By admin1
A $773 million bulk sale of mortgage servicing rights is at the center of a new lawsuit pitting two of the mortgage industry’s biggest rivals against each other.
Rocket Mortgage has sued United Wholesale Mortgage in New York Supreme Court, alleging the wholesale giant used broker incentives and AI-powered tools to poach borrowers from loans it had already sold — costing Mr. Cooper Group an estimated $100 million in damages.
The complaint, filed May 14, centers on a $773 million bulk sale of mortgage servicing rights that Mr. Cooper purchased from UWM across three agreements between January and June 2024. The deal covered roughly 182,000 loans with about $65 billion in unpaid principal balance.
Buried in each contract was a non-solicitation covenant: UWM agreed it would not solicit those borrowers to refinance for the life of their loans, and neither would its brokers, agents or independent contractors.
Rocket alleges UWM broke that promise almost immediately.
In September 2024, UWM launched Refi75, a 75-basis-point rate incentive for broker partners targeting past clients. One week later came KEEP, an AI-powered system that the complaint said automatically identified refinance candidates among UWM’s existing borrower database and sent them targeted offers, including borrowers whose loans now sat in Mr. Cooper’s portfolio. According to Rocket, UWM made no effort to carve those borrowers out of either program.
Things escalated after Rocket announced its $9.4 billion agreement to acquire Mr. Cooper on March 31, 2025. According to the complaint, UWM Chairman, President and CEO Mat Ishbia responded by launching a third program, Refi Shield 100, a 100-basis-point rate incentive and directing brokers on a “Weekly Fastbreak” video to go after Mr. Cooper loans specifically. The complaint quoted Ishbia saying he would “lose money just for fun” to keep those loans out of Rocket’s hands.
Rocket said prepayment rates on the affected loans ran roughly 2.5 times higher than comparable pools, a gap it attributes to UWM’s solicitation campaigns, and is seeking approximately $100 million in compensatory damages, plus interest and attorneys’ fees.
In a statement provided to HousingWire, a UWM spokesperson called the lawsuit “baseless and opportunistic” and pointed to the timing of the filing, coming shortly after Rocket’s acquisition closed and after Rocket’s former head of wholesale joined UWM as a partner, as evidence that the suit was engineered for headlines.
“Rocket has long operated on the premise that it owns the consumer relationship — not the broker,” the statement read. “We will defend this matter vigorously and remain singularly focused on the independent mortgage brokers and the borrowers they serve.”
