Better Home & Finance Q3 2026 Earnings Call Transcript

Better Home & Finance (NASDAQ:BETR) reported third-quarter financial results on Monday. The transcript from the company’s third-quarter earnings call has been provided below.

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Summary

Better Home & Finance Holding Company reported Q3 2026 loan volume of $1.4 billion, a 15% year-over-year increase, despite industry volume remaining flat.

Total net revenues were $45.1 million, up 9% year over year, but below guidance, largely due to disruptions from a proxy contest.

The company’s adjusted EBITDA loss was $29.7 million, with proxy-related expenses significantly impacting financial results.

Key strategic initiatives include a focus on AI-driven efficiency, partnership expansions, and cost reductions to reach profitability.

The company highlighted a shift towards an AI-first model, with significant operational changes, including management delayering and AI integration in various functions.

Better has launched a share buyback program, repurchasing 6.9% of Class A shares, and is actively working on expanding its HELOC and wholesale brokerage channels.

Future guidance aims for adjusted EBITDA breakeven, with expectations of $45 million to $47 million in Q4 operating expenses and significant quarterly savings.

Management emphasized a return to a culture of growth and profitability, leveraging AI to enhance productivity and reduce costs.

Full Transcript

OPERATOR

Welcome to the Better Home & Finance third quarter 2026 results conference call. At this time, all lines are in listen-only mode, and following the presentation, we will conduct a question-and-answer session. If at any time during this call you require immediate assistance, please press Star zero for the operator. This call is being recorded on Monday, November 9, 2026. I would now like to turn the conference call over to Mr. T. Tarek Lafifi, Corporate Office.

Please go ahead.

Sari Khfifi (Corporate Finance)

Welcome to Better Home & Finance Holding Company’s third quarter 2026 earnings conference call. My name is Sari Khfifi on Better’s corporate finance team. Joining me on today’s call are Vishal Garg, Founder and Head of Product Platform and Innovation of Better, and Loveen Advani, Chief Financial Officer of Better. In addition to this conference call, please direct your attention to our third quarter earnings release, which is available on our Investor Relations website. Also available on our website is an investor presentation.

Certain statements we make today may constitute forward-looking statements within the meaning of federal securities laws that are based on current expectations and assumptions. These expectations and assumptions are subject to risks, uncertainties, and other factors, as discussed further in our SEC filings, that could cause our actual results to differ materially from our historical results. We assume no responsibility to update forward-looking statements other than as required by law.

During today’s discussion, management will discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures, which we believe are relevant in assessing the Company’s financial performance. These non-GAAP financial measures should not be considered replacements for, and should be read together with, our GAAP results. These non-GAAP financial measures are reconciled to GAAP financial measures in today’s earnings release and investor presentation, both of which are available on the Investor Relations section of Better’s website and when filed in our quarterly report on Form 10-Q with the SEC.

More information as of and for the period ended September 30, 2026 will be provided upon filing our quarterly report on Form 10-Q with the SEC. I will now turn the call over to Vishal.

Vishal Garg (Founder and Head of Product Platform and Innovation)

Good afternoon everyone and thank you for joining us. Welcome to Better 2.0. It is so great to be back with you all. Getting here was a hard-fought battle, and we won the proxy contest because our shareholders believed in us. I would not be on this call today without you. To every shareholder who took the time to sign and send back a green consent card, to our employees who kept serving our customers through all of this, and to our business partners who stuck by us, thank you for continuing to believe in Better.

You gave us the opportunity to get this company back on track. And now it’s on us to deliver. Better 2.0 is a return to the culture that grew this company exponentially in our early years—from $500 million in loan volume in 2017 to $58 billion in loan volume funded in 2021, from about $3 million a quarter in revenue to $430 million a quarter in revenue in 2021, and to a company that at its peak was generating $50 million a month in EBITDA. What drove that? Speed, ambition, accountability, and a relentless belief that AI and machine learning could help make mortgage and home finance better for all Americans by making it cheaper, faster, and easier.

Somewhere along the way, we started adding a ton of things we didn’t need. And now that I’m back with perspective, having spent nearly two and a half months on the outside, I can clearly see what we need to do to bring that culture of growth and drive towards profitability back to Better. This is a company that, as Better 2.0, is centered on creating value for our shareholders, our customers, our partners, and our employees. I want to briefly recap what’s happened over the past few months to provide the backdrop to our results. On August 3, I was removed as CEO. I spent the next week reflecting on what I do well, what this company does well, and what we both need to get better at. I sought advice from shareholders, partners, and people I trust. And then we fought back. Our advisors told us that only about 1.7% of proxy contests seeking to replace a public company board succeed, and that it could take a year to two.

