The Exchange: Michael Miedler – The MortgagePoint

Michael Miedler is President and CEO of Century 21 Real Estate LLC. He was appointed to the role in January 2019, leading the brand and its global network of approximately 11,000 independently owned and operated offices and more than 124,000 independent sales professionals across 80 countries and territories. Miedler brings more than 20 years of experience with the Century 21 brand and extensive expertise in residential and commercial real estate franchising, brokerage, and management. Previously, he served as Global Chief Growth Officer, leading franchise sales and focusing on growth in emerging and diverse markets. During his tenure, he closed some of the largest franchise deals in the brand’s history and helped enhance and implement the C21 Recruiting Platform.

Earlier, as SVP, Miedler oversaw brand development and market-share strategy in the United States, advising real estate businesses on growth strategies, planning, and transactions. Before joining the Century 21 brand, he was managing director of ONCOR International, facilitating commercial real estate transactions in the United States and internationally. Miedler is a graduate of West Chester University of Pennsylvania, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in applied science, criminal justice, and accounting.

Q: You’ve said you expect more brokerage and brand consolidation over the next few years. How should mortgage lenders be positioning themselves for a real estate landscape with fewer, larger players?

Miedler: I don’t think consolidation stops at the brokerage. Margin compression is permanent; you don’t go backwards from it once it hits, and the way brands have responded is by pulling ancillary services in-house instead of relying on outside partners. That’s why Compass wanted Anywhere: not just the agents, but the relocation company and the title operation sitting inside it. Once a brand owns those pieces, that margin stays theirs instead of getting shared with a vendor.

I think mortgage is next in that same pattern. Right now, most lenders are outside vendors to these networks, competing loan-by-loan for referrals. I wouldn’t assume that lasts. The brands already pulling title and relocation in-house are going to look at mortgage the same way, either building their own or doing it through a joint venture, because that’s where the margin sits once the brokerage side keeps getting squeezed.

So, if I’m a lender, I’m not spending the next two years trying to be the best outside vendor for these networks. I’m trying to get inside the ownership structure now, through a joint venture or equity stake, before a brand decides to build that capability itself or hands it to whoever gets there first.

Q: You were vocal about the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, calling for improvements to FHA loan limits and investor provisions. What specific changes would you like to see lenders and policymakers prioritize next?

The concerns I initially raised were fixed in the final law. Here are the three things at the top of my list:

First, the capital gains cap. It was set in 1997 and hasn’t moved since: $250,000 for a single filer, $500,000 for a couple, while the median home has more than tripled. There are millions of longtime homeowners, a lot of them baby boomers sitting on the largest pool of home equity in American history, who look at the tax bill from selling and decide to stay put. That’s inventory locked away in exactly the homes first-time buyers need.

Updating that cap, or pairing it with an incentive for owners who sell to first-time buyers, would unlock more supply faster than almost anything else on the table, because those homes already exist. Nobody has to build them.

Second, implementation speed on the law that was just passed. Permitting reform only counts when a builder
actually breaks ground sooner, and the grant programs only count when a city council actually takes the money and changes its zoning. HUD moving fast on the rulemaking matters more right now than any new legislation. I’d like to see this law working in two years.

Third, and this one is mainly for lenders: the law created a pilot for FHA small-dollar mortgages, and it only
works if lenders come to the table. There are markets all over the country where perfectly good, affordable homes are hard to finance because a small loan doesn’t move the needle for the lender the way a big one does. Manufactured housing has had the same gap for years, and the law just modernized those rules too. That’s the entry point of the market, the exact place a first-time buyer starts, and I believe lenders who build capability there now are getting into the part of the market this law was written to grow.

Q: With inventory rising and rates easing into 2026, do you see affordability genuinely improving for buyers, or is the “leveling” you’ve described mostly benefiting sellers and agents?

Affordability is improving for buyers, but it’s not coming from rates or a flood of inventory—it’s coming
from time and leverage. A buyer today gets more days to decide, more room to negotiate concessions, and sellers who price to the current market instead of the one they remember from 2022.

Wages outpacing home prices in much of the country does the rest of the work. For the family running the numbers, That can be the difference between impossible and workable. This market is working for both sides, and you can really see it in the volume: the best spring since 2022, with more homes in contract than at any point in four years. Every one of those contracts involved a buyer and a seller agreeing on a number, and that doesn’t
happen at this volume in a one-sided market. Buyers have footing in the negotiation again. Sellers who price
correctly are still moving quickly.

