Author name: Ricky Vasquez

HousingWire has acquired Keeping Current Matters (KCM), adding the subscription content platform for real estate professionals to its HousingWire Solutions division and expanding local market intelligence inside the tools agents use to win listings. The deal, announced Tuesday, makes KCM a core component of HousingWire Solutions alongside Altos and RealTrends under the leadership of Mark […]

Mortgage activity slowed in May as rising interest rates dampened both purchase and refinance demand, according to Optimal Blue‘s May 2026 Market Advantage report. The report, released Tuesday, found that total mortgage rate lock volume fell 9% from April, although it remained 7% higher than a year earlier. Purchase loans continued to dominate the market,

For decades, financial systems operated on a quiet assumption: most information entering the system was fundamentally real. Documents might arrive incomplete. Borrowers might omit details. Fraud existed at the margins. But lending infrastructure was built around a world where verification happened slowly enough for human judgment and institutional friction to absorb uncertainty. The system was