“We actually got the approval for New York in a record time of, I want to say, three years. So it was a record time of three years. And we actually never ended up getting approved to license or to originate mortgages in New York. That just tells you how challenging and how difficult it is.”

Yeah, I would like to say we were so thoughtful that we already knew all these things going in. There was kind of late looking back some slightly slight improvements we could make in terms of the licensing process, but for the most part, like all of those required. For context, mortgage servicing and many of these licenses have pretty much chicken and egg problems. One of the key requirements is if they tell you you actually need to be profitable before you get a license. This is true for like the state of New York and a couple of other regulatory approvals like Fannie and Freddie. They'll make some exceptions and you can get around it, but it's quite challenging. And so when you look at it from the get-go, you end up in a situation where you first notice, holy crap, this is going to take a long, long time. And two, then you end up in a situation where you have to really be methodical in plotting out what licenses you get in what order. So for us, what we did was we said, okay, we're going to start out with this type of customer. We need to figure out, because we can't get the major government licenses, we need you to look for a specific type of loan that we can get licensed for. It's called at the time. They're still pretty prevalent today and they're actually, I think, growing, non-QM loans. They only require you to have state licenses. Here's the problem, though. With state licenses, you need to pick the states that people actually make non-QM loans. One of the biggest ones is the state of California. State of California actually has pretty stringent requirements. It actually requires you to have a government application or government loan approval in order to service California loans. There is one exclusion for the Department of Real Estate if you're in the brokering business and a real estate brokering business. So now you need to find someone who is in the department or as a real estate broker to actually help you get that license. Simultaneously, you also need to show them that you have five years plus of experience across every part of servicing. That's collections, that's customer service, that's payment processing, that's delinquency, that's foreclosure. So you need to do all these different things just to get going. And, like, well, let's not even get started when it comes to, well, once you've done that, how do you actually make sure you get the subsequent approvals and everything else? But it's an extraordinarily long process. Most people forecast this type of endeavor taking three to five years at the minimum in order to, and that's if you take the most literal optimal steps, three to five years to get all of the different approvals because they all stack on top of each other. You can't do one without the other. And by the very end, you end up having to really aggregate not just business, but really expertise across very, very large said domains.

There's many years of stories, including you going to visit mail rooms of

Fantastic. All right. So we made it through that full process. And then maybe talking about taking the regulation and putting it into a platform. I think it's really easy to knock on the incumbent, but they've had decades to harden state-by-state regulations changed over time. Like, how did we approach that from scratch?

Honestly, I think the unfortunate reality, which is, again, like you've mentioned before, a little bit of a moat, which is how we make ourselves feel better about all this. The pain

and suffering is just pain