The Education Gap Holding Back Assumable Mortgages

Written by:

Steve Marcinuk

Date:

15 Dec 2025

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The proptech industry’s standard approach, offering mortgage products directly to consumers through websites and apps, may not work for assumable mortgages, according to Andy Taylor, founder and CEO of RetroRate and former head of Credit Karma’s mortgage business. Taylor, who has spent years building consumer mortgage platforms, says his experience serving 150 million consumers revealed a critical obstacle: “Most consumers don’t know what a mortgage is, but really functionally, how does a mortgage really, truly work?”

Taylor believes this widespread lack of understanding has major implications for how assumable mortgages should be introduced to the market and why platforms aimed directly at consumers are likely to fail.

The Grandma Test

Taylor uses what he calls “the grandma test” to assess whether a financial product can succeed through direct consumer marketing. “I can’t really explain it to Grandma over Thanksgiving dinner,” he says of assumable mortgages. “She’s gonna be like, ‘I’ve never heard of that thing.’ And that sounds like shenanigans. That’s probably what grandma would say.”

Assumable mortgages require not only an understanding of how a standard mortgage works, but also the specifics of loan assumption, equity gaps, and how to compare the value of an assumable loan to current market rates. Taylor explains, “If they don’t know how a normal mortgage works, they certainly aren’t going to understand how an assumable loan works. And so I think that putting it on a website means that you’re going to have to dedicate at least 90% of your copy on that website to explaining what this is.”

This heavy educational requirement, Taylor argues, makes consumer-facing platforms for assumable mortgages financially unworkable. The cost of educating consumers from the ground up, combined with the relatively low volume of assumable mortgage transactions, does not support a sustainable business model.

Why Real Estate Professionals Are Different

Taylor’s solution is to focus entirely on real estate professionals. “We have a strong bias for powering the real estate professionals,” he says. “We don’t have a consumer-facing presence on our website—it’s not something that you as a consumer would go to.”

Drawing on his time as VP of Product at Redfin, Taylor says agents are uniquely positioned to bring assumable mortgages to market. “Real estate pros do this every day. They understand the value of the thing that’s going to unstick the market, aka great rates.”

Agents have the expertise to recognize why assumable mortgages matter and how to present them to buyers. They also interact with consumers at the point of transaction, eliminating the need for costly consumer marketing campaigns.

Educating agents is still necessary, but Taylor finds it far more efficient than educating individual consumers. “We’ll host a webinar for a couple of hundred people. We’ll get in front of those agents. We’ll show them, ‘Hey, this is a way you can boost your business,'” he says.

The Myth-Busting Challenge

Despite focusing on professionals, Taylor acknowledges that most agents know little about assumable loans and often hold negative perceptions. “Most agents don’t know anything about assumable loans,” he says. “If they do have any idea, they usually have a negative perception of it.”

Taylor identifies three persistent myths:

1. Assumable mortgages take too long to close. Taylor counters, “The last one that we helped a buyer with took 33 days,” which is comparable to standard mortgage timelines.
2. They’re not economically worthwhile. “If you’re a seller, and you can get 5% more for your home, which is, by the way, what most sellers get when they advertise it, or if you’re a buyer, and you can save $1,500 a month, I’d say that’s a good deal,” Taylor says.
3. Assumable mortgages are rare. Taylor notes, “There’s 22% of all the homes that have a mortgage that have an assumable loan,” showing that they are more common than many believe.

To overcome these misconceptions, Taylor emphasizes the need for real-world examples and clear financial outcomes. He works with large brokerages to provide tailored, region-specific content that demonstrates the value of assumable mortgages in agents’ actual markets.

The Partnership-Driven Model

RetroRate’s strategy reflects Taylor’s belief that professional intermediaries are essential for market adoption. The company partners with MLS organizations and brokerages, not consumers. “I think of partnerships and education almost as the same,” Taylor says, “because if you can partner with a large brokerage or an MLS, the name of the game for them is they’re trying to provide value either to their member agents or the subscribers.”

These partnerships allow RetroRate to distribute educational materials and integrate its data directly into the tools agents already use. When listing agents enter property details into MLS systems, RetroRate’s integration automatically highlights assumable mortgage data.

Taylor anticipates that this approach will create network effects. “As more listing agents start to list them, they become more visible in the MLS and the IDX sites and the major portals. And therefore there’s more awareness, which then continues to drive additional demand for them,” he says.

Whether this agent-focused model can scale to meet the larger market opportunity remains uncertain. However, Taylor’s experience at Credit Karma has convinced him that some financial products require professional intermediaries, regardless of the proptech industry’s preference for direct-to-consumer models.