The caveat, though, is that this improvement is fragile. If rates push to 7% and sit there, some of it stalls. No
amount of market improvement substitutes for the homes we didn’t build over the last decade, which is why the supply reforms in the ROAD to Housing Act play an important role in affordability now and in the future.

Q: You’ve cited Census data projecting that a large majority of net new homebuyers through 2050 will be Latino, alongside gains from Gen-Z and other minority groups. How should mortgage lenders be adapting their products, marketing, and loan officer recruiting to meet that shift?

The mistake I see lenders making is treating the Latino market as an outreach initiative when it is, mathematically, the market. The Urban Institute projects 70% of net new homeowners between now and 2040 will be
Hispanic. I’ve been working alongside NAHREP for more than 20 years, and the shift I’ve watched isn’t coming
soon anymore—it’s here. The question lenders need to ask themselves now: are their products, marketing, and people built for Hispanic homebuyers?

On products: the biggest barrier for these buyers is the down payment, and there’s assistance in every state. I recommend building DPA education into the process, in Spanish and English. Then look at underwriting. Hispanic households are more likely to be multigenerational, with multiple earners under one roof, and a process built around one W-2 borrower leaves qualified families on the sidelines of homes they can afford.

On marketing: Hispanic homebuying is referral-driven and family-centric. One closing can catalyze homeownership across an entire extended network. The loan officer who treats a $250,000 first-time purchase as a small deal is missing the 10 transactions that can come after.

On recruiting: less than 10% of real estate professionals today are Hispanic, and I’d guess the loan officer corps looks similar. If 70% of your future customers are Latino, your team should be too.

Q: You’ve said regulating institutional investors won’t move the needle much on its own. What would actually make a dent in the investor-driven share of single-family purchases?

Supply, honestly. Investors concentrate in entry-level homes because that’s where the shortage is worst—scarce
assets that appreciate are what investors buy. If you cap who can purchase, you’ve changed who owns a fixed number of homes. Build more homes, and you’ve changed the math that attracts investors in the first place.
There are three things I believe can make a dent.

First, get the ROAD to Housing Act implemented fast, because permitting reform and the manufactured housing provisions are aimed at the price points where investors compete with first-time buyers. Second, update the
capital gains cap. It hasn’t moved since 1997, and it’s keeping longtime owners—a lot of them boomers sitting on the largest pool of home equity in American history—from selling homes that already exist in the price range first-time buyers need. Third, make the first-time buyer more competitive at the offer table. Down payment assistance and the new FHA small-dollar mortgage pilot matter here, because the family bidding against
an investor usually loses on financing terms, not price.

Q: You’ve talked about AI and customer demand for simpler transactions driving scale. Where do you see the mortgage process itself needing the most AI-driven simplification?

Verification, without question. The mortgage is the longest, most opaque stretch of the entire transaction—30 to
45 days of collecting pay stubs, resending bank statements, and waiting on underwriting with no visibility into
where things stand. Every document a borrower submits twice is friction AI could have already eliminated.

The second spot is the pre-approval. A pre-approval should mean something at the offer table, and today it
often doesn’t—it’s a soft estimate that often falls apart in underwriting three weeks later. If AI can get a borrower to something closer to a true, underwritten approval up front, that can change the transaction. Deals die at day 25 because the financing wasn’t as solid as the letter said, and when that happens, it’s a family that packed boxes for a home they’re not getting, and a seller who took their home off the market for nothing.

I like to say use AI to kill the paperwork, not the conversation. A first-time buyer choosing between loan products, deciding how much house they can actually afford, figuring out whether to buy points—that’s counseling, and people still want a person standing behind that advice. Lenders that automate the document chase [allow] their loan officers [to] spend that time advising. Same thing we’re seeing with our agents: the hours AI gives back are worth the most when they go to the client. For example, one of our brokerages, Century 21 Beggins, built an AI platform that automates pricing analysis, listing creation, and client prep, and it’s now used by about 9,000 agents across our network.

Those agents are saving five-plus hours a week and performing about 40% better—and the hours they get back go to their clients.

Q: For buyers who’ve been sitting on the sidelines waiting for rates to drop, what are you hearing from Century 21 agents about what it will take to bring them back into the market?

What agents across the Century 21 network tell me is that the buyers coming back aren’t coming back because rates hit a magic number. They’re coming back when the monthly math works and when they feel steady enough to commit. Rates were near 7% last fall, and buyers sat out. Rates are 6.6% now, and this spring was the strongest since 2022 because several factors changed: people had jobs, stock portfolios that grew, and sellers willing to
meet them halfway.

