But the parks — which employ an estimated 110,000 people collectively — are also facing headwinds due to their employees’ struggles to afford housing, and now both NBCUniversal and The Walt Disney Company — owners of the major parks — are aiming to address it, according to reporting from Bloomberg.

For Universal Studios employees, the owners of the park are seeking to construct a 1,000-unit mixed-use development slated to open in 2026 that would promise a short commute to the Universal Orlando Resort, which is also aiming to open a full-scale third theme park called “Epic Universe” next year.

“To launch the project, Universal donated 20 acres of land adjacent to the Orange County convention center,” the Bloomberg report reads. “Called Catchlight Crossings and built in partnership with local developer Wendover Housing Partners, the project broke ground in November.”

While the development is in partnership with Universal, it is open to anyone who “meets specific income and other resident requirements” according to a spokesperson for the developer and is not designated specifically for Universal employees.

Disney is also looking to get more involved in housing its employees, announcing in 2022 that it would “donate 80 acres for a proposed 1,450-unit affordable development a few miles to the southwest,” Bloomberg reported. “Also set to open in 2026, the project would be built near Flamingo Crossings Village, a campus for participants in Disney’s college internship program that also leases units to some Disney World cast members.”

The company also announced significant new investments in its Parks, Experiences and Products segment, expecting to “nearly double capital expenditures over the course of approximately 10 years to roughly $60 billion, including by investing in expanding and enhancing domestic and international parks and cruise line capacity,” the company said last September.

Both companies have faced criticisms in recent years for underpaying their theme park employees, especially as housing costs have risen precipitously.

“The average tenant in the [Central Florida] region saw their monthly rent jump by $600 between early 2020 and early 2023,” Bloomberg reported. “According to the National Low Income Housing Coalition, the Orlando-Kissimmee-Sanford metro area has one of the worst affordable housing shortages in the U.S., with only 15 available units for every 100 extremely low-income renter households.”

With deadlines extending into 2025, it’s possible that government officials currently in leadership positions at Ginnie Mae and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) may not be in office should the suit progress to trial sometime next year.

Deadlines from the magistrate judge

Initial disclosures between the two parties must be submitted to the court by Jan. 24, while agreements and proposed stipulations for information to be used based on electronic records must be submitted by Jan. 31.

Should either party in this suit wish for others to join the litigation, such motions must be filed by Feb. 16. More crucially, the magistrate judge has instructed the bank and Ginnie Mae to “have substantially completed document discovery on or before May 23, 2024,” and to have “fully completed document discovery on or before June 13, 2024.” The deadline for “all expert and factual discovery” will be March 14, 2025.

Ginnie Mae and TCB will also be given the chance to use alternative dispute resolution, including mediation, which must take place by April 25, 2025. Mediation will need to be conducted by counsel between both parties and must include at least one person who has final settlement authority on each side.

Mediation requires an independent third party to serve as mediator, and the actual proceeding “shall be private, confidential, and privileged from process and discovery, unless otherwise ordered by the court,” the document reads.

Core dispute between TCB and Ginnie Mae

The core dispute at the center of the lawsuit stems from loans given by TCB to Reverse Mortgage Funding (RMF), a formerly leading reverse mortgage lender and Home Equity Conversion Mortgage (HECM)-backed Securities (HMBS) issuer that filed for bankruptcy in late 2022, and which saw its servicing portfolio seized by Ginnie Mae soon afterward.

Ginnie Mae subsequently used its authority to extinguish RMF’s HMBS issuer status, and TCB — which believed it had first-lien authority on RMF collateral at the time it made loans to the company — saw few paths to recoup the loans following RMF’s bankruptcy.

In TCB’s initial complaint, the bank mentions appointed and U.S. Senate-confirmed officials at HUD and Ginnie Mae directly as having provided assurances that “TCB would be able to monetize the collateral if Ginnie Mae seized RMF’s mortgage servicing rights during the bankruptcy,” the original complaint said.

An election year, new Ginnie Mae leaders?

