The more I look at Better, the less interested I am in treating this as a simple mortgage-rate bet.
What I actually want to know is whether Tinman can work as infrastructure for other lenders, because if the answer is yes, Better becomes a much more interesting business than just another originator.
NEO is probably the best real-world example so far. When they came onto Tinman, they were running at roughly a $1.5B annualized production rate.
By March, that was around $2.97B. Better also got a top-five non-bank mortgage originator live on Tinman this year, starting with HELOCs.
Then there’s the product side. HELOC volume grew 45% QoQ in Q2, while Better ended the quarter with about $102M in cash. The company has also increased its annualized cost-reduction target to more than $45M by year-end.
None of those things guarantee Tinman becomes some huge mortgage infrastructure platform. But, to me, they make the story more interesting because there are several ways this can work.
You have the core mortgage business, home equity, enterprise partners, independent brokers, and potentially more financial products running through the same technology stack. That’s a different setup than just hoping 30-year mortgage rates drop.
And for all the noise around Vishal Garg, one thing I do like about his current plan is how operational it is. Five partners, conversion targets, the UK bank sale, capital return, and profitability are all things shareholders can actually measure him against rather than vague promises about “unlocking value.”
I’d rather see Garg get the chance to execute against those targets and then judge the results.