Every industry facing a volatile market eventually has to answer the same question: when conditions improve, do you grow by adding, or by getting better at what you already have?
Twice a year, The Mortgage Collaborative surveys its lender members — independent mortgage banks, credit unions, and depository institutions — on where they’re placing their bets.
Our June 2026 Pulse of the Network survey, fielded across our 250+ member base, yielded an answer that I think holds a lesson well beyond our industry: the leaders who feel most confident about growth right now are the ones who are least interested in expanding headcount to achieve it.
Three-quarters of our members told us their primary growth strategy for the second half of the year is to increase production from the sales team they already have. Fewer than two-thirds are recruiting experienced originators. And yet 83% describe their organizations as growth-focused, and 89% expect origination volume to climb — most anticipating gains of 5% to 20%, with 17% projecting gains of 20% or more.
That combination is worth sitting with. Confidence about growth, paired with restraint about how to pursue it. In a market still contending with elevated rates, tight inventory, and compressed margins, that restraint isn’t hesitation. It’s a strategy.
Growth from within isn’t a consolation prize
There’s a tendency to read “grow with existing staff” as the cautious option — what you do when you can’t afford the ambitious one. Our data suggests the opposite is happening. Lenders aren’t holding back on hiring because they lack confidence in the market. They’re holding back because they’ve concluded that the fastest path to volume lies in the capacity they haven’t yet unlocked within their current teams.
That’s a different kind of growth thesis, and it demands different investment. It’s why three-quarters of our members are investing in technology specifically to improve loan officer productivity, and why 72% are rethinking compensation and incentive structures to retain their best performers. You don’t fund those two things if your growth plan is headcount. You fund them if your growth plan is capacity.
Trust, not capability, is gating AI adoption
The second-highest priority on our members’ lists this year is technology, and the AI numbers tell a story that should sound familiar to leaders in any sector watching a new technology mature faster than their confidence in it. 83% of our members are actively evaluating AI tools across their businesses. Only 17% have moved a tool into live production.
That gap isn’t a technology problem. When we asked lenders what’s holding adoption back, the most common answer wasn’t cost, or integration complexity, or a lack of use cases. It was trust — a quarter of respondents said their organizations simply aren’t yet confident in what AI-generated outputs are telling them.
This is a mature, deliberate posture, not a slow one. Mortgage lending sits inside one of the most heavily regulated corners of financial services, where an unverified output isn’t a minor inconvenience — it can become a fair lending finding or a compliance exposure. Three-quarters of our members told us automated decisioning already consumes more compliance resources than any other area of their business, and nearly half are actively concerned about the fair lending risk it introduces. Twenty-two percent admit they haven’t fully assessed that risk yet, which is itself a more honest answer than pretending the assessment is done.
Put together, this is what responsible adoption looks like in a high-stakes industry: broad exploration, narrow deployment, and a governance conversation that’s running in parallel rather than as an afterthought.
Efficiency is the strategy, not the fallback
For years, “operational efficiency” has been the phrase organizations reach for when growth stalls — the consolation initiative. Our members are telling us something different: efficiency is now a growth lever in its own right. Reducing cost-per-loan was the top operational priority for 86% of respondents. Nearly two-thirds are consolidating vendors and technology platforms. More than half are focused on cutting turn times.
None of that is defensive. Lower production costs and faster turn times are competitive advantages in a market where volume is coming back, but margins remain thin. The lenders who’ve already done the harder work of simplifying their vendor stack and tightening their processes will be able to convert the next wave of volume into profit faster than those still carrying operational complexity built for a different market.
Where the actual opportunity lives
It’s worth noting where our members see the volume coming from, because it’s not entirely new purchase activity. Seventy-five percent identified borrower retention and recapture as their top secondary-market priority, a direct response to gradually easing interest rates and reopening refinance conversations with borrowers they already have relationships with. Seventy-two percent are broadening investor and agency relationships, and 69% are strengthening post-close processes — the unglamorous work that determines whether a closed loan becomes a retained relationship or a one-time transaction. On the product side, conventional purchase loans and non-QM lending stand out as the two largest opportunities for the back half of the year.
Taken together with the staffing and technology findings, a pattern emerges: our members are looking for growth in the relationships, capacity, and infrastructure they already have before they look elsewhere.
The takeaway for leaders outside mortgage lending
I’d argue the lesson here isn’t specific to our industry. Any leader operating in a market defined by real opportunity and real constraint — capital, hiring, regulatory exposure, take your pick — faces the same choice our members did: expand to capture the upside, or get more out of what’s already in place and expand more deliberately once trust and infrastructure catch up.
Our members chose the second path, and the data suggests they chose it with clear eyes rather than reluctance. That’s the distinction worth remembering. Discipline, in a moment like this, isn’t the absence of ambition. It’s what ambition looks like when it’s paired with an honest read of the risk.
The Mortgage Collaborative conducts its Pulse of the Network survey twice a year to understand what lender members are navigating and where they need support.
Findings shape TMC’s working groups, lender-only collaboration labs, TMC Insight benchmarking initiatives, and conference programming.
Want to see the data for yourself?