2021 Rising Star Matt Jones: Reshaping the mortgage industry

 2021 HousingWire Rising Star Matt Jones, pictured above, is portrayed on the cover of the June HousingWire Magazine issue. He formerly served as senior counsel for the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, and currently, he serves as senior counsel for the U.S. Senate Finance Committee.

Going into 2020, Matt Jones thought it was going to be a relatively slow year legislatively. It was an election year, and typically, everyone turns to politics and campaigning instead of legislation.

“Boy was I wrong,” Jones said, who served as senior counsel for the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs at the time.

“It turned into, by far, the most consequential year of the four that I spent on the Hill,” he said. As the reports on the coronavirus started to come out in January and February of last year, it didn’t take long for the questions to start flooding in on how Congress would respond.

And for housing in particular, some of the biggest questions that Jones recalls were, “What happens to the people who can’t pay their rent or mortgage?” and “How are mortgage servicer’s who collect the monthly payments and advance them to investors going to stay in business when they’re suddenly not collecting payments?”

Those were massive, economy-wide problems that needed to be immediately addressed, he said.