Lennar Mortgage’s Tech Journey
(l. to r.: Laura Escobar, Thomas Moreno)
AUSTIN–Lennar Mortgage is integrating AI into its organizational processes to enhance efficiency. Here at MBA’s Independent Mortgage Bankers conference, 2025 MBA Chair and President of Lennar Mortgage Laura Escobar and Lennar Financial Services Chief Information Officer Thomas Moreno discussed the process.
Moreno noted AI is all over the news. “We saw DeepSeek this week and the [stock] market reacted negatively. I think these technologies are going to be really disruptive,” he said. “It’s possibly the most disruptive technology. In my career we have had networking, then we had the Internet, and now we have cloud computing. Well, now it’s AI and AI is here to stay. It’s not going anywhere.”
Moreno suggested mortgage bankers talk to their current technology partners and ask if they have any AI-enabled services that are already embedded in their product. “Last year at Lennar, we really leaned in hard with our Microsoft partner–I’m not even talking about mortgage banking–but we had this Microsoft tech stack, and they came out with this thing called Microsoft Copilot. And we realized that something like 20% of the time your employees spend daily is on chat, text and email, drafting documents to borrowers. So we took a look at this and realized we can use some of these tools to help just that little efficiency. And if you make your loan officer or your processor that much more efficient, then they have time to deliver better customer service, or to work on more loans.”
For example, Moreno noted that he spends a lot of time every day on Microsoft Teams calls. “When you’re finished with a Teams call, if someone who wasn’t able to attend the call asks for the meeting notes, AI can look at the transcription and summarize the notes and you can send them to your coworkers, literally 20 seconds after you finish the meeting. Talk about leveraging AI. That’s something that you guys probably already have in your tech stack if you’re a Microsoft customer.”
AI can also help summarize long-winded emails. “You can just hit ‘summarize,’ and it will look at the key talking points and put them right at the very top in a bullet fashion, Moreno noted. “If I’m prepping for a meeting with Laura, one of my favorite prompts is to ask, ‘what were the last three touch points I have had with Laura?’ It looks at my email, it pulls up the last three emails and summarizes them, looks at the last three chats I had with her and summarizes them. It also looks at the last three files that we shared with each other. Talk about great last-minute prep to get into a meeting, right?”
Escobar added that not only can Copilot summarize emails, “it also keeps me honest,” she said. “It keeps every leader honest, because you know exactly where you left off or what you’re accountable for. So that’s a way cool way of seeing what technology can do for us.”
Escobar asked Moreno how to assess whether an organization is ready to adopt AI technology, both technically and culturally.
“Culture is the biggest thing,” Moreno replied. “From a cultural standpoint, I think what people look at is the business book ‘Who Moved My Cheese?’, [that examines how people react to change] and ask, ‘am I going to lose my job?’ That’s not what AI is meant to do. AI is meant to be your digital assistant to help you be more efficient. If you’re a loan officer, it can do the heavy lifting. A couple of years ago we used bots. So we had this disclosure function that sat with our loan officers, and we centralized that and created bots to automate it. We took all of that load off of our loan officers to let them work more with their customers and provide better service.”
Moreno said to change the culture, you have to explain the ‘why’ to your team, meaning: tell them what’s in it for them. In the above case, the ‘why’ was a better work-life balance because it would generate and send out disclosures, saving team members some effort.
“On the technology side, what I would say to anybody here is that you should have a data strategy in your company. If you don’t, you should go out and partner with somebody to create a data strategy, because AI loves structured data,” Moreno noted. “So as you continue to build out your data model, number one, it gives you insight into your business. And nowadays, with margins being so thin, you want to know exactly what’s happening at every step along the way, so you can tweak things a little bit more. I think that’s really super important.”
