Housing supply, affordability and education will be the main priorities for Laura Escobar, the newly named 2025 chair of the Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA).

Speaking at the MBA’s annual convention and expo in Denver on October 28, the president of Lennar Mortgage said that housing supply and affordability are the main issues facing Americans today and that educating new members is critical for the mortgage industry.

“First and foremost, starting today, the MBA is going to get a whole lot louder on housing supply,” Escobar told the convention crowd. “We are currently short 1.5 million homes. In 2023 alone, the number of [U.S.] households grew by 1.6 million, while housing only grew by 1.3 million. We aren’t keeping up.”

Here are some of the main takeaways from Escobar’s speech:

• The cost of owning a home continues to rise. The average single-family home now costs more than $390,000 to build. More than $93,000 of the final price of a new home is due to government regulations. Labor and building materials have increased by 31% since the beginning of the pandemic.
• Home insurance costs have risen by 52% during the last 5 years and property taxes have risen by 18% over the same period. Increasing rules and regulations from federal agencies, banking regulators and government-sponsored enterprises are increasing the cost of mortgages. It now costs more than $11,000 for a lender to produce a single mortgage loan.

“We’re on the verge of a vicious cycle in which fewer and fewer people can afford the American Dream of homeownership,” she said. “That’s not good for America.”

Escobar vowed to “double down” on MBA’s longstanding message of improving housing affordability by using the relationships she and other association members have developed with agencies and lawmakers to argue that more urgency is needed to lower housing costs.

“My message to them and every policymaker in D.C. is going to be simple – stop talking about affordability and start delivering on affordability,” Escobar said.

On the education front, she wants to invest more money in training the next generation of mortgage professionals, including being more welcoming to members from minority populations. Times are changing and the housing industry must also change.

“There was a time at my company when I was personally doing a majority of our loans,” she said. “Why? Because I was the only person on staff who spoke Spanish!”

Escobar also touted MBA’s Mortgage Banking Bound program, a 100-hour course in which students earn an executive certificate in residential real estate finance. Next year, the program is scheduled to expand from its initial location in Miami to include a new program in Dallas, and there are discussions about offering the course in a variety of universities and colleges around the country.