Shareholders representing 52% of the voting power supported us, and we won the proxy contest in two months, the fastest public company proxy return to date. During that time, decisions by the prior board and interim CEO Daniel Lewis hurt the business. $12.8 million of shareholder cash was spent on a proxy contest and a poison pill that was put in place. More specifically, during this time, partnership launches that we had lined up stalled, employee morale suffered, and our conversion, most importantly, slowed. We can see it in the operating data during my absence under Daniel Lewis and the prior board.

Just within the months that I was out, loan officer talk time fell by 29%, emails and responses sent by salespeople to customers fell by 20%, and the production hours spent by our staff, as logged in by our Tinman system, fell over 25%. The fact is, the amount of effort, and therefore productivity, and that reflected in our results, suffered. Our September and August results are therefore challenged, and this has carried into Q4. When I came back, we assessed the situation and concluded that, in the current rate environment where the 10-year rose 15% in Q3, we had to focus on changing the culture, increasing effort and productivity, and lowering our cost base. To that effect, since my return, we have delayered our management and corporate structure by letting go of managers across the company for over $3.5 million of annualized savings.

Those management responsibilities are now performed by AI agents and dashboards and delivered directly to the most senior people in each part of our organization. These cuts are not temporary. They are roles forever eliminated by AI and will not return as we scale volume. Furthermore, due to Tinman’s capabilities, we can identify the employees who remained continuously productive and adapted to using AI in this market. They found ways to do more with less, help customers, and earn more money. By way of example, since we’ve implemented AI lead routing, we have seen weekend lock volume 2x from October 24th to the 31st. In addition to these operational improvements, we began taking strategic actions, rebuilding the board by appointing Bing Gordon, Founder of Electronic Arts, Steve Saracino, founder of Activant Capital, and Linda Yaccarino, former CEO of X, to the board. We removed the poison pill and dismissed the litigation. We finalized terms on the Birmingham bank sale with the buyer placing 10 million pounds in escrow, which has now been converted into Tier 2 capital into the bank.

And we kicked off the share buyback program where we have repurchased 6.9% of Class A shares so far. We also committed to a new level of transparency. Every Tuesday we publish a Better 2.0 scorecard showing what is complete, what remains outstanding, and where timelines have accelerated or have slowed down. As we have said before, we will keep publishing it until we reach adjusted EBITDA breakeven, which is our North Star. Through these scorecards, we have already announced completed actions expected to deliver $30.4 million in annualized savings towards our target of approximately $64.2 million.

On a quarterly basis, these completed actions represent $7.6 million in savings. In Q4, we expect to achieve an additional $7.4 million to $9.4 million in quarterly savings, and we expect adjusted EBITDA-basis operating expenses of $45 million to $47 million. Our goals for Better 2.0 are simple. First, reach breakeven as soon as possible. This is our top financial priority, and we are pushing on every lever we control—converting more customers, taking costs out, and using AI to make our people more productive. Second, expand distribution. Adding new partners with large established customer bases allows us to scale volume and revenue without upfront customer acquisition spending. Third, expand AI across sales, operations, and corporate functions.

We are moving from a human-powered-by-AI company to an AI-first company where AI does the work first and the people focus on what AI cannot do. Fourth, establish clear ownership and accountability. Every initiative in Better 2.0 has a target and a date, and you will see them in our weekly scorecard. And fifth, improve execution, speed, and consistency. We will hire and reward for ambition, agency, and achievement, and we will hold ourselves to industry standards or greater on every step of the funnel.

Now turning to third quarter results, loan volume was $1.4 billion, up 15% year over year and within our guidance range, while industry volume remained flat over the same period. In our August 3rd board meeting, we expected over $53 million of Q3 revenue and believe that if it weren’t for the proxy fight, we would have hit our target. Total net revenues were $45.1 million, up 9% year over year, and fell below our guidance range. Both interest rate headwinds, oil prices, and the general uncertainty around the Iran war weighed on loan volume, and we believe the prior board’s proxy contest lowered conversion and pushed out partner launches.