But with pretrial deadlines extending into 2025, it’s possible that these officials will no longer hold their offices by the time a trial date arrives since 2024 is a presidential election year, and the election victor will take office on Jan. 20, 2025. If the incumbent president fails to be re-elected, it’s likely that new officials will be appointed at HUD and Ginnie Mae.

New presidential administrations often bring new decision-makers and priorities with them into office, and it is unclear whether or not a new administration would be more or less likely to settle this case before trial.

While TCB previously explained that it still hopes to reach an amicable settlement with the government, “Texas Capital is confident it will prevail in this case and is committed to doing so because the law, facts and equities – in addition to the interest of thousands of seniors – are on its side” according to a statement TCB representatives shared with RMD in October after the initial complaint was filed.

However, it is also worth noting that the current front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination is Former President Donald Trump, who never appointed a Senate-confirmed Ginnie Mae president during his 2017-2021 term in office.

Incumbent Ginnie Mae President Alanna McCargo is the first Senate-confirmed Ginnie Mae president since Ted Tozer’s resignation in 2017, who served in the majority of the Obama administration.

Ginnie Mae position, recent HMBS moves

After more than three months of relative silence on the dispute, Ginnie Mae responded to TCB’s complaint in January saying that the warehouse lender lacks standing and discounts the authority the government has to extinguish a lender from its reverse mortgage-backed securities program. Ginnie Mae is seeking dismissal of the complaint in its entirety.

“When [RMF] defaulted on its obligations, GNMA exercised its right to extinguish RMF’s interest in certain mortgages in order to ensure the timely payment to investors in securities backed by those mortgages,” its early January court filing reads. “Plaintiff [TCB] also had an interest in those mortgages — prior to extinguishment — because RMF had pledged its limited interest in those mortgages to TCB as collateral for a loan.”

Despite these legal challenges, Ginnie Mae has been very active in the development of HMBS policy due to ongoing liquidity challenges within the sector. Earlier this month, the company announced that it was exploring the development of a new HMBS product in addition to the current offering, a move lauded by former Ginnie Mae President Tozer.

Last year, the company made important changes to the HMBS program including reducing the minimum size required to create HMBS pools to assist smaller issuers, while also changing certain pool eligibility requirements to ease some liquidity strain.

Scrutiny of Ginnie Mae’s stewardship of the HMBS program has also come from within the government. Last November, the HUD Office of the Inspector General (OIG) stated that the HMBS portfolio poses a “significant risk” to Ginnie Mae in 2024, largely due to the sensitivity of HECM loans to interest rates. The HUD OIG had also announced earlier that it was opening an inquiry into the extinguishment of RMF from the HMBS program.

This is according to a new report from home improvement services company Leaf Home and market research firm Morning Consult, which enlisted responses from 1,001 baby boomer homeowners (aged 59–77) and 1,001 millennials (aged 27–42) in late December 2023 and early January 2024.

The report describes homes owned by baby boomers as “time capsules,” since most of the surveyed boomer cohort (73%) said they have lived in their homes for 11 years or more. This is combined with the finding that “over half of their homes were built in 1980 or earlier with many never investing in renovations,” according to the results.

For millennials and younger generations who could eventually purchase these homes in the future, this creates a “looming underinvestment crisis that promises a future of deferred maintenance for their millennial inheritors,” the report said.

But for those who are aging in place in these homes today, there is also a notable deficit of renovations and added safety features, which could prove problematic for those who will naturally develop vision, mobility or cognitive impairments as time progresses, the report said.

Another recent report found that the current housing inventory is ill-equipped to facilitate aging in place safely for older Americans.

Just 24% of baby boomers are preparing their homes for aging, and even fewer are adding other safety features. Roughly 75% of baby boomer respondents report that they “have never added safety or accessibility features in their homes,” while 81% of the cohort report planning to leave an inheritance of some kind when they pass away.

Roughly half of millennial respondents (51%) expect to receive no inheritance.

