Fannie Mae issued Lender Letter LL-2026-07 this week, and it is the marketing item of the week precisely because it does not look like one. Effective immediately, servicers may proactively solicit borrowers who are eligible to terminate conventional mortgage insurance based on their property's current value, with the change to be folded into a future Servicing Guide update. Read that as a marketing fact rather than a servicing one. Borrower-initiated, value-based MI termination was already available; what changed is that the outreach is now permitted to come from the servicer. Which means the call is going to get made. The only question is whose name is on it. Yesterday's brief pointed at builder incentives as the thing nobody in your market was posting about — this is the second one, and it is the better of the two, because it does not need a builder or a buyer to say yes.
The rate side is why it matters now. Bankrate's conventional 30-year sits at 7.12%, flat on the day but 22 basis points above the 6.90% it carried a week ago and 40 above the 6.72% of a month ago, at the very top of a 90-day range running 6.47% to 7.12% across 85 sessions since June 22. Freddie's PMMS, a separate weekly survey, printed 6.95% for the week ending September 17. At those levels the refinance conversation only works for the narrow band of your closed book whose note rate is above 7.12%. For everyone else, dropping mortgage insurance is the only monthly payment reduction left that does not require touching the rate — and the size of it is whatever the MI line already says on their statement.
The pull is narrow enough to build today: conventional purchases from your 2023 and 2024 books that closed with mortgage insurance and are still paying it. Run current values against the original loan amount and sort by the widest gap. The outreach writes itself, because you are not selling anything — you are telling someone to go read one line on their own mortgage statement. That is what gets the reply; there is no offer to evaluate and nothing to say no to. It also puts you back in the file ahead of the servicer's own campaign, which is where the commercial value sits later, when that borrower finally does have a reason to refinance.
pull every conventional purchase you closed in 2023 and 2024, filter to the files that carried mortgage insurance, and send one short message asking them to check the MI line on their current statement — then offer to run their number against today's value and tell them whether it can come off.