Our adjusted EBITDA loss was $29.7 million for Q3. Excluding proxy-related legal, PR, and other expenses of $12.8 million, our adjusted EBITDA loss would have been approximately $16.9 million, within our guidance range. However, in our August 3rd board meeting we expected an adjusted EBITDA loss of $12 million and believe that if it weren’t for the proxy fight, we would have hit our target and beyond. Our Tinman AI platform was the principal driver of growth. Platform loan volume grew 64% year over year to $792 million and 57% of total loan volume, up from 40% a year ago, as our channel mix continued to shift towards the platform. Now that we have a renewed focus and drive with Better 2.0, there is exciting growth ahead of us. Expanding our distribution channels is our top growth priority. Just last week we launched Better’s AI-powered HELOC with a large existing partner.

HELOC is the right product for the current rate environment, and this partner serves a large customer base with significant home equity. We are building on the experience and capabilities developed through our existing relationship with this partner to accelerate the rollout and scale of this partnership. In wholesale, we are full speed ahead with 39 mortgage brokerages signed, representing total addressable home equity volume of $400 million per year. We believe we have a product that achieves brokers’ goals and a real right to win most, if not all, of this volume. Brokers want competitive rates, fast answers, and confidence that their borrowers will have a smooth experience all the way through closing. That is what we are building with Tinman Go.

We are starting with HELOCs, with plans to expand into non-QM and conventional mortgages, building out a full product suite for brokers in a one-stop shop where both HELOCs and mortgages are available in one unified platform powered by AI in the broker’s pocket, rendering instant decisions for rates and eligibility in a way that no other platform in the industry does today. In addition, we are rebuilding momentum across our partnership pipeline. Four of the large partner opportunities stalled under the prior board remain in sight, and we are moving discussions forward with each of them. These opportunities are central to how we intend to scale—bringing Tinman to partners with established customer bases and growing our reach without a corresponding increase in customer acquisition spend through an embedded finance product that lets each of our partners expand into mortgage and HELOC and serve more of their customers with more products.

In direct to consumer, we are optimizing for profitability rather than volume. That means lower customer acquisition spend, with $13.2 million in annualized CAC reductions already in place, Better lead-to-lock and lock-to-fund conversion, and AI-enabled lead routing. Together, these initiatives give us more volume at a lower cost. Partner and wholesale growth adds revenue without adding proportional acquisition costs, and AI-driven conversion lets us grow revenue at our lower fixed cost base.

That is how we scale. That is how we get to profitability. Turning to recent activity, volume before the proxy contest started in July was $496 million. That volume once the proxy contest started on August 3rd was $464 million for the month of August, $435 million for the month of September, and $345 million for the month of October, where the real damage from the loss of productivity and work effort in August and September was felt in funded loan volume in October. We believe that the changes in the sales and operations team that we have implemented in the last week of October and this first week of November will dramatically turn this around.

And while we face seasonally light loan volumes for the months of November, December, and January, we will be able to still showcase productivity and growth because of the changes that we have made. All of these initiatives will take time to ramp, but we believe they represent important building blocks for the business as we enter 2027 and seek a return to profitability and growth. We want to be transparent about both the headwinds we are facing and the progress we are making. We believe the operational changes underway, combined with our expanding partner and broker channels—39 mortgage brokers signed since we’ve returned, multiple partners implemented and launched and signed, and many more to go—position us to improve performance and drive profitability and growth.

We will continue to keep you all updated weekly with our scorecard reporting until we hit adjusted EBITDA breakeven so you can track our progress against our Better 2.0 goals. We have a lot of work ahead, but we have a clear set of priorities: get to profitability, restore growth, bring costs down, and get Better 2.0 to sustainable growth and profitability. Better 2.0 is about executing with urgency and holding ourselves accountable for the results. You’ll continue to hear directly from us about the progress we are making and where we need to do better. Thank you all for your continued support. With that, I’ll turn the call over to Loveen.

Loveen Advani (Chief Financial Officer)

Thank you, Vishal. I will now provide more detail on the quarter. On the macro environment, in the third quarter, Freddie Mac reported the 30-year rate increased 10% over the quarter, resulting in industry volume declining 7% and the MBA Application Index declining 16.5% over the same period. Refinance activity remains challenged, which reinforces our focus on HELOCs as homeowners look to access equity without giving up the low rate they already have.