“The housing market is caught in a generational tug-of-war. Boomers will soon face aging-in-place hurdles, while millennials will face the surprise of homes in need of major upgrades,” said Jon Bostock, CEO of Leaf Home, in a statement accompanying the report.

“With an aging and ignored inventory of homes available in the next decade, we may see a crisis that will overwhelm the home improvement industry and strain the budgets of inheriting millennials, impacting the housing market,” Bostock added.

Here are the top 10 Federal Housing Administration (FHA)-approved lenders in the reverse mortgage industry for the calendar year 2023, based on data compiled by Reverse Market Insight (RMI).

Consolidation was the name of the game

Finance of America Reverse (FAR) initially announced its intent to acquire industry-leading reverse mortgage lender American Advisors Group (AAG) in December 2022, and the deal closed early last year.

For the rankings, this allowed the FAR and AAG entities to be combined, as the new parent company consolidated its corporate infrastructure to onboard AAG personnel and processes, which the company later said in Q2 2023 had impacted its financial performance.

Mutual of Omaha Mortgage maintained its position in the no. 2 slot on the leaderboard, and is interestingly the only company within the top 10 to grow its FHA-backed Home Equity Conversion Mortgage (HECM) volume when compared to all other companies within the top 10 threshold, based on RMI data encompassing FHA-approved lenders. Mutual of Omaha saw its HECM volume grow 8% over year-end 2022 levels and saw its market share more than double to 20.4%.

All other top 10 companies endured volume losses between 31% and 62%, with the latter applying to Austin, Texas-based Open Mortgage. That company also announced its exit from the reverse mortgage business at the end of 2023, with CEO Scott Gordon citing lower origination volumes combined with lower closing pull-through rates as the primary reasons for the decision.

Other industry professionals lamented the company’s exit, especially given its long-time top 10 leadership position in the space.

Guild Mortgage found its way onto the top 10 in 2023 due to its acquisition of Cherry Creek Mortgage early in the year, with both companies having a high enough volume level to effectively earn two separate slots on RMI’s leaderboard.

Looking ahead

Industry professionals in different capacities who spoke to RMD at the end of 2023 will be keeping a close eye on performance metrics and lender activities to see how the business will continue into the new year. RMI President John Lunde cited Mutual of Omaha as a company to watch.

“It will be fascinating to see how the lender changes evolve the industry,” Lunde told RMD in December. “It’s clear at this point that Mutual of Omaha has been more successful in adapting this year to the changing environment, which makes perfect sense given their brand, distribution, and existing customer base.”

Companies in the space will need to take advantage of their strengths to either maintain or grow market share, which applies to newer entries in the space we saw during 2023.

“What we see as most impactful looking forward is how additional companies enter the space that share some of those same advantages and help evolve the perception of the product and industry,” Lunde added.

Some companies have also entered the reverse mortgage business, including PrimeLending, while prominent forward lender Guaranteed Rate announced it would be expanding its reverse mortgage presence. Marketing personnel at loanDepot also explained to RMD in 2023 the renewed opportunities they see in the reverse mortgage space.

Construction Coverage, a company that reviews construction software, insurance, and financial products in order to assist property builders, recently released a new report taking a closer look at the divide between baby boomers’ and younger generations’ shares of metropolitan housing markets according to reporting at the Chicago Sun-Times.

“Boomers own 35.6% of Chicago homes amid a housing shortage,” the company said in an email about the report according to the Sun-Times. “First-time home buyers, especially millennials and Gen Xers, are facing an uphill battle when looking for a home, partly because baby boomers […] are planning to stay put.”

Despite owning 35.6% of all homes in the area according to the report, the baby boomer cohort makes up only 19.9% of the total population of the city’s metropolitan population. It also said that while baby boomers make up roughly 20.7% of the national U.S. population, the cohort accounts for 37.8% of all homeowners across the country.

