What is the end game?
Who are all these industries going to sell their goods and services to, when fewer and fewer people have jobs and can afford to buy them?
The ironic part is, the more the entities and companies improve "efficiencies", the less everybody in the RE food chain seems to make. Loan volume is thin, making appraisals cheaper or eliminating them for a WAIVER will not change that. Big deal, the loan closes 3 days sooner. The mortgage lenders are still starving.
The end game is that individuals can't make a living on their own, you are seeing it happen right now in the appraiser industry, appraisers can either work for a company as a staff appraiser, or continue to try to push a 900 pound boulder up the side of the hill. Independent restaurant owners are getting pushed out because their profit margins are SO THIN, sooner or later it will be 90% chain restaurants, same with auto mechanics, the automakers make it to where you need whatever car companies individual software to repair a car, my mechanic told me he can't afford to purchase software for Toyota, Honda, BMW, etc. as it's WAY to expensive, he said he will probably just have to pick a company, say Honda and ONLY work on Hondas or older cars that don't need the specific software.
John Deere, does the same thing with their tractors, farmers have to wait LONG periods of times to get their newer tractors looked at because of software, costing them money due to the long wait times. The mortgage lenders you speak of will ONLY be big banks sooner or later, it will only be BofA, Wells Fargo, Chase, etc. there pretty much won't me small mortgage companies or mortgage bankers, some credit unions will survive, but 80%-90% of loans will be from big box lenders. Realtors won't be safe either, it will be the same thing, no more small companies, wither you work for one of the big box real estate companies, or you'll starve as they will have a stranglehold on 80%-90%, as the consumer will use them, because it will be "so easy to use" that's the road we're heading down. Industries will still be able to sell their goods and services, there will just be WAY fewer options for the consumer to select from and it will all be under the lie that it's WAY easier to do, if I see another Homes.com commercial, I'm going to puke, watch one of those and you'll see just what I'm talking about.
Again, these are just my opinions, I don't see anything getting any better anytime soon, especially when my wife and I got a letter from Blue Cross Blue Shield yesterday informing us that our insurance coverage is more than doubling in 2025. As my favorite author says in one of his books, "So it goes"