Vishal covered our headline results, so I’ll focus on the underlying drivers. Lower refinance activity, softer conversion, and the delays in key partnership launches weighed in on loan volume and revenue sequentially. At the same time, the Tinman platform continued to deliver strong year-over-year growth and represented an increased share of our business. Our net loss was $36.5 million, narrowing from the $39.1 million in the third quarter of 2025.

On adjusted EBITDA, we had a loss of $29.7 million in Q3.26 versus a loss of $22.9 million in Q3.25. The $12.8 million of proxy-related expenses was the largest driver of the variance to our guidance. Excluding those, our adjusted EBITDA loss would have been $16.9 million, within our guidance range of an adjusted EBITDA loss of $15 million to $18 million. By product mix, purchase made up 55.6%, refinance made up 25.5%, and home equity made up 18.9% of Q3 loan volume. By channel, in Q3, 57% of loan volume, or $792 million, came from the Tinman AI platform, up 64% year over year; and 43%, or $603 million, came from direct to consumer. As Vishal noted, monthly loan volume declined from $496 million in July pre-proxy to $345 million in October post-proxy. Operational disruption and market volatility continue to limit near-term visibility, reinforcing our focus on aligning costs with current production and improving productivity.

As our new HELOC partnerships and brokerage relationships ramp, our priority is to translate the distribution into funded volume without rebuilding overhead. We will continue reporting progress through our weekly scorecards until we reach adjusted EBITDA breakeven. Taking a look at our balance sheet, we ended Q3.26 with $77.5 million in cash and cash equivalents and $12.9 million in restricted cash. We continue to make progress on the sale of Birmingham Bank. We expect the transaction to close in the first quarter of 2027, subject to regulatory approval, and to generate approximately $65 million of additional cash. The £10 million in escrow that the buyer had placed is now converted to Tier 2 capital for the bank.

In the interim, we’re evaluating borrowing against our unencumbered position in the bank and have received five term sheets to date. We’ll continue to give you visibility into these numbers each quarter alongside our weekly scorecard, and we let the results speak for the progress we’re making. I will now turn it back to the operator for Q&A.

OPERATOR

Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. We’ll now begin the question-and-answer session. Should you have a question, please press the star followed by the one on your touch-tone phone. You will hear a prompt that your hand has been raised. Should you wish to decline from the polling process, please press the star followed by the two. Please, we do ask to ask one question, followed by one follow-up. And your first question comes from Ramsey El-Assal from Cantor Fitzgerald.

Please go ahead.

Ramsey El-Assal (Analyst)

Hi, Loveen, Vishal. How are you guys doing today? Thank you for taking my question. I wanted to ask about the path to break even and to get your thoughts on the sort of categories of expense reduction that you expect to realize as you kind of close in on the goal. I guess it’s a roundabout way of asking about visibility. Was it, you know, headcount reduction is the first phase and then you have to move into more operational efficiencies? You know, how clear is the path to get to the 60?

Thanks. 64, thanks.

Vishal Garg (Founder and Head of Product Platform and Innovation)

I think the path is actually pretty clear. I think if you look at Slide 9 of our earnings deck, what you can see is what we control right now, going in, since we came back, is what we spend money on, because the platform is built. As you can tell, 57% of revenue is coming from Tinman and the AI platform and therefore dependent on our partners, and then the lead volume from our partners, which of course, as you know, is dependent on the macro environment.

So we don’t control that. But what we do control is how much energy, time, and expense we spend to turn that lead volume into revenue dollars. And there we’ve done a pretty strong job in the last 30 days since we’ve been back in taking that revenue. The expense line, which was $75 million in Q3—and let’s just forget about Q3 for now because it had proxy expenses—but $68.7 million in Q2, and we’ve taken that down to what we believe is going to be about $46 million in Q4. And that’s almost a reduction of 40%. And to take a company at scale and take their expense line down by 40% requires cuts in everything. So we’ve become more efficient in marketing. We used to have two different marketing agencies.

Those marketing agencies are gone now, and now we have our AI agents going and buying those ads and clicks and so on and so forth. We have an AI creative that’s taking creative that has already worked and, instead of coming back with three versions of the creative, coming back with hundreds and hundreds of versions of creative and adjusting it on the fly. In sales, we have eliminated the role of what was called the home lending associate. And that was a person that would go and reach out to customers, walk them through the application, and get them ready to then talk to a loan officer. That’s being all done by Betsy now. A lot of the loan officer tasks, the follow-up tasks, are being done by Betsy. A lot of the coordination tasks are being done by Betsy. The underwriting reviews are increasingly being done by Betsy.

