President Donald Trump is considering a major shake-up to the mortgage system: portable mortgages, an idea designed to inject life back into a frozen housing market that’s been paralyzed by sky-high rates and years of disastrous Biden-era economics.
Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Bill Pulte confirmed that the agency is “actively evaluating” the concept, which would allow homeowners to transfer their existing mortgage — interest rate and all — from one home to the next when they move.
In short, instead of giving up a comfortable sub-3% mortgage and being forced into today’s 6.5% loans, a homeowner could essentially take their old rate with them. For millions of Americans stuck in place, this could be exactly the nudge the market needs.
But not everyone is cheering. Naturally.
Realtor.com senior economist Jake Krimmel told FOX Business that portable mortgages aren’t compatible with the traditional, complex U.S. mortgage-finance architecture. In other words, the system is too tangled and bureaucratic to handle an idea that might actually help people — shocking.
Krimmel called the proposal “a brute-force attempt to ‘solve’ the lock-in effect,” where homeowners refuse to move because doing so would force them to trade cheap mortgages for expensive ones.
Krimmel acknowledged that if the rate gap were the only thing holding back housing mobility, portable mortgages might free up inventory. But a Federal Reserve report from May 2025 found that the lock-in effect only explains about half the drop in homeowners moving.
“It’s not clear portability would bring sales back to normal levels,” he said, noting that the benefits would be highly selective — only homeowners with low fixed rates would truly gain, while renters and owners without existing mortgages would still face today’s elevated rates.
But the biggest hurdle, he argued, is feasibility.
The U.S. mortgage system runs on securitization — mortgages are pooled together and priced based on the specific home backing them. So if a mortgage became portable, the collateral (and the risk profile of the entire pool) would change midstream, something the system simply isn’t built to handle.
If portability became widespread, mortgage durations would stretch unpredictably, throwing off payout models and making mortgage-backed securities harder to value. Investors would then demand higher compensation for the uncertainty — meaning mortgage rates would rise even further.
Beyond that, origination and servicing would become more complex, since taxes, escrows, liens, and title issues are all tied to specific properties.
Krimmel summed it up bluntly: “Portable mortgages might seem like a good way to mitigate the lock-in effect… but widespread implementation would introduce thorny technical problems and significant unintended consequences – many of them worse than the issue they’re trying to solve.”
Still, the fact that President Trump is even looking at creative solutions speaks volumes. While Democrats sit on their hands pretending the housing crisis will magically resolve itself, Trump is at least exploring options — something Washington bureaucrats often find far more frightening than high interest rates.
A stalled housing market is a real problem. And leadership that’s willing to take bold ideas seriously is a refreshing change in a world where the “experts” have failed Americans over and over again.
