Solano Real Estate Scene: Jim Porter
Article By: Jim Porter – June 27, 2025
Rocket Mortgage, the largest loan originator in the country, has agreed to purchase Redfin, a technology based real estate company out of Seattle.
Redfin operates in 100 markets and is estimated to have a market share of just under 1%. The price of this acquisition is estimated at $2.1 billion.
Rocket also announced an agreement to acquire Mr. Cooper, the nation’s largest mortgage loan servicer, for $9.4 billion, which will make Rocket No. 1 in both mortgage sales and servicing with more than 10 million clients making monthly payments to Rocket.
I have said it before and I will say it again, the business with the most data will thrive and grow for the next 20 years. Rocket will have the phone numbers of all the borrowers that signed on the 10 million loans, and I estimate at least 50% of these loans have partners and spouses, making the number of potential repeat clients at 15 million.
The mortgage and real estate business has been bad for the past 30 months, but everyone that knows anything about this cyclical business is that it’s like milk, everybody needs milk, and everyone needs money and a place to live.
Mergers and acquisitions become a big part of all industries when things get rough – the strong buy the weak as a strategy to grow, and the weak sell to survive and salvage some profit for the shareholders.
It might not be appropriate to call smaller companies that get acquired by bigger players as weak, because Pixar was pretty strong when they sold to Disney, YouTube was doing OK when they sold to Google, and Instagram wasn’t in any trouble when they joined Facebook, but these Rocket purchases are different.
Redfin is tiny and has never made a profit and has more liabilities than assets, so I assume it is about the Redfin technology. Mr. Cooper is a large, profitable loan servicer but has no serious sales force and is still recovering from negative reputational issues from when they were called by their real name: Nationstar.
Nationstar was one of the most hated loan servicers in the country for many years after the crash in 2008, because they were overwhelmed with delinquency and foreclosures and made some very poor decisions.
Nationstar, dba Mr. Cooper, has lost and settled many class-action lawsuits over the past 10 years. The PR person that came up with the idea of changing the name to Mr. Cooper was a genius.
Many local Realtors and I hated the way Nationstar handled their short sales, loan modifications and REOs.
I must admit that over the past few years Mr. Cooper has improved. The last couple of times I have called them to assist a client, they have been polite and responsive.
Every large home builder and almost every large real estate company now owns a mortgage company or has some type of relationship with a lender, and many of these home sellers sell title insurance and escrow services and homeowner’s insurance too.
I predict that by 2030, real estate agents will offer mortgages as part of their bundle of services and companies like Rocket will continue to sell mortgages, and selling real estate will become an even bigger part of the business.
Lenders need homebuilders and real estate salespeople because everyone wants a nice home, and nobody really wants a mortgage.
Jim Porter, NMLS No. 276412, is the branch manager of Solano Mortgage, NMLS No. 1515497, a division of American Pacific Mortgage Corporation, NMLS No. 1850, licensed in California by the Department of Financial Protection and Innovation under the CRMLA / Equal Housing Opportunity. Jim can be reached at 707-449-4777.
