After investing heavily in technology like AI to cut costs, mortgage loan servicing giant Mr. Cooper continues to score below the industry average for customer satisfaction — as it has for more than a decade, according to annual surveys by J.D. Power.
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Customer dissatisfaction with Mr. Cooper could be a drag on Rocket Companies’ plans to grow its mortgage refinancing business by acquiring Mr. Cooper, the nation’s largest loan servicer, in a $9.4 billion deal that’s set to close later this year.
Unless they sell their home or refinance their mortgage, homeowners are pretty much stuck with their loan servicer — the company that collects their monthly loan payments on behalf of portfolio lenders and, more commonly, investors in mortgage-backed securities, who are the ultimate source of funding for most home loans.
Some lenders sell the servicing rights to mortgages they originate when the loans are packaged up for sale to investors. But Rocket is already a major player in mortgage servicing — and likes the business so much that it wants a much bigger slice of it.
Mr. Cooper is the nation’s largest mortgage servicer. Once Mr. Cooper and Rocket are under the same roof, they’ll be collecting payments on $2.1 trillion in outstanding loans from nearly 10 million homeowners — about one in six U.S. mortgages.
Like other lenders that keep their loan servicing rights, Rocket likes the countercyclical nature of the business. Fees generated by loan servicing can help even out the ups and downs in mortgage lending.
But being in the loan servicing business also gives lenders an edge in “recapturing” homeowners when they’re ready to refinance.
So the July 24 release of J.D. Power’s 2025 U.S. Mortgage Servicer Satisfaction Study was something of a mixed blessing for Rocket.
On the one hand, Rocket’s existing servicing business, provided through Rocket Mortgage, was rated tops among 31 companies ranked by the study, which polled 15,912 customers who have been with their servicer for at least one year.
Some big names in mortgage lending were in the chase to match Rocket Mortgage’s industry-leading score of 685 on a 1,000 point scale. They included Guild Mortgage (677), Chase (650), Bank of America (649) and U.S. Bank (640).
On the other hand, Mr. Cooper, which collects monthly mortgage payments from 6.4 million homeowners, was ranked 23rd by J.D. Power.
Mortgage servicer customer satisfaction rankings
2025 U.S. Mortgage Servicer Satisfaction Study. Source: J.D. Power.
Scoring 564 on a 1,000-point scale, Mr. Cooper was well below the industry average of 596. And this year’s 32-point gap was worse than last year, when Mr. Cooper’s score of 577 was 29 points below the industry average.
Joining Mr. Cooper in scoring below the industry average of 596 were PNC Mortgage (595), United Wholesale Mortgage (595) and Truist (588).
In releasing the latest rankings, J.D. Power noted that homeowner satisfaction with mortgage servicers in general was down 10 points from a year ago.
Rising escrow costs such as property taxes and insurance and poor communication are factors driving lower customer satisfaction with loan servicers, the market research company said.
At a time when customer satisfaction with mortgage originators is near record highs (730 in 2023 and 727 in 2024), the dissatisfaction with loan servicers reveals a “significant disconnect in the mortgage consumer journey,” J.D. Power’s Bruce Gehrke said.
Bruce Gehrke
“Rates are still high, volumes are down, consumer financial health is strained and the industry is struggling to maintain high levels of customer engagement and personalization throughout the servicing experience,” Gehrke said in a statement.
Overall satisfaction was 67 points lower among homeowners who’d seen escrow costs like property taxes and insurance go up this year — increases that are often part of their monthly mortgage payments.
There’s not a lot loan servicers can do about higher property taxes and insurance, other than communicating to borrowers that such changes are in the works.
But J.D. Power found only one in three (32 percent) homeowners gave their mortgage servicer high marks for communication, down five percentage points from 2022.
Mr. Cooper “takes pride in the work we do to keep the dream of homeownership alive,” the company said in a statement to Inman. “While we did not see an improvement in our J.D. Power U.S. Primary Mortgage Servicer Satisfaction Study results, we remain committed to improving our customer experience.”
But Mr. Cooper has ranked below the industry average for mortgage servicers in J.D. Power surveys for more than a decade, going back to the days when it still did business as Nationstar Mortgage.
Mr. Cooper customer satisfaction scores, 2013-2025
Source: J.D. Power U.S. Mortgage Servicer Satisfaction Studies, 2013-2025.
In addition to collecting borrowers’ monthly mortgage payments, loan servicers are also expected to help them find ways to avoid foreclosure if they have trouble making their payments.
In 2013, as Nationstar Mortgage continued to face challenges managing subprime loans it made during the runup to the 2007-09 housing crash and recession, it ranked last among 13 loan servicers evaluated by J.D. Power, scoring 123 points below the industry average of 733.
By 2018, having rebranded as Mr. Cooper, the company was no longer at the very bottom of the rankings — but was still scoring 52 points lower than the industry average of 758 for customer satisfaction in J.D. Power’s rankings.