Now, there’s more room to negotiate now than there’s been in years—on price, on closing costs, and especially
on rate buydowns, where a seller concession can do the work of a Fed cut on the monthly payment. A buyer waiting for the headline rate to drop to 5.5% can get to the same monthly payment today through a buydown, but most people aren’t aware of that. That’s a conversation our agents are having every day.

The other thing bringing buyers back is clarity. When people pause, it’s usually around uncertainty, not affordability. The buyers re-entering now want payment scenarios run; they want to understand what happens if rates move against them, and they want to know their worst case before they commit. Give a buyer a clear picture of what they can carry and what their options are if things change, and most of them stop waiting.

Q: As brokerages get larger and more vertically integrated (Compass, Rocket/Redfin), what does that mean for independent lenders trying to maintain agent relationships and referral pipelines?

It changes where the referral comes from. When a brand owns the mortgage arm, the title company, and the tech platform, the transaction gets routed before an independent loan officer ever hears about it. The referral
pipeline stops being a relationship business at the transaction level and starts being an ownership question at
the corporate level. I said earlier that I think mortgage gets pulled in-house the way title and relocation already have, and independent lenders should plan around that assumption.

What that means practically is that the agent relationship still matters, but it can’t be the whole strategy. Agents refer lenders who close on time, communicate, and don’t put deals at risk in underwriting, and that doesn’t change no matter who owns what. A lender who consistently delivers a smooth closing keeps getting the call, because the agent’s reputation rides on that closing too. Speed and certainty are things a borrower and an agent can both feel, and independents who deliver them will always have a seat at the table.

The other asset independents have is the same one our brokers have: they live in their markets. Our differentiator at Century 21 has always been owners and agents who are living and breathing in their marketplaces, and the independent lender who knows the local self-employed borrower, the local condo project that needs special approval, the local down payment assistance programs—that knowledge doesn’t scale into a national platform easily. Depth in one market beats breadth across 50 when the file on your desk is complicated.

Q: You’ve said the market “desperately” needs more supply. What’s the single biggest obstacle to building that supply right now: land, labor, financing, or regulation?

The single biggest obstacle is regulation, because it’s the one that makes the other three worse. HUD has cited
that regulation accounts for roughly 25% of the cost of a single-family project and about 40% for multifamily. That’s before a shovel hits the ground—zoning restrictions, permitting delays, environmental reviews that take longer than the construction itself. A builder can find land, hire crews, and line up financing, and then spend two years waiting on approvals while carrying costs eat the project alive. That’s why so much of what does get built ends up at the high end—by the time a builder gets through the process, the margins only work on expensive homes. The starter home doesn’t. It’s also the reason I was as vocal as I was about the ROAD to Housing Act.
The law goes at this directly—streamlining environmental reviews, cutting permitting friction, and putting federal grant money behind localities that change their zoning. The manufactured housing provisions matter here
too because eliminating the permanent chassis requirement opens up a faster, more affordable way to add supply, and it was a federal rule holding it back for 50 years.

Labor is the second constraint, and it compounds over time. The construction workforce is aging and roughly
a quarter of it is foreign-born, so immigration policy and housing policy are more connected than most people
realize. However, a bigger workforce can’t build homes that zoning won’t allow. Fix the rules first, and the rest of the equation gets easier to solve.

Q: Looking at the rest of 2026, what’s the one metric you’re watching most closely as a signal for how the housing market will move?

The metric I watch above everything else is inventory. Sales, prices, and rates tell you what already happened; inventory tells you what happens next. And right now, it’s sitting at, I think, the most interesting inflection
point in years. According to our Chief Economist Mike Simonsen, there are about 1.07 million homes on the market, fractionally fewer than last year—after four straight years of supply growth, that growth has stopped.

Which direction it breaks from here tells me the story of 2027. Rates and inventory pull against each other:
if rates ease toward 6%, buyers return faster than new listings appear, homes get scarce again, and prices firm up. If rates push toward 7% and sit there, inventory builds back up, and buyers gain leverage—and the softness we’re already seeing in asking prices works its way into sales prices next year. You don’t get lower rates and more homes to choose from at the same time; you get one or the other.

The reason I watch supply over everything else comes back to what our agents deal with every day: almost
every problem in this market—affordability, bidding wars in one ZIP code and price cuts in the next, the first-time buyer who can’t find anything under $350,000—is a supply problem wearing a different costume. Rates change the monthly payment. Inventory changes whether there’s anything to buy at all.