By Joseph E. Seagle, Esq.

News highlights for real estate professionals and entrepreneurs with a side of business leadership advice courtesy of Florida's oldest and largest land trustee.

👋 Happy Friday! Today is National Senior Citizens Day, designated by presidential proclamation in 1988 and observed every August 21 since (National Day Calendar). The day was framed around recognizing what older Americans contribute. The quieter half of it is the part nobody puts on a card, which is what happens to everything they built once they are gone. BTW, it’s also my mom’s 82nd birthday. Please send good vibes her way.

That is most of this week's issue. Two stories about credit files that do not say what underwriters think they say, one about the document Floridians write to hand things down and mostly write wrong, and one about the culture you leave behind in a company meant to outlast you.

1 big thing: The $157 billion nobody underwrites

Total US buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) credit issuance reached roughly $156.7 billion in 2025, nearly 80% above the most recent Consumer Financial Protection Bureau measurement, according to a June Federal Reserve FEDS Note. In most cases those balances never appear on a borrower's credit report at all.

Glen Weinberg, COO and partner at Fairview Commercial Lending, told Mortgage Professional America on July 13 that the numbers brokers are underwriting to may be fiction. "People are goosing their credit scores because, instead of using a credit card, they do a BNPL loan like Affirm or Klarna, and it doesn't show up on your credit."

Why the score is pointing the wrong direction

Some BNPL providers do report. Even then, the balances are not meaningfully scored. The Fed found 63% of 2025 BNPL issuance carried a zero percent APR, so a borrower who is underwater on four installment plans can look clean in the model. Weinberg's argument is that the score has inverted its own purpose. Historically the people reaching for buy-now-pay-later are reaching because card limits are gone or maxed out, which is a risk signal the score is now rewarding instead of pricing.

His number: "That person with a 750 score really should have a 620 score if you factored in buy now, pay later."

What to execute now

For real estate investors and private lenders — this is the case for the way most Florida hard-money and private lenders already write paper. Weinberg's own conclusion is that the variable determining whether a lender eats a loss has never been the score. It is equity. Hold your loan-to-value discipline in Orange, Hillsborough, and Duval regardless of what the borrower's credit score says.

For home services businesses — your consumer financing partner is a buy-now-pay-later product in most cases now. Know whether your provider reports, because your customer's next appraisal or refinance depends on the answer.

For licensed professionals — practice acquisition and partner buy-in underwriting runs on personal credit. The 40-year-old associate's file is the one most likely to be understating.

Watch for: whether the scoring agencies fold BNPL tradelines into the models Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac accept, and what happens to borrower scores across the Florida entry-level market in the quarter after they do.

Sources: Mortgage Professional America, July 13, 2026; Federal Reserve FEDS Note on buy now, pay later, June 2026.

2. Regulators put work authorization in the credit box

Three federal banking regulators moved in mid-July to push immigration enforcement into mortgage underwriting, and the operational question it leaves for Florida originators is genuinely hard.

The big picture: The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the FDIC, and the National Credit Union Administration issued a joint statement warning that lending to borrowers not legally authorized to work in the US presents heightened credit risk. "When a borrower's income is derived from employment that is not legally authorized, the source of repayment may be less reliable and may present increased credit risk," the agencies wrote. The guidance arrived ahead of a July 18 deadline set by Executive Order 14406, "Restoring Integrity to America's Financial System," signed in May 2026.

Yes, but

No new rule was imposed. Nothing prohibits these loans. The statement reminds institutions of obligations they already had, and attorneys at Troutman Pepper Locke read the framework as risk-based, noting it "appears to stop short of requiring financial institutions to verify every customer's immigration status."

That is where the pinch is. The guidance incorporates the CFPB's June 8 statement on ability to repay and immigration status, which flagged ITIN use as a possible indicator of unlawful presence. Meanwhile blanket denials based on ITIN use alone create fair lending exposure under the Equal Credit Opportunity Act. Two compliance obligations, pulling opposite directions, on the same potential borrower. Also, stories of immigrants with visas, pending cases, and work permits being whisked away from immigration court hearings to detention centers and then deportations abound. Even borrowers with seemingly legal authority to be present and working in the U.S. are being deported — and their families are abandoning their U.S. homes to follow them — so what’s a lender to do?

