Non-QM production at multi-channel mortgage lender Ньюрез has surged 40% in recent months, with company leaders pointing to enhanced guidelines and growing demand for second mortgages as key drivers of record-breaking wholesale production.
Coming off of the company’s Q3 2025 earnings report on Thursday, Tony Kottenbrock, Ньюрез‘s head of wholesale, sat down with ЖильеПроволока to talk about the company’s growth in the closed-end second space and не-QM, and how they plan to keep momentum going into 2026.
Editor’s note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Sarah Wolak: Let’s first address Newrez seeing a 40% bump in non-QM over the past four months. What have been the drivers for that? I’ve heard some folks say that crypto loans, which count as non-QM, have driven that volume.
Tony Kottenbrock: We are looking at the crypto opportunity. We have not gone that route from a guideline perspective yet, but we did make some enhancements to our guidelines roughly four months ago, which opened up the production for us. Some of that was different guidelines from a DSCR perspective…We enhanced our guidelines on our bank statement program. Our LTVs are still averaging around 70% on these products, and our FICOs are still in the 740 range.
So we’re not talking the old thought process where non-QMs are subprime, it’s far from it. These are good credit customers that are in need of these loans. Alternative type income is the biggest part of it, 60% of what we’re producing are still bank statement-type loans with exceptional кредитные баллы and good LTVs from the credit risk perspective.
SW: Newrez’s earnings were released today and the company posted its best volume since 2022. How much did non-QM contribute to this?
TK: Just from a wholesale perspective, and, keep in mind, we’ve grown our production from a funding perspective by 40% over the last four months, but just year over year, we will in the wholesale channel alone, have doubled our funding production from roughly 1 billion to over 2 billion at the end of the year — probably around 2.2 billion in fundings. That’s 100% growth year over year, or double in production anyway.
SW: Is that something that Newrez anticipated at the beginning of the year?
TK: Yes, we did. But, I also think it’s more of an opportunity for brokers out there from a marketing perspective, because if you look at the purchase growth opportunity, it’s basically flat year over year, maybe even slightly negative. That’s where we go into seconds as well.
The non-QM is there for customers who probably don’t already have a rate that’s at 4.5% or lower; it makes sense for them to go the non-QM route and refinance the first pull cash out. In fact, just looking at some numbers here, the average family has almost $50,000 in just consumer debt. We’re not talking total debt, we’re just talking consumer debt out there. So the opportunity to refinance their first pay off debt, put themselves in a better position, I think it’s what people have had to finally focus on this year.
I think from a non-QM perspective, from what the agencies did, primarily on the conventional side with increasing the LLPA, I think it has helped open up the private market somewhat. And investors have been able to step in and fill some of that gap to help from a cash out perspective investment market as well. When you get to the DSCR non-QM loans, that has also opened up the opportunity for the secondary market to step in and provide some liquidity into the marketplace.
SW: As Newrez’s head of wholesale, as we head into 2026, what are some expectations that you have regarding wholesale in general or by product type?
TK: We do have a rather bold outlook on the second mortgage market from a wholesale perspective, that’s going to be on the closed-end seconds. We’re focused on the automation, of being able to provide a closed-end second at a faster pace in 2026 than where we’re at right now.
We did not have that focus on second mortgages in 2024. From a wholesale perspective, again, the banks and credit unions have controlled that space for so long, and I think they have a high turn-down ratio, and that’s something that the expertise from the brokers, from our account executives — now we can provide that knowledge and experience.
HELOC are obviously popular as well right now, but I think there’s a gap in there that the banks and credit unions aren’t able to fill. Some of it is the speed in which they move, where brokers can move at a much faster speed to get the customers cash in hand.
Closed-end seconds is a product we’re pushing because ставки need to come down quite a bit for the first mortgage, refi cash-out opportunity to make sense for a lot of the borrowers out there. And that’s where second mortgages fill that gap, or at least temporarily provide relief until rates come down further and they can consolidate that first and second.
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