When a restaurant owner I recently spoke to closed on her new home, the joy of securing the perfect home for her family was nearly eclipsed by the overwhelming relief of finally ending the mortgage process pain. We’ll call her Maria to protect her privacy.
At Maria’s closing, the lender was well represented. The loan officer was there, backed by a team of processors, assistants, and underwriters. Her real estate agent and the seller’s listing agent both were paid handsomely regardless of what kind of deal Maria got. And there sat Maria, beleaguered and worn down. For the past month and a half, she took on the part-time jobs of document handler and home purchase project manager in addition to the herculean effort of running two restaurant locations and being a Mom. It nearly broke her.
Every interest in the purchase process had a machine behind it, except for Maria’s, the person paying for it all. Sure, her loan officer and real estate agent work for her. But there is a limit on how much of the work they can actually take on. They’re not digging up tax returns and writing letters of explanation. They prepare their clients for a taking on a “second full-time job chasing documents,” as one real estate agent I recently interviewed put it. The entire system hinges on information asymmetry and exchanging fees for friction points.
Thirty million Americans share this problem: 17 million of us who work for ourselves, and another 13 million with messy income like RSUs, 1099s, and investment income. When people like Maria need to buy a home, they’re treated as outliers and oddballs rather than the backbone of our country. They’re forced to brave a grueling process of endless document requests, opaque lender guidelines, dizzying loops of calls/emails, and sometimes spend weeks upon weeks switching from bank to lender to broker, repeating the entire document upload process each time.
For decades, the math made complex borrowers too expensive to serve honestly. Agentic AI just changed that math, and we’re building Adeft to act on it.
According to Freddie Mac, originating a loan today costs roughly $11,000, and much of it traces back to siloed systems, manual paper chasing, and years of cruft on broken processes, all held together by humans acting as system integrators. Those costs get passed on to us, one way or another.
We’re building Adeft to stand for Maria and the millions of other Americans who are self-employed and self-built. The small business owner, the founder, the freelancer, the contractor, the household whose income does not arrive in a neat envelope twice a month. We stand for those who have been priced out, slowed down, and worn out by a mortgage system that wasn’t designed to recognize the self-employed and self-made. It is both wrong and ridiculous, because people like Maria are exactly the kind of people the American dream was meant for.
It is time that the mortgage industry meets borrowers where they are and gives them clarity at the moment of confusion. Complicated income shouldn’t be a red flag in 2026, because it reflects the normal shape of modern work. It is time to collapse the waiting, the paper chase, and the premium that have always dogged people like Maria for the crime of being misunderstood. The dream of owning a home should never be a nightmare for the people bold enough to build something of their own.
While our vision is focused on borrowers like Maria, we’re starting inside the machinery where empty promises give way to the harsh reality of income calculations, underwriting guidelines, verifications, and cross-checking thousands of pages of documents. Over the next few months we’re building toward an easy, fast, and transparent closing for the most challenging borrowers.
Few teams have felt this problem from the borrower’s chair, worked it from the loan originator’s chair, and built at the frontier of the technology that will finally solve it. We have.
The American dream was never the problem. The path to it was. We are here to clear it.
I have one ask: Make one introduction to a self-employed person you know who has been through the mortgage gauntlet in the last 18 months or to a CPA whose clients are self-employed. Help us better understand the intricacies of the problem we’re trying to solve.
More soon,
Jeremiah