After months of work to help customers get under contract, a broker loses out at the end
Despite national headlines about housing surpluses in the United States, real estate markets vary greatly. In Maine, where inventory shortages remain as prevalent as anywhere in the country, brokers are running into issues where buyers bail after months of work for an online lender.
While some markets are so saturated in homes that buyers are getting major concessions from sellers to close deals, Maine is still seeing very limited inventory. With so few deals available, each one is invaluable to mortgage brokers looking to make a living.
Skylar Welch (pictured top) is the founder and managing partner of Maine Pointe Lending. She’s growing increasingly frustrated as she sees months of hard work for potential homebuyers disappear when they end up financing with minimal cost savings at closing.
“I work my butt off for these clients,” Welch told Mortgage Professional America. “I work every weekend, I work every night. I might run 10 properties every week for them, multiple days for what could be six months, could be a year. After working all that time, being available, always answering the phone, always getting them everything they need, making the letters, getting their offer accepted.
“Because I have local relationships with these real estate agents, and they're accepting it because my name's stamped on it. Then, at that point, borrowers start shopping with these online companies that are basically a bot.”
She feels like the real estate agents are encouraging customers at the end of the process to shop around for loans, even if the broker has worked for months to get the client into a home.
“Real estate agents, they're just like, ‘Oh, you're under contract now, go start shopping,’” Welch said. “Imagine if mortgage brokers said to a buyer, ‘Oh, that real estate agent is charging 3%? Go find one that will charge you 2% after they just showed you 50 properties.’ Do you think that would be socially acceptable? Absolutely not. That would be bad.
“Yet, on our end, as a mortgage broker, they're saying, ‘Okay, now you're under contract. Go shop and find the best rate. I know they just helped you for the last year.’ I don't think that should be socially acceptable either.”
Market pressures adding to stress
In addition to general affordability issues, what makes the situation worse in Maine is the lack of housing available. Welch said the problems they’re having in her market regarding inventory are about as challenging as any market in the country.
“But when some people say things like, ‘Oh, we have inventory issues.’ I mean, there have been times when there are four listings in our biggest city in our state,” she said. “When I say there are inventory issues, like, there are seriously inventory issues.”
As was the case in many rural markets, the problems began during the pandemic, when remote work allowed people to move far away from metropolitan areas.
“During the after effects of COVID, people were flooding to Maine, because people could now work remotely,” Welch said. “They were realizing they could afford so much more, but there aren't as many job opportunities in Maine. So, people in Boston and New York and Connecticut and Rhode Island were like, ‘Why would I stay in the city and pay millions of dollars for a tiny little place where I could go live in a beautiful house on lots of acreage in Maine and now work my job remotely?’
She said people moved from as far away as California and Texas for their little slice of the Pine Tree State. Now, many of those people are tied to low-rate mortgages, which they don’t want to give up. And even if they do, with inventory so limited, there’s nowhere to go.
“I'm getting an influx of calls from people being like, ‘How can I take equity out of my house, make it bigger, or make it into what I want it to be? Because, one, I don't want to lose my 2% or 3% interest rate; and two, there's nowhere for me to go. There's nothing for me to buy,’” she said. “I think that a lot of people would want to list their house and move and either upgrade or downgrade, but they're afraid that one, they can't find a property that they want, and two, they don't want to leave that low interest rate.
“So, it's created this stalemate where people don't have anything to buy because people don't want to leave because they don't have anything to buy.”
And while homebuilders are trying to keep up with overwhelming demand, Welch said they don’t have builders in the state who are constructing massive subdivisions all at once.
“We don't have the large-scale new construction builder,” Welch said. “We have the one-off builders. We have builders who build maybe 10 houses a year. So, our construction is drastically different than other states.”
Limited deals, lost deals
The lack of homes to buy makes the frustration of losing out on customers at the very end of a lengthy home search even worse.
“(Online companies) don't really know what they're doing, charging nothing and giving them these interest rates that now, after I've worked for a year on, I can't compete with,” Welch said. “Because I'd be losing money on it, and they're not providing the service that we're doing. So it's becoming really frustrating.”
Similar to the way that big box companies drove smaller businesses out of cities, Welch said these online lenders can undercut local brokers.
“These big corporate companies can just be like, ‘Oh, we pay our employees very little, or we're using bots, or we're using AI to do these things,’” she said. “But they're not the ones answering all their questions. They're not the ones running prequals and running numbers for them every night and weekend. They're simply getting the contracts at a 16th of a point better interest rate.
“There's no sense of loyalty or appreciation, or even value in everything that we're doing. I just spent a year working for you, and now I'm getting paid nothing because you found a 16th of a point better interest rate on some online bot. That's the frustrating part.”
Affordability challenges for first-time homebuyers underscore the need for professional advice, says Michael Brennan, President of Nationwide Mortgage Bankers (NMB). He believes the industry has shifted to a trusted advisor role. https://t.co/IRNtu98WoM
— Mortgage Professional America Magazine (@MPAMagazineUS) June 25, 2025
It’s even more frustrating for Welch because she loves being a mortgage broker and helping people. She’s been in the business for 15 years. She also loves giving back to her local community.
But there are some days that the career she loves doesn’t love her back.
“That's where my mindset is,” Welch said. “It's taking that joy out of it, for me to be honest. Like, I love what I do. But when you're constantly doing everything, and then they say, ‘We're going with someone else. You were so great. I would refer anyone to you, because you've been so great. But we're saving 20 bucks a month.’ It’s just hard, you know.
“I have a family. We have family and staff in a community. We support the local community. We support the local everything. And, you know, we can't just be like, oh, yeah, who cares?”
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