A record amount of home equity has brought companies across the mortgage industry, particularly fintechs, into the sector.
Borrowers with a mortgage in the United States hold a total of $17.9 trillion in home equity, equal to $310,000 per homeowner, according to Cotality's latest Homeowner Equity Insights Report. Better Mortgage and fintechs like FirstClose and Nada are looking to take advantage, expanding their services to increase their market share.
"Home equity is a strategic growth priority for Better because it addresses a durable need for homeowners while making our business less dependent on the traditional mortgage cycle," a Better spokesperson told National Mortgage News. "By expanding beyond direct-to-consumer through partners like Coinbase, we can reach more homeowners, diversify our product mix and scale that growth more efficiently over time."
The company announced Thursday that Coinbase One members are eligible for a lender-funded rebate equal to 1%, or up to $10,000, of their Better home equity line of credit. This expansion, launched on Aug. 12, is designed to grow with Coinbase One members over time, from the first mortgage to the home equity needs that follow, the company said in a press release.
Better's HELOC originations grew 45% quarter-over-quarter and 23% year-over-year to $294 million. That accounts for 18% of its total loan volume, up from 12% in the first quarter of 2026, according to the release.
Nationally, new closed-end second mortgages and HELOC originations rose 19.8% from $78.2 billion to $93.7 billion in the second quarter. But that still represented less than 0.1% of the total tappable equity homeowners with a mortgage could have drawn from, according to the Cotality report.
"Homeowners have accumulated enormous amounts of equity, but most of it isn't doing much," said Thom Malone, principal economist at Cotality, in a press release.
Borrowers with the most housing wealth are often the least likely to tap it because they have low mortgage rates, strong cash flow and little reason to move, which means much of the country's record home equity remains unused, while the same homeowners continue to benefit from the lower monthly payments that helped create it, Malone said.
Fintechs expand market presence
Fintech lenders have captured most of the home equity growth. Experian research showed fintech HELOC originations grew 140.2% between 2023 and 2025, far outpacing banks and credit unions over the same period, according to Better.
FirstClose, a fintech provider of data and workflow solutions for home equity and mortgage lenders, announced the launch of a workspace that lets loan officers manage borrower leads in one place, called Lender Portal. The platform covers lead intake, eligibility evaluation and borrower engagement tracking, according to a press release.
"Loan officers spend a lot of their day hunting for information instead of talking to borrowers, which is both inefficient and costly because that's how applications stall and borrowers slip away," FirstClose CEO Tedd Smith said in the press release. "Lender Portal addresses that challenge head-on so that loan officers can spend more time assisting borrowers and moving applications forward rather than searching between systems."
Nada, another home equity fintech, also revealed a forward flow purchase agreement with a private fund in which O'Connor Capital Solutions acts as investment manager providing up to $300 million to purchase home equity agreements originated by Nada.
This marks Nada's second major institutional capital partner this year. The relationships demonstrate accelerating institutional interest in home equity agreements as an emerging residential asset class, the company said in a press release.
"We have spent a significant amount of time evaluating the home equity agreement market and think the asset class offers a compelling way to gain exposure to the U.S. residential real estate market," said Joshua Mercado, managing director and head of the asset-based finance vertical at O'Connor Capital Solutions, in the release.
