Broker-lender pacts are redrawing the lines for reverse mortgage companies

New broker-lender agreements are reshaping how reverse mortgage companies work together while taking aim at one of the industry’s most persistent problems: churning.

But the agreements come with caveats. They are only one piece of the broker-lender relationship and they are heavily tilted toward addressing refinance issues at a time when the industry desperately needs to grow purchase volume. And they won’t fundamentally change how brokerages run their businesses, mortgage brokers told HousingWire.

These agreements have been created to address tension between retail and wholesale operations at multichannel lenders. To ease that friction, lenders like Mutual of Omaha Mortgage and Longbridge Financial have rolled out programs designed to protect broker partners’ loan pipelines.

In general, the programs work by preventing lenders’ retail teams from contacting borrowers who are already in a broker’s active pipeline, automatically routing these customers back to their original advisers. They also monitor common refinance intent signals — such as payoff requests — and add the brokerage firm’s contact information to borrowers’ statements.

These moves have extra weight now that a new trigger leads law is in place, meaning far fewer companies will know when a credit pull occurs. 

“They are making some positive steps and it shows the industry is evolving. There’s better alignment between brokers and lenders. It benefits everyone,” said Eric Manley, founder of Florida-based Atlantic Avenue Mortgage, the nation’s top reverse brokerage firm in 2025 as measured by Home Equity Conversion Mortgage (HECM) endorsements.

Still, Manley stressed that no contract can replace the fundamentals. Regardless of what the agreements say, the most important thing is working as a team through human-to-human interaction with lenders.

“The agreements are great, but they alone aren’t the solution. The long-term success still depends on fair economics between them both, strong support and product availability,” Manley said.

Going after the ‘bottom feeders’

Loren Riddick, national director of reverse lending for NEXA Lending, sees these agreements less as a business-model shift and more as a weapon against churning — the practice of convincing homeowners to repeatedly refinance their HECM loans under misleading pretenses.

NEXA’s model, Riddick said, is built around loan officer autonomy. The company works with 15 different investors and lets its originators choose freely among them.

“NEXA, because of its DNA, is all about choice, freedom for the loan officer. It’s a very entrepreneurial model. We have 15 different investors. NEXA allows its loan officers to work with whatever investor that they choose. There is no hard line,” Riddick said.

Where the agreements matter most, he said, is in curbing lenders he labels as “bottom feeders” — those who ignore the National Reverse Mortgage Lenders Association‘s recommended waiting periods and begin marketing to borrowers the moment a loan closes.

“It takes a true professional to make sure that client not only gets the best experience, but that they also get the most informed decision possible,” Riddick said. “If you don’t have those protections in place, then unfortunately, you have situations where those relationships that have been forged over time, hard work, sometimes over months and years, can’t be preserved.”

Broker protections are good for borrowers and industry professionals alike — and Riddick said he hopes more companies adopt them.

Deeper structural challenge

Shain Urwin, national reverse mortgage director for broker C2 Financial, said the agreements create a “two-way street” between brokers and lenders, signaling that brokers now have “lenders to have our backs.”

But he pointed to a fundamental limitation: “Unfortunately, most of this is for refinances.” The industry, he said, cannot survive on refinance activity alone and needs to attract new borrowers — particularly affluent clients.

Urwin, who personally pushed the industry toward these contracts, said C2 parted ways with major lenders that refused to put agreements in place. Today, every investor the firm works with has one. 

He’s particularly enthusiastic about being alerted when a client pays off a loan or attempts to refinance — more so than having C2’s name on borrower statements, since he’s “not staffed” to handle a flood of inbound calls.

As for whether the agreements guarantee that borrowers will stay with a given lender, Urwin called it a “loose understanding.” 

“No. 1, it’s impossible to police — I couldn’t make it happen, and it could even be a violation. You’d be into steering,” Urwin said. “As a partnership, you’re trying to do what you can to protect each other. That’s the whole point of it. But not at the client’s detriment, at the client’s benefit.”