One broker shares his secrets that have caused his business to explode
Since all trends eventually come back around again, it’s no surprise that talking about “vibes” has returned to everyday language in the 2020s after originally surging in popularity in the 1960s.
However, the Beach Boys weren’t likely talking about artificial intelligence and technology when discussing their “Good Vibrations”.
The vibes have moved to the computer world, as a trend called “vibe coding” has gained popularity. It’s largely attributed to those who use AI to help code in a way that would be far faster than doing it by hand.
Now, that’s moved into the mortgage space, believe it or not, and one broker is taking full advantage of these good vibes.
Carlos Scarpero (pictured top), mortgage broker at Edge Home Finance, is making the most of a major advancement in AI technology over the last few months, which has allowed him to level up his mortgage website. He’s hoping other brokers will follow suit.
“I've always been interested in AI,” Scarpero told Mortgage Professional America. “Last year, I watched a lot of AI content. I took a few AI courses, and then I even went to an AI conference last September. Then, as the year progressed, I just kind of lost interest in AI a little bit. I just kind of ignored it for a couple of months. Well, the technology improved so fast that in a four-month period, it was really perfect.”
Creating mortgage calculators
Once Scarpero noted the large jump in quality of the AI programs, he got to work on vibe coding. He felt like mortgage calculators were a logical place to start. He had tried to create them in the past, with mixed success.
“I've been wanting to do mortgage calculators for three years now,” Scarpero said. “I think that, from an SEO and marketer perspective, a mortgage calculator is that piece of marketing that we can put on our website, we can get it ranked, we can attract traffic, we can get people to interact with our sites, and potentially call us. And so it's an area that I've been wanting to explore more deeply.
“Up until this point, the technology was just such a pain to get something built. I have a web design background. Six months to a year ago, I was trying to build these calculators. I bought plugins, bought software, looked at consultants, all that kind of stuff, and I was only able to recreate a few of the calculators online. I could not get most of these things to work right.”
He said even if the calculator worked, if he wanted to make a small change to it, like the color, it would recode the whole thing and would usually break the calculator. However, after the latest tech advancements in AI, he was able to recreate even the most complicated calculators.
“I gave it a link to a 2025 Fannie Mae calculator and asked it to create something similar with 2026 data,” Scarpero said. “It took five minutes. All I had to do was clean it up. I took a screenshot of a calculator on my website. And I said, ‘Match the branding on this calculator to the colors of my existing content.’ It shoots it out and everything matches.”
Scarpero said the real test was seeing if it could create a more complicated calculator, like a VA Interest Rate Reduction Refinance Loan (IRRRL) calculator. As someone who specializes in VA loans, he was excited to see if it would work.
“As a VA guy, VA IRRRL is a product I should be building calculators for,” he said. “How much work would it be to build a VA IRRRL calculator? How much does the AI know about what's needed to build the calculator? I said, ‘Please build a VA IRRRL calculator for me.’ I didn't give it context. I didn't tell it how to do it. I didn't tell it what the requirements are. Ten minutes later, it was done correctly.
“The VA IRRRL also has this thing called recoup time, where the recoupment has to be 36 months of payments, because we don't want loan churning. Well, the calculator figured out automatically how to calculate recoup. And on top of that, if it met recoup, it changed that field to green. If it did not meet it, it was red.”
Upgrading your brokerage
So excited by the results, Scarpero said he churned out 10 calculators over a weekend for his website. He said brokers should be spending some time in these AI programs, trying to create things to make their website more useful for customers. He said they should start small to get a feel for how to use the technology.
“I think they're trying to swing for the fences too hard instead of just doing one little simple thing,” he said. “A lot of people overthink it, too. With the calculator prompts, I wrote a sentence. Don’t overthink it. And sometimes people get overwhelmed. Some people still don't have websites. Literally, you can go build a website with a prompt now.
“You can go into a web provider, and literally go in there and type in, ‘I want a mortgage website that does this.’ It can even write the copy for you. Just tell it, ‘I'm a loan originator in Dayton, Ohio, and I specialize in VA loans. I want a patriotic-looking website. Here's my logo.’ That's how good the software is now, and it'll create it. And if you don't like it, you can always change it.”
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