This is despite data that indicates that baby boomers are a less dominant factor in the Chicago housing market when compared to the rest of the nation, the Sun-Times said. In fact, Chicago did not even crack the top 10 of cities with the highest concentration of baby boomers. (The top spot went to Tucson with a concentration of 41.8%).

The columnist speculates that one of the reasons for this could be a higher concentration of multigenerational households in the city, but the aging-in-place preference for older Americans is a well-documented phenomenon based on research from other entities, including AARP.

Older Americans also have historic levels of home equity, according to recent tabulations from the National Reverse Mortgage Lenders Association (NRMLA) in conjunction with data analytics firm RiskSpan.

The two organizations produce the quarterly Reverse Mortgage Market Index (RMMI) report. The most recent edition from Q3 2023 showed that senior housing wealth grew by an estimated $178.4 billion in Q3 to a record of $13.08 trillion, with older homeowners benefitting from a pandemic-era run-up in home prices.

The RMMI increased precipitously between 2011 and 2021. When it endured a decline in 2011, the collective figure sat at roughly $3 trillion while in Q3 2021, the RMMI index rose by 4%, topping $10 trillion for the first time.

Both the Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA) and the National Housing Conference (NHC) lauded the proposal in statements released this week.

“MBA and its members have long called for enacting tax provisions that address our nation’s housing affordability crisis and the acute shortage of homes for owning and renting,” said Bob Broeksmit, president and CEO of MBA. “We support this bill, particularly for its meaningful enhancements to the Low Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) that will produce an estimated 200,000 additional rental units over the next two years.”

The proposal contains increased state allocations for affordable housing projects, as well as a reduced tax-exempt bond financing requirement that “will help more borrowers and lenders to use the LIHTC program to construct and rehabilitate housing for low- and moderate-income households,” Broeksmit said.

NHC President and CEO David Dworkin also commended the proposal, echoing the potential to construct 200,000 additional rental units and emphasizing the need for the United States to address affordability challenges.

“The United States is experiencing the worst housing affordability crisis in recent history,” Dworkin said. “This bill will make a significant downpayment on bipartisan solutions to produce more housing that is affordable to working Americans in every state. This is why it has strong bipartisan support.”

The proposal is not without shortcomings, however, according to Dworkin.

“We would have liked to see provisions to incentivize more housing for extremely low-income Americans and build and rehab more housing in underserved neighborhoods,” he said. “But we also recognize that the perfect cannot be the enemy of the good, and this is a good bill.”

Broeksmit and Dworkin specifically commended House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Rep. Jason Smith (R-Miss.) and Senate Finance Committee Chairman Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) for their “bipartisan, bicameral” work on this proposal, calling on Congress to pass it and send it to the desk of President Joe Biden.

Despite partisan misgivings on both sides of the aisle, the bill passed the markup phase in the House Ways and Means Committee by a vote of 40-3. However, the bill may still have an uphill battle to become law due to ongoing rancor in the House, according to reporting at The Hill.

Homes in which people raise their families may be too large to adequately support someone’s needs as they age, and naturally begin to see cognitive or mobility impairments, the story explained. Renovations may provide some solutions, but it is also a solution with limits according to Rodney Harrell, VP for family, home and community at AARP.

“We don’t have enough homes that meet our aging needs,” Harrell told MarketWatch. “There are changes the housing industry can make. There are changes policy people can make so that people aren’t compromising. But we’re not there yet.”

According to 2011 data from Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies (JCHS), less than 4% of U.S. homes offer all of the most key features of aging-accessible housing, defined as “single-floor living, no-step entries, and wide hallways and doorways,” the story said.

A Virginia-based home remodeler, Vince Butler, who also serves as an aging-in-place specialist with the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) personally estimated the actual figure to be lower, adding that there are “140 million homes that don’t have the features they need.”

The most underdeveloped feature of aging-accessible housing is a home with zero-step entryways since homes for generations have been constructed on elevated foundations requiring steps or a ramp to reach the door.

