DU changed on September 25.
Fannie Mae's September 25, 2026 update rebuilt DU's red-flag section around occupancy, cut the current-job requirement for validating fixed base income from twelve months to three (with twelve months of total history), moved the close-by clock to business days, and added three Ineligibles. In its first week, almost nobody wrote it up. Every change, as it looks in the findings.
Read the briefDefects follow volume.
February's sub-6% print pulled a refi wave through pipelines across the market. The first QC data is in: critical defects jumped 23.9% in one quarter, and compliance findings hit a five-year record share. Your defect rate is a property of your throughput.
Read the briefThe income defect.
Income/employment has topped post-closing QC's critical-defect table in all but two quarters since late 2024. The quarter-by-quarter data, the anatomy of an income defect, and what a $32K buyback means for prevention.
Read the analysisYour AI program is due August 6.
Fannie Mae's LL-2026-04 takes effect in weeks — and Freddie Mac's AI rules are already live. What the GSEs now expect, how ready you are, and a three-week plan to get there.
Read the briefHow AI is reshaping mortgage operations in 2026.
The year the loan file stopped sitting on a desk. New credit models, autonomous agents, and hard governance rules turned underwriting into an AI-native operation.
Read the briefThe income calculation bottleneck.
Files don't stall because teams can't read documents. They stall because one mismatched paystub turns a clean file into three reviews. Income isn't a field — it's a workflow.
Read the analysisThe loan file is the interface.
Underwriting is a cross-document reasoning problem. So the interface should be the loan file itself — a living network of evidence you can interrogate, not a maze of tabs.
Read the vision