According to HousingWire, Better Home & Finance's board has moved aggressively to block former CEO Vishal Garg from regaining control of the company. The board voted unanimously to remove him, pointing to significant financial underperformance including cumulative losses exceeding one and a half billion dollars since 2022 and a stock price that has fallen more than ninety percent during his time running the company. The company also expressed concerns about his judgment, temperament, and credibility in leadership.
The confrontation intensified when Garg announced he wanted to return to an executive position and was seeking board members to resign, which would effectively give him control again. He offered to work for just one dollar until the company becomes profitable and said he would buy back thirty million dollars of stock. However, Better's leadership characterized this as a power grab and part of a broader board battle.
Things got heated this week when Better said Garg refused to sign representation letters needed to file the company's quarterly report on time. Better alleged he was trying to extract concessions from the board through this delay. Garg countered that he only received the filing document seven minutes after the deadline had already passed, so he signed it promptly afterward. The board also raised concerns about potential securities law violations based on communications they reviewed, though Garg dismissed these allegations as conjecture.
Despite the controversy, Garg maintains he is the right leader for the company's future. He points out that revenues have grown two and a half times over the past two years and that monthly losses have been dramatically reduced from over forty million dollars to around four million. He also acknowledged that better returns might have come from investing elsewhere during the brutal five-year period the mortgage industry has experienced.
The underlying issue here is that Better, like many mortgage companies, has struggled mightily since the easy money days of 2021. The company remains publicly traded and deeply unprofitable, creating tension between Garg's vision for a turnaround and the board's concerns about whether continuing down the current path makes sense. Shareholders are now in the middle of this leadership dispute with legitimate questions on both sides about the company's direction.
What I am seeing locally here in the Bay Area and across the East Bay is that instability at major mortgage lenders gets passed down to real estate professionals like me in the form of uncertainty and delayed closings. When you have this kind of internal drama at one of the country's larger digital lenders, it inevitably affects inventory flow and buyer confidence during an already volatile time in our market.