“Getting someone in and out of the home is often the hardest part, and it’s the most crucial point,” Butler said. “Bathrooms are easy to fix, doors are easy to widen. The biggest problem is just getting into the house. Having a one-level house still doesn’t make it accessible if there are two steps up to get into the house.”

Other necessary features for such homes that are rare in the market today include showers that can accommodate a wheelchair, lever-style door handles instead of doorknobs and more accessible light or power controls that are easier to reach.

Lighting itself may also need to be changed inside a home, Butler said.

“Lighting can be improved in every home,” he explained. “As people age, color distinction can fade, and it’s hard to see differences in flooring or spaces.”

On Jan. 18, the company began to restore several impacted systems over the course of the day beginning with its servicing customer portal. While it maintained certain limits on its functionality, the company explained that it would continue updating customers as more of its features became available.

Two hours later, the company restored access to its portal for Home Equity Line of Credit (HELOC) customers, followed shortly after that by its “MyloanDepot customer portal” dedicated to online loan applications and status tracking.

By the end of the day, it had also restored the website for its “mellohome” real estate affiliate.

When reached, representatives of loanDepot referred HousingWire to the website it has created to offer updates to consumers about systems and processes impacted by the cyberattack. It remains unclear which other systems are impacted, and a representative advised that the website encompasses all public-facing statements on the matter at this time.

The company informed customers and the wider public of the cyberattack on Jan. 8, and a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) reviewed by HousingWire indicated the date of earliest event as Jan. 4.

The company mailed Internal Revenue Service (IRS) 1098 forms to servicing customers beginning on Jan. 16. Those forms were expected to be reflected on the servicing website as soon as it was brought back online, the company explained.

Technology news site TechCrunch reported that a loanDepot company representative “did not dispute that the incident was linked to ransomware,” in which a bad actor gains access to a target individual or organization’s digital systems, then encrypts them, and sells the decryption key back to the victim for a price.

“We are working quickly to understand the extent of the incident and taking steps to minimize its impact,” loanDepot said in its Jan. 8 statement on the attack. “The Company has retained leading forensics experts to aid in our investigation and is working with law enforcement. We sincerely apologize for any impacts to our customers and we are focused on resolving these matters as soon as possible.”

Arriving at FOA following its acquisition of American Advisors Group (AAG) last year, Moschner already had a successful marketing career before joining the industry’s leading lender. He discusses his professional journey and what he finds “intoxicating” about the reverse mortgage business as a marketer.

Marketing beginnings

Most of Moschner’s career has been spent at what he calls “traditional” or “classic” consumer products marketing, he said in an interview with RMD. He spent most of his career at the multinational consumer goods conglomerate Procter & Gamble (P&G) in Cincinnati and continues to operate from there today.

Working for P&G gave Moschner access to marketing assignments for a lot of international and domestic brands, which offered a baseline of classic marketing principles he would take further into his career.

Over the past seven years, Moschner has worked primarily in financial services marketing with a focus on the life and annuity space, he said.

“I worked for two companies, one called Bright House Financial, where I was on the ground floor launching that brand as it spun off from MetLife,” he said. “And then I found my way over to another life insurer called Protected Life, where I was the chief marketing officer. There was nothing frankly wrong with those roles, and I was enjoying them very much, but then my phone rang about [two years] ago.”

Leaping into reverse mortgages

That phone call was from AAG, and Moschner spoke with the lender’s founder and CEO to discuss the possibility of jumping into the industry’s leading reverse mortgage lender. After a good conversation, Moschner found himself really taken with the reverse mortgage product category, he said.

“I find this category intoxicating from a marketer’s perspective,” he explained. “It’s the combination of the opportunity ahead of us that we all know, where the [demographic has trillions] in equity. You’ve got this retirement crisis, you’ve got a solution hiding in plain sight, yet massive customer inertia.”

Beyond those dynamics, Moschner sees the issues that the industry has had connecting with older borrowers as, fundamentally, a marketing problem he thinks he could affect positively for his company and the wider sector.