And so you’re seeing, up and down the factory, we’ve just dramatically amped up the usage of Betsy since we got back and really taken a lot of the belts and suspenders and eye patches off that we had in that context, and really let it run. Lastly, in capital markets, the demand for some of our loan products has never been higher. The number of investors that are interested in buying mortgages that yield 7% or more, or home equity lines of credit that yield 9% or more in this market environment, is quite large. And actually, the fact is that the mortgage industry is making less of them now because of consumer demand. So us being able to hold our ground there has enabled us to start getting better pricing and develop a wider credit box.

So I think you see it in all those functions. Then in corporate, we’ve dramatically scaled back the fixed-cost functions across every part of the organization and removed management layers. I would say that’s the biggest thing that has taken place. We have gotten rid of your traditional VP, director, senior associate, senior managers, and it’s now effectively a C-level or EVP-level person working directly with the people who are hands-on keyboard.

And I think that again is just a mindset change that’s more akin to the type of mindset that a Series B, Series C company would have rather than a big public company. So I would say that these cuts are pretty permanent. And again, the most important part about that cut is the path to break even, which is that if you think about where Q1 revenue was, that was $47 million, and Q4 opex at $46 million, there’s a line of sight to profitability right there. Q2 revenue of $54.7 million versus opex of $46 million for Q4. If we get any kind of retrenchment back into anything that resembles that, you have clear breakeven taking place.

Ramsey El-Assal (Analyst)

That’s great. That’s terrific color, thank you. One quick follow-up from me. You called out the four partner opportunities during the proxy battle and that you’re kind of re-engaged there. Obviously, without naming names, what is the likelihood that you can get those guys back onsite and rolled out?

Vishal Garg (Founder and Head of Product Platform and Innovation)

Yeah, we’re very confident. We’re very confident. I think with two of them we have legal documents that are being exchanged. The other two we’re working on tech integrations.

Ramsey El-Assal (Analyst)

Fantastic. Thank you so much.

OPERATOR

And your next question comes from Kyle Peterson from Needham. Please go ahead.

Kyle Peterson (Analyst)

Great, good afternoon, and appreciate you taking our questions. I wanted to start particularly on the volume and the commentary. I think you mentioned that some of the damage from the past quarter was really felt in October, so a little bit of a slight delay there where the brunt of it was faced. So I guess, how should we think about now that the team is back and everything seems to be turning in the right direction? What does the timeline look to get everyone on pace?

Is that a faster ramp back up to full and possibly even greater productivity, or is there kind of a similar lag where it’ll take a few months?

Vishal Garg (Founder and Head of Product Platform and Innovation)

I think there’s a bit of a lag, because as we’re ripping through different departments to kind of de-layer and focus our energies and efficiency on the absolute best people in those departments. So I think you’re going to see a bit of that U. So I would say October, November are probably the bottom of the U. And then you start to see a rebuild towards volumes that reach July, August type of volumes, and then beyond.

Loveen Advani (Chief Financial Officer)

Hi, this is Loveen. I think one of the points you’ve got to stress on: we told the Street we’re going to get about $16 million, or $64 million annualized, savings. If you look at Slide 9, we plan to get $16 million of quarter-over-quarter savings in the fourth quarter itself. That’s the cadence of the company. We want to make sure we right-size the business and then address the volume problems that we’re currently facing.

Kyle Peterson (Analyst)

Got it. That’s really helpful. And then for my follow-up, I wanted to touch a bit on the HELOC expansion with your existing partner. That seems like a particularly good opportunity and pretty sizable. I guess, how fast does the ramp look like? Is that 100%—turn the switch and it’s on? Is it being rolled out in cohorts? What does that kind of build-out look like for you guys? And how should we think about how that volume should translate to the P&L here in the coming months, quarters?

Vishal Garg (Founder and Head of Product Platform and Innovation)

I think you should look at the volumes that we did with them in October, November, December, Jan, Feb, March, and see the rollup there. And I think you can expect to see a similar hockey stick. And yes, it’s being rolled out to a small percentage of their customer base, then a larger percentage of their customer base, and then a larger percentage of their customer base. So that’s how you should sort of see that. And that’s exactly what happened last year as well, from October of ’25 to April of ’26 before we had the Iran conflict make a hiccup.

