Shares in Better Home & Finance soared Monday on a bullish assessment of the money-losing mortgage lender’s prospects by Eric Jackson — the activist investor whose interest in Opendoor Technologies helped spawn a stock rally and CEO ouster in August.
Jackson, the founder and president of EMJ Capital Ltd, posted a thesis on X Monday that Better is “the Shopify of mortgages” with the potential for explosive growth over the next 2 years. That set off a flurry of trading, with more than 7 million shares bought and sold — about 85 times more than the average volume.
Shares in Better, which hit an all-time low of $7.71 on Jan. 13, were changing hands for as much at $94.06 on Monday, up 176 percent from Friday’s close of $34.09.
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Even after Better’s price per share retreated to close at $49.98 Monday, the company’s $764 million market capitalization was more than five times bigger than at the start of the year, when all of Better’s outstanding shares were worth only $135 million.
Better is trimming its losses
Better Home & Finance revenue, expenses and losses. Source: Better earnings reports.
Over the years, Better has racked up $2 billion in losses, including an $86.8 million net loss during the first six months of 2025, an improvement from $92.9 million during the same period in 2024.
In reporting a $36.3 million second quarter loss in August, Better said it retired $521 million in convertible debt with Softbank and is focused on becoming profitable by the end of Q3 2026, as measured by adjusted earnings before earnings, interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA).
Known for its technology, Better saw business boom when homeowners rushed to refinance during the pandemic. After funding $58 billion in loans in 2021, Better racked up an $889 million loss the following year when mortgage rates rebounded. Better’s loan production dwindled to $11.4 billion in 2022 and bottomed out at $3 billion in 2023.
Low mortgage rates fueled 2021 refi boom
Source: Better earnings reports.
Better began laying off employees at the end of 2021 (CEO Vishal Garg went viral when he fired 900 employees on a Zoom call) and reworked the terms of a deal to go public through a merger with a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC).
By the time the SPAC merger closed in August, 2023 Better had cut its workforce from a peak of 10,400 in 2021 to 950.
Better has “doubled down on their AI and runs with 900 staff vs. 3,000,” Jackson said of his theory that the company is poised for a comeback.
Better touts its AI-powered Tinman loan origination, pricing engine and closing system as a productivity booster that’s augmented by “Betsy,” an AI agent that can make or take calls from consumers.
“The Betsy + Tinman AI they built in the past 3 years now handles what armies of humans couldn’t,” Jackson believes.
If Better had the technology it is using today back in 2021, Jackson thinks the company could have handled $243 billion in originations, but simply didn’t have “enough humans pushing paper.”
Jackson thinks Better could soon be doing that kind of business, “except this time with software, not headcount.”
Better sponsors 440 mortgage loan originators working out of 43 branch locations in 22 states — Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Hawaii, Iowa, Michigan, Missouri, North Carolina, Nebraska, New Jersey, New Mexico, Nevada, New York, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont and Washington — according to records maintained by the Nationwide Multistate Licensing System.
Forecasters at Fannie Mae expect mortgage originations to grow by 22 percent next year, to $2.26 trillion. While most of that business ($1.55 trillion) is projected to be purchase loans, refinancings are also expected to grow by 53 percent next year, to $715 billion.
Analysts at BTIG predict the nation’s biggest mortgage lender, United Wholesale Mortgage, will originate $165 billion in loans next year if mortgage rates stay where they are now. But UWM might do as much as $210 billion in business if mortgage rates come down to 5.5 percent, BTIG analyst Eric Hagen said in maintaining a “buy” rating on UWM and raising his price target to $10.
While demand for refinancing fueled Better’s boom years, refis only accounted for 14 percent of the company’s H1 2025 loan originations.
To help build its purchase loan business, last year Better hired the executive team from NEO Home Loans to build out a distributed retail channel that uses Better’s technology to power local loan officers.
NEO Home Loans executives Ryan Grant and Danny Horanyi launched the “NEO Powered by Better” partnership in January, using Better’s Tinman AI platform to drive retail branch originations.
By June 30, NEO Powered by Better had added 58 branches, with NEO funded loan volume growing 163 percent from Q1 to Q2, to $429 million, the company disclosed in an August investor presentation.
The $592 million in NEO mortgage production in the first half of the year accounted for 29 percent of Better’s $2.1 billion in H1 2025 funded loan volume.
Better executives announced this month that during Q2, the company originated $80 million a month in home equity loans and home equity lines of credit (HELOCs), up 38 percent from Q1 and 166 percent from a year ago.
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