A month ago I posted that Mat Ishbia was in worse financial trouble than anyone knew. Here's the latest.

Everything below is public. SEC filings. Press releases. Court documents. Anyone with a laptop and an hour can pull it.

Yesterday CrossCountry raised their Two Harbors offer from $10.80 to $11.30 per share in cash. UWM submitted a last-ditch counter-bid on April 20. The Two Harbors board rejected it, calling CrossCountry's offer "superior certainty of value through fixed, all-cash consideration that is not subject to any financing condition."

With lawyers in the room and a fairness opinion in hand, the TWO board told the world they do not trust UWM's ability to finance the deal.

Now look at why.

Mortgage servicing rights, or MSRs, are the right to collect a fee on a loan for its life. They sit on the balance sheet at fair value. That value is not a market price. It's built from assumptions the company picks. The biggest one is the discount rate, the haircut applied to future cash flows. Lower haircut, higher reported value. Same logic as a bond.

Page 88 of UWM's 2025 10-K. Weighted average discount rate dropped from 10.9% to 9.4% in twelve months. A 150 basis point cut.

Rates fell that year. Falling rates cause refinancing, which kills MSR cash flow. MSRs should have lost value in 2025. UWM took $435M in write-downs. The discount rate cut took back most of it. PennyMac, Mr. Cooper, and Rocket use option-adjusted spread, which is harder to bend. UWM uses a single discount rate. Softened the hit. Hmmm...

UWM finished 2025 with $503 million in cash against $3 billion in long-term debt. Operating cash flow was negative $2.6 billion. Equity dropped from $2.1B to $1.6B.

That is the operating company. Now the personal side.

In 2023 Ishbia pledged 805 million UWM shares to JPMorgan to fund the Suns purchase. They were worth $4.6 billion then. Today, $2.9 billion. A 36% drop in collateral.

Ishbia has been selling UWM stock every trading day in March & April. 24 million shares dumped, $89 million extracted, while the stock fell to a 52-week low of $3.38.

Read the rest of this post here …

Big news for Cleveland mortgage. The OMBA is standing up a Cleveland MBA chapter and we are building the founding board now.

After decades of monthly breakfast meetings with industry speakers, annual golf outings, and many tours of the Cleveland Federal Reserve, the Mortgage Society of Ohio is winding down. Bill Feller, Bill Damm, and Paul Skerlong have carried that torch and will be stepping into advisor roles for what comes next.

They built something special and the entire NE Ohio mortgage community owes them. The Ohio Mortgage Bankers Association is standing up the Cleveland MBA in its place. Same spirit, fully supported by the OMBA team and infrastructure. Programming, advocacy, talent, education, and in-person networking events designed for senior mortgage banking leaders in NE Ohio.

If you want a great way to give back to your industry, meet other senior leaders in your market, and come in at the ground floor of something new, this is it. We will ideate and execute the meetings, events, programming, and advocacy together.

I would love to have a board and officers built and set by the Ohio MBA Conference June 14-16 in Columbus so we can invite them all there and announce it from the big stage in front of the whole state.

Ground floor of an industry chapter only happens once. If interested in being involved, fill out the quick intake form. This is gonna be fun!

Six big name keynotes. Twenty one breakouts. Sixteen Ohio's Own honorees. Lots of parties and meals. Three days at a gorgeous property in one of the gems of the Midwest ... Columbus, OH.

The 2026 Ohio Mortgage Bankers Association Conference is going to be one of the best state mortgage conferences this industry has ever hosted, and I am not saying that because I run the thing.

I am saying it because of the slate:

✔️ AI governance and AI in the pipeline
✔️ Credit reporting overhaul
✔️ Growing revenue & competing with the megas
✔️ Cap markets, construction, servicing, secondary, MSR
✔️ Data and analytics for originations & operations leaders
✔️ The Ohio landscape from the seats that actually shape policy and capital flow
✔️ Leadership, recruiting, and the next cycle of talent

If you are a CEO, CFO, production head, ops head, CCO, CIO, marketing lead, or top producer, there is a session built for your seat. And there are four more you will want to be in anyway.

And if you are the rising star on the team, the ops lead being groomed for SVP, the producer being built into a branch manager, the analyst ready for the next seat, this is the conference where careers get accelerated.

Employers, hear me on this one. You can send your top performer to a steakhouse. Or you can send them to three days in a room with the who's who of the mortgage industry, leading panels, holding court in the hallways, and sharing the playbooks they are actually running.

One will get you a thank you card. The other will get you a leader.

It is the best development money you are going to spend all year. And the best reward you can hand a high performer is a seat at a table they have not sat at yet.

Sunday June 14 to Tuesday June 16. Click HERE for more details.

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May 2 - Kentucky Derby (152nd running, Churchill Downs)

May 5 - MISMO Spring Conference (Louisville)

May 7 - Jobs Report (April)

May 14-17 - PGA Championship (Aronimink Golf Club)

May 16 - Preakness Stakes (Laurel Park, Md.)

May 17-20 - MBA Secondary and Capital Markets Conference (Marriott Marquis, NYC)

May 25 - Memorial Day (markets closed)

May 31 - Indy 500 (Indianapolis Motor Speedway)

JUNE 2026

Jun 3 - Jobs Report (May)

Jun 5 - Belmont Stakes (Saratoga Race Course) -- Triple Crown on the line

Jun 11 - FIFA World Cup kicks off (USA, Canada, Mexico -- 48 teams)

Jun 14-16 - Ohio MBA Annual Conference (Columbus OH)

Jun 15 - Father's Day

Jun 16-17 - FOMC Meeting (rate decision, press conference)

Jun 18-21 - US Open Golf (Shinnecock Hills)

Jun 19 - Juneteenth (federal holiday, markets closed)

Jun 22 - NBA Draft (approx.)

Jun 29 - Wimbledon begins

"Poor man wanna be rich, rich man wanna be king, and a king ain't satisfied till he rules everything.” - Bruce Springsteen, 1978, “Badlands”

Until the next one,
Swerb
[email protected]