MCS Mortgage Services’ 2024 Wins and 2025 Priorities

With 2025 quickly approaching, Chad Mosley, President of MCS Mortgage Services division, shares his insights on the latest trends across the industry as well as a look at the team’s biggest accomplishments from 2024 and what he expects in the new year. 

What would you consider MCS Mortgage Services’ biggest achievements in 2024? 

At the top of our list of accomplishments is the acquisition and integration of Five Brothers. That gave us an entrance into the reverse mortgage servicing industry. It’s a small, close-knit industry with only a couple of major servicers, so acquiring Five Brothers and their contracts was a huge win for us.  

We also added their Five Online technology system, a very attractive asset built to service reverse mortgages, to our tech stack and brought on some incredible new team members through the acquisition. Their vast knowledge and history of working with reverse mortgages helped us get up to speed overnight and has been integral as we navigate this new terrain as a property preservation provider in the reverse space. 

Were there any trends or challenges in the mortgage industry that affected MCS operations this year?  

Since the pandemic, course correcting and rightsizing have been major themes across the industry. The general, industry-wide thinking when the pandemic hit was that after it was over, things would work their way back to “normal” or 2019 volumes, but that hasn’t happened. Volumes have remained flat, and this isn’t expected to change anytime soon.  

Mortgage delinquency rates and foreclosures are at all-time lows, due in part to loss mitigation or workout options to avoid foreclosure and the large amount of equity people tend to have in their homes now.  

In response to this new normal, we made strides to work more efficiently by combining teams and more effectively managing our volume.  

Can you share examples of steps you took to enhance efficiency? 

Our continued improvements have largely come through technology automation and process efficiency within our Property Registration team. That’s a big focus of the business and a service we provide for most of our clients. These efficiencies allowed us to onboard additional clients and complete more property registrations in 2024 than in previous years without incurring additional costs. 

We also examined our vendor management function and streamlined our partner onboarding process. We improved the vendor experience, making it easier to apply and to upload required documentation. And we've already seen the fruits of that labor—we have added more services partners and retained a higher percentage of them than ever before. That’s a big win for us because we know our partner network is extremely critical for our success. 

With volumes expected to remain flat for 2025, what are your priority areas for investing your team’s time and resources? 

We’re going to continue to focus on improving processes to drive efficiency as well as efforts to enhance the overall client experience. For example, we plan to overhaul our bid process—changing the way we review bids and how we present them to our clients. We want to present them with greater transparency and efficiency, so our customers can quickly make approval decisions.  

Loss draft inspections will be another area of focus. Because of the amount of scheduling coordination and communication involved, we’re aiming to re-engineer our processes. We believe a future technology deployment will improve the process and experience for everyone.  

Are there other trends you foresee across the industry that could impact the business?  

The primary investor insurers are analyzing their maintenance allowables (their standard rate sheet of what they pay for services). They are considering adding new allowables for certain types of services and rethinking the rates for some current allowables due to industry changes (rising cost of materials and fuel). We look forward to seeing updated allowable schedules in 2025, which will help us increase payments to our service partner network, ensuring the vendor base is sustainable and profitable. 

What other goals or expectations do you have for your team in the coming year?  

We’re going to continue to expand in the reverse mortgage industry. We’ve just scratched the surface, and now that we’ve integrated that business, we can focus on growth. We are also currently onboarding several property registration customers. We’ll continue to monitor those volumes and manage our team accordingly.    

Our underlying goal is always to be the best provider in this industry. That manifests itself through our relationships with our clients, our scorecard performance, our timelines and the quality of our work, so we never want to take our eye off the ball. 

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