Mortgage origination is communication intensive. Many brokers and lender reps easily spend 3+ hours per workday drowning in emails. If they could trim that by just 10%, they'd save a precious 75 hours a year.

What could you do with 75 more hours before New Year's? Well, if you're 40 years old and have 25 years to retirement, now we're talking about potentially 1875 rescued hours. That's 78 full days of one's life they'd get back simply by making email more productive.

Turning your inbox into a lean, mean communication machine isn't child's play; it's survival. Today, we explore an email tool that some feel is so transformative it could literally hand someone back days of their life.

Most of the time, when homebuilding is booming, so is the mortgage business. That's just one reason why our industry is pulling for homebuilders to get their groove back—at least in Canada's biggest provinces.

To sniff out when we might see more cranes in the sky, we caught up with Kevin Lee, CEO of the Canadian Home Builders' Association. Here's what he served up...

"We believe that this period of declining rates could create a period of intense mortgage competition in Canada ... This mortgage competition will likely take place over a 2 to 3-year period, so we could see waves of competition and tactics are likely to evolve and change."

That's direct from an RBC Capital Markets report on Monday.

In the story that follows, we analyze whether 2025 could be a gladiator deathmatch for mortgage originations. We then assess how intense these rate duels may be and what strategies brokers and lenders can employ to stay in the ring.

If you're looking for answers on where rates could go from here, don't rely on Bay Street economists. Not yet, anyway.

Following America's November 5 election, Canada's rate outlook has become an inkblot test; seemingly every expert sees something different. The reason is they're now juggling all sorts of unknowns, including:

Six weeks ago, Scotiabank dropped a policy bomb with its STEP qualifying rate change. The move made it much harder for borrowers with higher debt ratios to get approved.

After investigation, we've since unearthed suspected reasons behind this shift. The story that follows outlines those, as well as the ripple effects on brokers.

And, if Scotia's STEP has you feeling locked out like a teenager past curfew, don't worry - we've got a list of alternative lenders ready to roll out the welcome mat.