The Florida takeaway

The volume is smaller than the noise suggests. The Urban Institute counted roughly 5,000 to 6,000 ITIN mortgages originated in 2023 against about 4.6 million total originations that year, per the National Community Reinvestment Coalition. The concentration is not evenly spread, though, and Miami-Dade, Broward, Osceola, Orange, and Hillsborough carry more of it than the national ratio implies.

For private lenders and portfolio originators — document the individualized repayment analysis on every file rather than the category. A written, borrower-specific rationale is what stands up under either agency's review.

For home services businesses — this reaches your subcontractor base before it reaches your customers. Verify I-9 practices with counsel now instead of during an audit.

What's next: Treasury was due to issue proposed amendments to Bank Secrecy Act customer due diligence rules by August 17, but hadn’t done so as this is being written. Confirm whether that has happened before you rewrite any policy.

Sources: Mortgage Professional America; OCC news release.

On this week’s “Ask Joe” episode of Trust This, I try to dispel some myths that are circulating on the Internet about revocable living trusts — what they are; what they aren’t, and what they can and cannot do.

 Listen in or watch on your favorite streaming platform.

3. Practice Pointers: Ten things that don't belong in your Florida will

A Kiplinger roundup of estate attorneys lists ten things to keep out of a will. Every item on that list hits harder in Florida, because Florida law already decides several of them for you.

The big picture: A will is a narrow instrument. It moves probate assets and nothing else, and under Fla. Stat. § 732.901 the custodian must deposit it with the clerk within 10 days of learning of the death. The clerk keeps the original for 20 years. Your will is a public court record.

What most people don't know: Florida restricts what you can devise at all. Under Fla. Stat. § 732.4015, homestead is not subject to devise (passing through the will or a trust) if you are survived by a spouse or a minor child, and may go to the spouse only where there is no minor child. So the clause leaving the house to three children in equal shares is not a plan. In a fair number of Florida estates it is void, and the constitutional descent rules take over.

Key takeaways:

The bottom line: A clean will handles only what genuinely has to go through probate. Everything else belongs in a trust, a beneficiary designation, a separate writing, or an operating agreement. This is Florida law, and every state writes its own probate code and homestead rules, so get counsel where you live and where the property sits.

Go deeper: Read the full long-form article on aspirelegal.com

Sources: Kiplinger, Erin Bendig with Donna LeValley and Kathryn Pomroy, updated June 10, 2026.

4. Coaching Thoughts: Your culture is the room, not the wall

Ask most owners to describe their company culture, and you get the values slide deck. Ask an employee what it feels like on a Tuesday, and you get something else. Fast Company makes the case that the gap between those two answers isn’t a communication problem; it’s a design problem.

The numbers are unkind. Deloitte found only 23% of organizations believe their people are strongly aligned with corporate purpose. Gallup puts daily connection to company culture at two in 10 employees. Those are not disengagement numbers. Those are numbers about culture living in a document instead of in the work.

The Lencioni floor

Patrick Lencioni built The Five Dysfunctions of a Team on the observation that everything else stacks on vulnerability-based trust, and that trust does not come out of a workshop. It gets produced when someone goes first, in the room, on something that costs them a little. The Fast Company piece arrives at the same place from the other direction: the durable shifts come from designed experience rather than better messaging. A story circle beats a breakout room because someone has to go first.

The EOS translation

Every one of these is already in the operating system. Most owners just run them as compliance.

Bottom Line: Culture is not what you wrote down. It is what happened in the last meeting you ran, and your team has already scored it.

This Week's Challenge: At your next L10, do not skip the Segue, and go first with something that is actually uncomfortable. Then say nothing for the rest of the round.

Source: Fast Company, on culture as designed experience, citing Deloitte and Gallup research.

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Be on the lookout for our next issue! 👋