Loan officers are going to Washington

For a hundred years, the Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA) has moved mortgage policy in Washington. Last Wednesday, it brought 50 loan officers with it. 

Loan officers are going to Washington.

For a hundred years, that sentence had not been true.

For a hundred years, the MBA has been the mortgage industry’s voice in Washington. An office blocks from the White House. A policy staff that reads FHFA notices the way priests read liturgy. An advocacy calendar that has moved real bills. The institution carried the work every year.

The producers were doing different work, at the closing table and on the phone at 6:47 a.m. with a buyer whose rate had locked overnight.

Last Wednesday, the MBA brought them in.

On April 15, during the MBA’s National Advocacy Conference, 50 loan officers from 26 states walked into 44 Senate and House offices. Abdel Khawatmi from New Jersey. Darlene Franklin from Colorado. Sue Meitner from Pennsylvania. About 90% of them had never advocated for anything in Washington before. They carried the MBA’s 2026 policy priorities, and they carried what the MBA wanted in that room: the borrower.

Ryan Kiefer, a First Community Mortgage branch manager in Cincinnati, has personally closed loans for more than 3,000 families. His branch has helped more than 35,000. This was his first time doing advocacy. Dave Savage and Kristin Messerli asked him, and he said yes:

“It stopped being about policy in theory and became about real people. The moment it turned into real stories, they leaned in, asked better questions.”

FirstHome IQ is a three-year-old 501(c)(3) co-founded by Kristin Messerli, Dave Savage and Todd Bookspan, with a 14-strong board drawn from across the industry. Kristin Messerli runs it as executive director, and she has been saying this for a year:

“Local loan officers are the most powerful advocates for housing affordability in this country. And almost nobody is using them that way.”

Finally, Washington did.

Kristin Messerli doesn’t remember who called whom first. The MBA was building out its grassroots advocacy. FirstHome IQ had spent three years organizing producers. In January, the MBA invited FirstHome IQ to bring a cohort to NAC. By April, they were walking onto the Hill.

The MBA’s 2026 advocacy agenda was already set before the producers arrived. Push the House to fix the Senate-passed 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, which cleared the upper chamber 89 to 10. Move the industry away from the tri-merge credit report structure. Land the Basel III re-proposal somewhere the industry can live with. A fourth fight had just been won: the Homebuyers Privacy Protection Act, which ended the practice of flooding borrowers with competing offers the moment their credit was pulled, signed in September, effective six weeks before NAC.

In December, when the national credit bureaus raised prices, MBA CEO Bob Broeksmit put it this way:

“Once again, the national credit bureaus are abusing their government-granted oligopoly by gouging consumers. Today’s news only strengthens our call to move away from the tri-merge credit report structure.”

That is a load-bearing institutional argument, the kind the MBA has been carrying to the Hill for a 100 years.

The 50 producers brought something else on Wednesday. The family paying the tri-merge fee. The first-time buyer who aged into her forties before she found a house. The borrower in a specific district whose loan closed, or didn’t, on whatever the House decides to do with the ROAD Act. The names attached to the numbers.

Todd Bookspan spent more than two decades as a top-one-percent originator nationally. In all of it, he had never once set foot inside a Congressional office on industry business:

“This is the first time I actually felt invited to go there and do something.”

Dave Savage, who chairs the FirstHome IQ board, has spent 30 years building producers. He put the shift in the terms he uses with them:

“Historically, loan officers have not been in these rooms. That has all changed. How do we scale it to hundreds?”

Owen Lee, the MBA’s incoming Chair, put the mechanism plainly afterward:

“Advocacy on Capitol Hill is really about education of the lawmakers, and nothing educates them more than a story from the front line back home in their district.”

The CEOs and government-affairs heads have carried the policy argument for a century. The producers carry the witness.

The 50 producers who went to NAC were witnesses.

Matt Adler closed loans for 570 families last year in Troy, Michigan, through Lake Michigan Credit Union. Dave Savage had pushed him to get on the plane to DC. On Wednesday, he walked into four Michigan offices on the Hill: Haley Stevens, Elissa Slotkin, Gary Peters and Sri Thanedar. He talked about buyer fatigue. A story that had become routine for him over the past three years, first-time buyers who had stopped looking:

“They were tired of getting outbid or not finding homes amongst a small, stale inventory. Buyer fatigue is one of the most telling reasons that the average first-time buyer age increased to forty years old.”

He had braced for lackeys. He found staff who took notes. He went home and told his kids he was proud he’d gone, and that he wanted to be an example to them.

In a California Member’s office, Todd Bookspan sat with producer Jeremy Forcier and walked a staffer through HR 1340, the bill to double the capital gains exemption on home sales, a figure Congress set in 1997 and hasn’t touched. In California, where values have more than quadrupled since, the math has turned punitive for anyone who has owned long enough to consider selling. The staffer listened, then stopped them. Her grandmother, she said, had owned a house forever, the one where her mother and aunt grew up. She was hesitant to sell because of what she’d owe. The house was staying off the market. The staffer wasn’t reading a brief. She was telling them about her family. That is what the room sounded like on Wednesday, once a producer was in it.

Across the Hill, Caroline Frauman, tax counsel to Representative Gwen Moore of Wisconsin, kept Michael Creed and the other Wisconsin producers past their 30 minutes, asking questions. When they stood to leave, she asked if she could follow up.

The national originator count has been collapsing since 2021. By 2025, 221,000 remained, down 46% in two and a half years. Last year also registered the first annual rebound since the pandemic. The ones who survived have a great deal to say about what is happening to American families, and until last Wednesday, nobody had organized them to say it inside the rooms where policy gets written.

Kristin Messerli has been clear about what last Wednesday was:

“Policy is happening with or without them. Loan officers have a crucial voice to share that both protects and supports the consumer and helps move the industry forward.”

FirstHome IQ’s plan for next year scales up. All 50 states at NAC. Hundreds of loan officers in the cohort. A standing producer presence on the Hill, year after year, with borrowers in every district.

Owen Lee, who chairs the MBA next year, sees where this is going:

“We don’t have an established avenue to communicate with loan officers, and that’s one thing I’d like to change.”

A fly-in is an event. A standing constituency is a political force. If the cadence holds, producers become a permanent feature of the MBA’s advocacy infrastructure, walking into Congressional offices on the same schedule CEOs and government affairs heads have kept for a century, and carrying what the briefs don’t:

A name. A district. A family. A rate lock at 6:47 a.m.

The producers are in the room now. They are not leaving.

Bri Lees is a fractional CMO and mortgage marketing thought leader.