The Housing Market Hands More Decisions to AI

For most of the history of consumer credit, the loan decision sat with a human. That model is changing. This week in the Prompt Economy™ AI agents are now handling document review, credit scoring, risk assessment and borrower communication autonomously, compressing timelines and extending credit to borrowers that traditional systems could not reach.

A HousingWire article reports that at the Mortgage Bankers Association Servicing Solutions Conference in Dallas, Tavant unveiled its Touchless Servicing Portal and embedded AI agent MAYA. The article says the portal unifies application, decisioning and servicing in a single borrower-facing experience, allowing homeowners to move from paying their mortgage to exploring refinancing in one click. More than 80% of routine servicing inquiries are deflected in current deployments. Refinance application time has dropped by 33%.

The real estate use case is equally direct. A real estate professional can prompt MAYA to generate a pre-approval letter instantly for a specific buyer at a specific amount. “It’s all happening with just one prompt to the agent,” Sandeep Shivam, associate director of FinTech at Tavant, told HousingWire. The platform currently supports more than 400,000 borrowers nationwide.

On compliance, the article notes that AI agents must be provisioned like employees, with immutable logs of every action. “The auditor is going to come along and say, ‘Show me that this is sound,'” said Sundeep Mathur, vice president of fintech at Tavant. The article frames this as the central governance challenge for any lender deploying autonomous agents in a regulated environment.

AI Takes Over the Mortgage Workflow

A National Mortgage News article based on a survey of more than 150 mortgage industry professionals finds that more than 50% of respondents see credit scoring analysis and AI-backed underwriting as the most transformational technology available to them in 2026, ahead of digital closings, fraud detection, and natural language processing.

The article argues that agentic AI changes the capacity equation in a cyclical industry. Craig Rebmann, product evangelist and managing director at Dark Matter Technologies, told the publication: “No technology provider is going to bring you volume. They’re only going to bring you capacity. The lender is then responsible for determining what they’re going to do with that capacity.”

The article points to Frost Bank, which re-entered mortgage lending after exiting more than 20 years earlier and ended 2025 with $595 million in unpaid mortgage balance from originations, exceeding its goals by 19%. The article frames agentic AI not as a replacement for mortgage professionals but as the force multiplier that allows a right-sized workforce to meet rebounding demand without the hiring and firing swings that define a cyclical industry.

AI Reaches the Borrowers Traditional Credit Ignored

While U.S. lenders deploy agents to compress the mortgage cycle, the most consequential use of AI lending may be happening in markets where traditional credit infrastructure barely exists. A World Economic Forum article written by Ahmed Mohsen, co-founder and CTO of MNT-Halan, describes how Egypt’s fastest-growing FinTech built an AI-powered alternative credit scoring engine that evaluates users who have never interacted with formal credit systems before.

The article says MNT-Halan has automated more than 50% of its loan approvals and achieved a 60% approval rate for previously unscoreable users. The engine draws on data from the Halan superapp across payments, savings, and e-commerce. By observing how users make purchases, repay balances and engage with in-app tools, the model builds dynamic individual profiles without relying on formal financial histories.

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