Rocket Mortgage predecessor Quicken Loans was the top-ranked loan servicer in 2018 — an honor it’s secured 11 times.
In announcing the company’s place atop the 2025 J.D. Power Mortgage Servicer Satisfaction rankings, Rocket credited innovation for its success, including an AI tool that “transcribes and analyzes conversations, allowing team members to focus on building long lasting relationships over routine tasks.”
This year Rocket introduced AI-driven chat for borrowers facing financial hardship, “offering compassionate, low-pressure support,” the company said of more than 50,000 chats handled by AI.
Mr. Cooper’s relatively poor customer satisfaction scores could be of concern to Rocket executives as they look forward to bringing the Dallas, Texas-based company’s 6.4 million clients into the fold of its “customer-for-life” strategy.
(Rocket did not respond to requests for comment on why Mr. Cooper’s customer satisfaction ratings have been lower than Rocket’s, and whether that is a cause for concern).
Mr. Cooper has made much of its use of AI and other technology to drive efficiencies. In 2023, CEO Jay Bray said the loan servicer was spending “several hundred million dollars a year” on call center operations.
After slashing more than 1,000 jobs in 2022 and launching a “multiyear” artificial intelligence program, Bray said the company expected to realize at least $50 million in annual savings while continuing to grow its loan servicing portfolio.
“If you think about what we’re trying to do, it’s really to replicate the Amazon model,” Bray said at the time. “I’m sure everyone on this call uses Amazon and yet I doubt anyone has ever spoken to anyone at Amazon. That’s because you don’t have to.”
Jay Bray
Bray, who will become president and CEO of Rocket Mortgage after the companies merge, also acknowledged that Mr. Cooper had “a lot of work ahead of us” in perfecting its use of AI.
“But we think it’s a big opportunity … not just to eliminate expense but to make the experience much, much better for our customers,” Bray said.
In reporting a $198 million Q2 profit last week, Mr. Cooper President Mike Weinbach said the company can service mortgages for about half the cost of its competitors.
That gap is widening as Mr. Cooper continues to “invest in and implement new AI solutions, since this technology is uniquely suited for optimizing large call center operations,” Weinbach told investment analysts on Mr. Cooper’s earnings call.
Bray said on the same call that Mr. Cooper is “firing on all cylinders” and intends to “hit the ground running” with an integrated platform when it merges with Rocket Companies later this year.
In a statement to Inman on Monday, Mr. Cooper said the company has launched “several initiatives that we believe will enhance key servicing touchpoints.”
One initiative addresses Mr. Cooper’s interactive voice response — an automated phone system that customers use when initially contacting Mr. Cooper via phone.
Another is aimed at the process for handling the transfer of borrowers from other loan servicers, the company said.
Mortgage refi market: $500B and growing
Source: Fannie Mae housing forecast, July 2025.
Rocket CEO Varun Krishna expects that bringing Mr. Cooper’s massive $1.5 trillion loan servicing portfolio under its roof later this year could help Rocket achieve its goal of capturing 20 percent of all U.S. mortgage refinancings.
In 2021, with interest rates near historic lows during the pandemic, mortgage lenders refinanced $2.67 trillion in home loans. But as inflation took off and mortgage rates rebounded, the refi boom all but evaporated, shrinking to $221 billion in 2023.
While purchase lending is now the name of the game for mortgage lenders, economists at Fannie Mae expect refinancing volume will rebound to $511 billion this year and hit $761 billion in 2026 as mortgage rates come down.
If Rocket can capture 20 percent of next year’s projected $761 billion refi market, that would amount to $152 billion in refinancing business — 50 percent more than the company’s $101.2 billion in total 2024 loan production.
Rocket was the nation’s leading refi lender in 2024, with $44.5 billion in refinancing volume accounting for 11.3 percent of all U.S. mortgage refinancings, according to an analysis by iEmergent.
Rocket barely edged out its biggest rival, United Wholesale Mortgage (UWM), which refinanced $43.4 billion in mortgages last year to capture 11 percent of the market, iEmergent found.
The next biggest competitor in refinancing, Freedom Mortgage Corp., funded $11.7 billion in refis, giving it 3 percent market share.
But in the bigger market for purchase loans, UWM did nearly twice as much business as Rocket in 2024, funding $96.4 billion in loans to homebuyers, or 7.5 percent market share.
Rocket’s $50.1 billion in purchase loans funded made it the second biggest provider of financing to homebuyers, with 3.9 percent market share, iEmergent estimates.
Rocket hopes its recent acquisition of real estate brokerage Redfin, which closed on July 1, will help it more than double its share of the purchase loan market, to 8 percent.
According to J.D. Power, “better interest rates and lower costs and fees are cited most frequently by customers as a reason to switch mortgage providers.”
But service quality and responsiveness “can be equally powerful drivers of customer loyalty and retention.”
Servicers who fail to deliver on “important loyalty and advocacy metrics … could be headed for some challenges down the road when volumes pick back up again,” Gehrke, senior director of lending intelligence at J.D. Power, said.
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