I think you can expect a similar ramp on the HELOC product.

Kyle Peterson (Analyst)

Okay, that’s great to hear. Appreciate all the color, and welcome back.

Vishal Garg (Founder and Head of Product Platform and Innovation)

Thank you.

OPERATOR

Thank you. And your next question comes from Kartik Mehta from Northcoast Research. Please go ahead.

Kartik Mehta (Analyst at Northcoast Research)

Hey, Vishal and Loveen, obviously you’ve talked about the greater emphasis on HELOC, and Loveen, I was wondering if you could talk about the gain on sale on HELOCs and how they’re different than your traditional mortgages, and what you expect the trend to be on that gain on sale as we move forward?

Loveen Advani (Chief Financial Officer)

Yeah, depending on who the investor is, the gain on sale can be six to eight points on the HELOCs versus our traditional two to three points on the mortgages. And so the balances are smaller, but we basically end up making about the same amount of money in revenue on a HELOC as we do on a mortgage.

Michelle (Analyst)

And so obviously that will help you as you try to get to that revenue that gets you to break-even. And you, I think, now signed 39 wholesale brokers, I think represented by $400 million in potential annual loan volume. Can you just talk about how those brokers are doing today and what you anticipate their trend to be over the next, let’s say, 12 months?

Vishal Garg (Founder and Head of Product Platform and Innovation)

What I will tell you is each of those brokers had a pre-existing solution, and of course there are gaps in the pre-existing solution. Right? Some solutions have a wide credit box, but they take you 30 to 60 days to get a HELOC done. Other solutions have near-instant approval and funding very quickly, but it’s red light/green light with no, you know, counteroffer, no decisioning other than what’s within that criteria. And so I would say in the HELOC landscape there’s, you know, securitizers who are fast, have high rates and no ability to save files and therefore low approval rates, and then there’s banks who are slow, have low rates and tight credit boxes. And then there are non-QM buyers who are slow, have wide approval criteria and high rates. And nobody has combined all three of these like we have on Tinman.

You know, across our 65 investors, you know, 25 of whom we’ve added this year, we have coverage for all of those. And we have a fast track for people who want their money instantly and want an easy process and are willing to use digital tools like Plaid. And then we have the, hey, I have 19 K-1s and I want to take out $750,000 in a HELOC on my $3 million house. Yeah, we have that solution too. So I think that is the unique value proposition, and we think as these brokers start to use that population that initially they’re going to send us the stuff that doesn’t get funded elsewhere, which is fine by us because, as you know, we don’t hold any inventory.

We’re matching to the investor criteria and selling it on. But then what we’re hopeful is we’re going to capture the bulk of the volume because they can come to us and in one system easily get decisioned for all of their customer demands rather than having to re-enter the application into two or three different systems. And so we think that there’s a real opportunity for us to capture, you know, 80% of that $400 million.

Michelle (Analyst)

Perfect. Thanks, Vishal. I appreciate it.

OPERATOR

Thank you. And your next question comes from Timothy D’Agostino from B. Riley Securities. Please go ahead.

Timothy D’Agostino (Analyst)

Yeah, good afternoon. Thanks for taking questions. I guess the first from my end, could you maybe provide an update across different products and then just across the platform itself on the cost per loan and cost to originate? It’d be great to hear any commentary how that’s trending and maybe how we should think about that going forward. Thank you.

Vishal Garg (Founder and Head of Product Platform and Innovation)

The cost to make a loan is going to be coming down pretty dramatically. I mean, all the delayering that we have done in the org, and that’s going to help. On the customer acquisition cost, I think you should expect it to stay kind of where it was because when the demand for HELOCs and for mortgages has sort of come down because of the rate environment, some of the other players are bidding up to get that marginal demand so they can keep their factories afloat.

And so while we’re getting more efficient, we’re at least able to keep investing in CAC. That being said, we have dramatically reduced our spend in the last 30 days just to reassess where we think demand is that’s profitable inside D2C. Right? Obviously, you’re going to continue to see our customer acquisition costs in the broker channel and our partner channel as unfunded loans, so it’s okay. But, you know, on D2C, we’ve substantially scaled down marketing spend so that we can create learning data just about what works organically and what works in the best channels and through retargeting for our existing customer base, and then go back from there.

