Weekly Real Estate News
Summary
NEXA says the veteran Bookspan Baker Team is moving its established production business onto the NEXA platform while retaining its identity under Keepsake Loans.
Veteran mortgage leaders Todd Bookspan and Matt Baker have moved their established production team to NEXA Lending and are launching Keepsake Loans, a new umbrella brand that will operate on NEXA’s platform.
NEXA announced the move Thursday, saying the Bookspan Baker Team will retain its existing team identity within Keepsake Loans while using NEXA’s technology, products, investor relationships and infrastructure.
The company said Bookspan and Baker have worked together for more than 15 years, served more than 5,000 families and originated more than $1 billion in mortgage volume. NEXA said the team is on pace for approximately $100 million in production during 2026. Those production and customer figures are company-supplied and are attributed accordingly.
An established team moves into the broker channel
The move is notable because Bookspan described a shift in his own view of the mortgage broker model.
“I had misconceptions about what the broker channel looked like in 2026,” Bookspan said in NEXA’s announcement. “Once we became curious, asked more questions and really understood the model, we realized there were opportunities from a product, technology and income perspective that we simply weren’t aware of.”
Bookspan has spent 25 years in mortgage banking, according to NEXA. Baker has more than 30 years of industry experience.
The team is not being folded into a generic NEXA identity. Instead, Keepsake Loans is intended to preserve the team’s branding while putting its production on NEXA’s infrastructure.
NEXA is selling infrastructure without surrendering identity
That structure reflects a broader competition in mortgage recruiting: experienced originators and teams increasingly evaluate platforms not only on compensation and products, but also on whether they can retain their brand, staff and operating culture while gaining scale.
NEXA’s announcement points specifically to technology, product access, investor relationships, revenue-sharing opportunities and its expansion into servicing through evoLend.
Those are NEXA’s descriptions of its platform and should not be read as an independent WRE assessment of the relative economics of one mortgage model over another.
For Bookspan and Baker, however, the move is a concrete example of an established production business choosing to preserve its consumer-facing identity while changing the infrastructure underneath it.
As Keepsake Loans launches, the useful measures will be less promotional: whether the team actually expands production, whether additional originators join the brand and whether NEXA’s platform produces the operational gains the team says it is seeking.
