A 30-Year Broker Says This Market Is Harder Than 2008

James Hardin has built brokerages and origination teams since the late 1990s. He has now worked through three housing cycles. Asked to compare the present market with the crash, his answer was not the one most people expect. "In my opinion, 2008 through 2011 wasn't as bad as what's going on right now," the president of Able Financial Inc said in an interview with Mortgage Professional America.

The distinction he draws is about supply of business, not the ability to process it. "Back then, there was business all over the place. It just took you a month to get it closed," he said. "Whereas now there's just absolutely no business and plenty of people to close your deals." In 2008 the bottleneck was underwriting. Today the bottleneck is that the loan is never written at all.

The numbers inside his own shop show the scale of it. His wife and co-originator Abby Hardin closed $110 million in 2020, running 25 to 30 deals a month with two processors. She now closes 3 to 5 deals a month. Nothing about her skill or her process changed. The volume simply left.

The turn came in late 2022, when rates spiked. Able Financial had been running roughly 65% purchase business and 35% refinance. The refinance side disappeared, and with it 35% to 40% of the firm's business, effectively overnight. The staffing followed. Hardin did not renew 40 loan officers in 2023, then lost 30 more the year after, then 30 more again.

The cost of a thin pipeline compounds in ways that do not show up in volume charts. Hardin described a recent early payoff penalty of $15,000 triggered by one loan officer who closes roughly one deal a quarter. In a high-volume year that charge is absorbed without comment. In a drought it is the difference between a producer being worth keeping and not.

Behind all of it sits the rate lock. Homeowners sitting on mortgages from 2020 and 2021 are not trading them away. "They're not moving because they don't want to get a new home and put that money down and still have a doubled payment," Hardin said. That single calculation removes both sides of a transaction at once, the listing and the buyer, which is why inventory and demand have stayed low together.

His read on strategy is that scale is no longer the advantage it was. A small broker can shop a file across lenders and price it for the borrower rather than for the margin. "I literally will find the best rate for that client with the best product, where a retail lender can't do that because they're selling the margin for the company," he said.

For agents the lesson runs parallel. When deals are scarce the winning move is not faster processing, it is being in front of more of the few transactions that exist. That is why marketing spend has held up even as commissions have tightened, and why tools such as HomeFlyer AI that put a listing in front of thousands of agents at once have found an audience in a market this quiet.

None of this reads like 2008 on paper. Delinquencies are low, lending standards are tight, and there is no wave of forced selling. That is exactly Hardin's point. The last crisis was a credit event that cleared. This one is a volume drought with no obvious end date, and a drought is harder to wait out than a storm.