Another thing is we to date hadn’t really monetized our existing 5 million-plus customers. And what we have done, there were sporadic attempts, but it was very, like, loan officer based. What we now have done is Betsy is actively mining that customer list in a way that no loan officer could and seeing all the triggers and reaching out to consumers on a regular basis. We’ve just started that, and we’re doing it like about 5,000 a day, but we’ve got 5 million of them.

And I think that’s a very significant competitive advantage because unlike other customer lists, all 5 million of those people are homeowners, so it’s a very significant portion of the American homeownership public that is also borrowing against their homes. So we have some pretty high hopes for that.

Timothy D’Agostino (Analyst)

Okay. And so just, you know, going off the October 14th release where you had mentioned that, you know, the goal is to reduce total cost to originate a mortgage, you know, below $1,000 per loan and then to produce a HELOC below $500. Like that’s still the goal, and, I mean, can you provide kind of a timeline on that?

Vishal Garg (Founder and Head of Product Platform and Innovation)

Yeah, I think early ’27.

Timothy D’Agostino (Analyst)

Okay, great. Thank you so much for taking questions.

OPERATOR

Thank you. And your next question comes from Owen Rickard from Northland Capital Markets. Please go ahead.

Owen Rickard (Analyst)

Hey guys, thanks for taking my question here. You recently had two announcements. You brought on some large producer teams through NEO. I was just curious, what’s the cost structure and payback timeline on recruiting these teams, and maybe how does that recruiting spend square with the broader cost-cutting narrative?

Vishal Garg (Founder and Head of Product Platform and Innovation)

Those teams join us, we don’t have upfronts. We don’t do any of that stuff that other people do. Those teams join us to move from one platform to another and to make more money because we are the only platform in retail where you can demonstrate proof to someone that you’re going to do twice as many loans, make way more money, and have way lower costs. So there are all these platforms in retail that are running around recruiting loan officers, paying upfront, you know, giving people bonuses equivalent, signing bonuses equivalent to like two years or four years of production.

We don’t do that. Right now, these teams are being recruited because they are leaving their existing platform that they’re worried about and where the technology is so antiquated. They’ve been telling, hey, hey, hey, what’s going on? They’ve had the same platform for 25 years and, you know, they just see that we’re moving forward. We also see about 2x, you know, the loan officers coming on—the retail loan officers coming on our platform see a 2x improvement in efficiency being part of our platform. So that’s an added reason for them to come on board.

Owen Rickard (Analyst)

Got it. Thanks, guys. Super helpful.

OPERATOR

Thank you. And your last question comes from Joseph Fafi from Canaccord Genuity. Please go ahead.

Will Johnson (Analyst)

Hey, this is Will Johnson on for Joe. Thanks for taking my question. It’s been several months since the Tinman launch in ChatGPT. Just wanted to see if you could give us an update on adoption there and maybe how much that’s contributed to volume at this point. And then, you know, any comments on the OpenAI partnership broadly and how it’s progressing would be great. Thanks.

Vishal Garg (Founder and Head of Product Platform and Innovation)

Yeah, I think we continue to invest in that partnership, and we continue to have various tools leverage the platform. Our next, you know, what we built and demoed inside ChatGPT is now actually integrally, or, you know, integrated into our Tinman Go platform that we’re launching. And so, you know, we are super bullish and continue to have very, very strong, positive interactions with ChatGPT and with OpenAI in general.

Will Johnson (Analyst)

Great, thanks.

OPERATOR

Thank you. And there are no further questions at this time. I would like to turn the conference call back over to the management team.

Vishal Garg (Founder and Head of Product Platform and Innovation)

Thank you, everyone, for joining us. We’re in the first month of Better 2.0. As you can see, we’ve already made a tremendous amount of progress. We’re super excited to continue this journey. And as you know, every Tuesday you’re going to be getting a report card from us, so you don’t have to wait till the next earnings call to figure out what’s happening with your company. This is our company. Your company. Without you, we wouldn’t be here in this room today.

And we are going to continue to be very transparent, update you as we transform this company into the $100 billion platform for home finance that we know it can be with the power of AI. Thank you.

OPERATOR

Ladies and gentlemen, this does conclude your conference call for today. We thank you very much for your participation and you may now disconnect. Have a great day, everyone.

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