“It comes down to the idea that if there’s a solution that people aren’t understanding, then it’s just a matter of this idea that we either haven’t given them the right insight or tapped into the right need, used the right language or made them the right offer,” he said. “I believe we can use some of those things that I’ve learned across my career to make a positive impact not just for Finance of America, but for the category in general.”

Move to FOA

Moschner served in his role at AAG for roughly five to six months before one of the biggest moves of industry consolidation came into view: FOA’s acquisition of AAG.

While FOA and its reverse-specific subsidiary Finance of America Reverse (FAR) had been a major, leading player in the space for some time, the AAG acquisition would see them become the dominant player virtually overnight.

“I have now, since April, been leading the combined marketing entity of the two,” he said. “I’ve overseen how we’ve really brought these teams together, and [most of the past year] has really been about integration. Putting two teams together, putting our processes together, putting our technology stacks together, all of that is really how I got here.”

New opportunities, moving the needle on reverse mortgages

While being acquired by another company relatively soon into his AAG tenure was not on his “career roadmap,” Moschner sees a real opportunity to expand the business now that much of the initial dust from the acquisition has settled, he said.

“Now that we’re here, I think this is such an incredible gift,” he said. “[We’ve] brought together the power of the AAG marketing model and the performance marketing model that we have with FAR’s product portfolio, which [we plan on] expanding. I think that is going to be a ‘secret sauce,’ and now that we’re here I’m even more excited about what’s ahead.”

While AAG offered FAR’s proprietary reverse mortgages through a correspondent partnership in the past, being a single entity allows the companies to leverage the marketing muscle that AAG has built over its existence with the product catalog maintained by FAR. On top of that, with the macroeconomic environment slowly improving, Moschner’s optimism has grown, he said.

“And again, as a marketer, I believe we can impact change, and I believe we are one of the big levers that are going to really unlock this category going forward.”

2021 research from AARP indicates that 77% of adults at or over the age of 50 want to stay in their homes as they get older, but the figure in Laguna Beach is much higher. There, the figure is closer to 90% according to Rickie Redman, director of Lifelong Laguna.

Originally piloted in 2017, Lifelong Laguna is a program that enlists a local area nonprofit to encourage support for aging in place.

“Lifelong Laguna is based on the Village movement, where aging in place is encouraged with community support,” the story reads. “The Laguna Beach program aims to fulfill a specific need for a city where approximately 28% of residents are age 65 and over, while local assisted living and memory care services are scarce.”

Much of the city’s older population has lived in Laguna Beach since they were in their 20s and 30s. Now in their 70s and 80s, they simply do not want to be displaced to live somewhere else, even if another area or dedicated facility could more easily attend to their needs as they age.

“They make this city unique,” Redman told CNBC, saying many of the older residents can trace their journey here to the city’s “artistic roots,” the story explained. “They’re the placeholders for the Laguna that we now know.”

The program currently serves about 200 older residents, and there is no direct cost to them for participating. It is entirely funded by grants and local fundraising efforts, according to Redman.

“Its services address a wide range of needs, including a home repair program the city operates in collaboration with Habitat for Humanity, nutrition counseling and end-of-life planning,” the story explained.

Other cities and communities have adopted similar systems, as aging-in-place preferences have increased dramatically since the onset of the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic. Data from Genworth Financial indicates that roughly 70% of the 10,000 baby boomers who will turn 65 every day until 2030 will require long-term care at some point in their later lives, CNBC reported.

“There definitely is a mindset change, where people are saying, ‘I do want to stay put, I don’t necessarily want to move into a nursing home or into assisted care,’” said Jessica Lautz, deputy chief economist and vice president of research at the National Association of Realtors (NAR) to CNBC.

One beneficiary of the Laguna Beach program told the outlet that her needs have been attended to very promptly, from assistance with yard clean-up to the organization of end-of-life services for her recently deceased husband.

“Anything that I’ve needed, I’ve gotten help,” said Sylvia Bradshaw, an 84-year old Laguna Beach resident when describing her membership in the program.