brokers’ (and UWM employees’) compensation, brokers will regard UWM as a lender of last resort—especially given the wildly unpredictable underwriting experience and perpetually broken technology (another “software update,” sorry). With little origination revenue and increasingly worthless MSRs, UWM will finally implode too spectacularly to be salvaged by the empty hubris and generation-spanning Fed put that has carried the company over the last two decades.

But don’t worry: Mat and his plutocrat pals will be just fine after bleeding a billion or two of dividends out of the company and into his boyhood basketball dream-come-true in Phoenix, Arizona. Maybe we’ll get lucky and he’ll send us all a postcard.