Quarterly insights for servicing leaders staying ahead of what’s next in tax and flood.

In this edition: Escrow costs are climbing before borrowers ever see a bill. We’re breaking down where the shortfall actually starts and why timing matters more than most servicers think. We’re also welcoming new finance and technology leadership, meeting the person keeping flood accounts on track and hearing from LERETA’s data chief on what’s next.

Escrow Advances Are Rising Long Before Borrowers See a Bill

Rising property tax bills are driving up escrow shortfalls, and servicers are absorbing the cost first. Servicers running escrow analyses on a statement-date schedule are often estimating tax obligations before the actual numbers are set, a gap that later shows up as an advance.

Escrow advances aren’t inevitable. They’re a function of how current a servicer’s tax data is.

 

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This Quarter in Mortgage Servicing

CFPB Final Rule on Mortgage Servicing Could Land Any Day

The CFPB’s 2026 regulatory agenda targeted August for a final rule amending loss mitigation procedures under Regulation X, first proposed in 2024. The 2024 proposal would remove the “complete application” framework, long a source of operational complexity for servicers. The agenda’s timelines are approximate, so the rule could arrive any time now. (via National Law Review)

Florida Amendment 3 Could Reshape Servicer Escrow Income

Florida’s Amendment 3 would raise the homestead exemption for non-school property taxes to $150,000 by 2028, enough to shrink escrow custodial balances and pressure MSR valuations statewide. Texas, Georgia and the Carolinas are watching closely, so servicers beyond Florida should start scenario-planning now. (via HousingWire)

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The People Behind Your Portfolio

LERETA Names Robert Lay as Chief Financial Officer

Robert Lay has joined LERETA as Chief Financial Officer, bringing more than 25 years of finance leadership across mortgage servicing, title and technology-enabled financial services. He most recently served as CFO at Selene Finance, overseeing a $195 million portfolio of operating businesses.

 

LERETA Names Khurram Malik as Chief Technology Officer

Khurram Malik has joined LERETA as Chief Technology Officer, bringing more than 20 years of technology leadership across global financial services. He will lead platform modernization, cloud strategy and the company’s AI-enabled engineering initiatives.

 

Employee Spotlight

Antonette Mora, Senior Flood Account Manager

Antonette Mora manages LERETA’s flood accounts, keeping client relationships steady and questions answered before they become problems. After returning to LERETA in 2012, following her start in flood with Nationwide TotalFlood in 2005, she still finds “a new and interesting fact” about the industry just when she thinks she knows it all.

 

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Executive Corner

Matt Stadler, Chief Data and Analytics Officer

I’m Matt Stadler, LERETA’s Chief Data and Analytics Officer. I lead our Data, AI and Transformation teams, 18 people strong across data engineering, data quality and process improvement, and I’ve spent my career convinced that data is the most underused asset most companies own.

I live in Frisco, Texas, with my wife, Kelly, and our four children (well, three are away at university). When I’m not developing data strategies or staring at a Snowflake migration plan, you’ll usually find me flying, traveling or experimenting in the kitchen.

LERETA sits on a genuinely rare asset: direct connectivity to more than 22,000 tax authorities and thousands of lenders, processing tens of billions in tax payments a year across millions of loans. My job, plainly, is to turn that scale into something our clients can feel: error-free execution, faster answers and, eventually, new products built directly on top of it.

This year, that’s meant real progress on a few fronts. We’re deep into migrating our legacy data warehouse to a cloud-native platform that was designed for where we’re headed. We’ve paired that with Ataccama to automate data quality checks across tens of thousands of data fields. And at the end of Q1 2026, we launched an AI Center of Excellence, along with an internal Ambassador program that’s harnessing curious, enterprising experts across the company to envision the next phase of tax and flood servicing.

None of this is theoretical. The goal is a company that runs on cleaner data, makes decisions faster and eventually offers that intelligence as a product, not just a service. We’re on our way, and the pace is picking up.

I’m glad to be doing this work at LERETA and always happy to talk through what we’re building if it’s useful to your business.

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On the Calendar

MBA Summit 2026

mPowering You

October 10, 2026
LERETA proudly sponsors the mPowering You summit, which fosters community for women in real estate finance, helping them rise and succeed together. Find out more.

MBA Annual Convention & Expo

October 11–13, 2026
Join us at the MBA Annual Convention to connect, gain industry knowledge and shape the future of the American Dream. I’m in.

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Quick Take

22,000+ tax authorities. One direct connection.

That’s what lets LERETA flag a problem before it becomes a client’s problem.