MLN NewsStream

If federal mortgage announcements leave your head spinning due to ambiguities and omissions, you're not alone. It's a wild dream, but maybe one day, regulators will let mortgage practitioners proofread their communications in advance. Then, edits can be made and mortgage pros will get all the key details they need on the day of the announcement.

We spoke with multiple lenders on Friday, and none of them felt overly confident about some of the finer points of OSFI's policy shift. When the lenders themselves are confused, you know we're in for a ride.

On that note, we got more clarifications from the banking regulator and lenders on the new uninsured switch change. Here's the latest...

Canada's bank regulator officially announced the removal of the federal mortgage stress test for borrowers switching from one lender to another, but oh, mama, the devil's in the details!

OSFI says everything's a go for tomorrow's stress test policy change. The banking regulator confirms that "November 21 is the date that banks can begin accepting straight switches without performing the mortgage stress test."

It's a move that should incrementally boost origination volumes industrywide as more borrowers are able to switch lenders. However, due to system issues, internal policy and other factors, not all lenders will be on board on day one.

The most aggressive competitors will naturally see the greatest uptick in switch volumes. But overall, this won't move the needle much since most retention departments have a knack for keeping renewers loyal. Moreover, only a small minority of would-be switchers were blocked by the stress test to begin with. For mortgage originators, however, every new deal helps.

What's more intriguing is a potential shift to #insurable# policy, and we've got an update on that.

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...