As the U.S. reverse mortgage market struggles to adapt to lower principal limits, demand north of the border is surging — and Canada’s top reverse mortgage lender has embarked on a new marketing push to expand even further.

The new TV spots from HomeEquity Bank emphasize homeowners’ desire to stay put even as they age. In one commercial, a young couple with a baby stroller envies a home owned by an older woman named Doris, predicting that she’ll want to downsize any day now — only for Doris herself to appear behind them and insist she’s not going anywhere.

In another, a couple jokingly threatens to move into their daughter and son-in-law’s condo after they suggest it could be time for them to downsize.

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The preference for baby boomers to age in place has been blamed in part for lower homeownership rates among millennials, who have been forced to compete for a smaller slice of available properties on the market. But now experts warn that even just a slight change in older homeowners’ attitudes could lead to a mass sell-off that would flood certain markets.

Focusing solely on the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area, researchers at George Mason University’s Stephen S. Fuller Institute point to the significant amount of empty-nesters living in properties that might be too large for their current needs. Using Census Bureau data, the team looked at the proportion of homeowners with “extra bedrooms” around the nation’s capital, defined as the number of bedrooms in excess of people who live at each property.

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In a landscape fraught with declining origination figures and new rules, reverse mortgage lenders have more than a few suggestions for improving the product central to their business.

Many would start with at least some reversal of the program changes from the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which last fall inaugurated an overall reduction in principal limit factors and an updated insurance premium structure.

For Rick Sweeney, a reverse mortgage specialist in Nevada and northern California, the loan’s new standard upfront premium is just part of the problem: “Worse is the lower limit factors, which result in far less dollars available to senior borrowers,” he said.

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Consumer Financial Protection Bureau acting director Mick Mulvaney on Wednesday named the first leader for the department’s newly formed Office of Innovation.

Paul Watkins, formerly in charge of financial technology initiatives for the attorney general of Arizona’s office, will take the helm of the innovation office, announced as part of a larger restructuring of the CFPB back in May.

According to the bureau — which Mulvaney continues to call the “Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection” in a nod to its name in the original Dodd-Frank regulatory package that created it — the new department will work to foster “consumer-friendly innovation.”

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Mutual of Omaha Bank on Monday completed its purchase of Synergy One Lending, Inc., cementing its entrance into the reverse mortgage marketplace.

The two parties received regulatory approval from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency earlier this month, Mutual of Omaha Bank said Tuesday, with the transaction formally closing on July 16. The terms of the deal, first announced in May, remain undisclosed.

“This acquisition brings together two organizations that complement each other strategically and culturally,” Mutual of Omaha Bank CEO Jeff Schmid said in a statement announcing the closing. “By combining our collective strengths, Mutual of Omaha Bank and Synergy One will be able to serve more customers who are in the market for a traditional or reverse mortgage.”

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The CEO of Champion Mortgage’s parent company described the reverse mortgage servicing and sub-servicing market as a “smaller pond” compared to other aspects of its business, pointing to cratering origination numbers in the Home Equity Conversion Mortgage marketplace.

“It’s just such a smaller pond, right?” Nationstar Mortgage Holdings (NYSE: NSM) CEO Jay Bray said on his company’s second-quarter earnings call Tuesday morning. “If you step back and think about what’s going on in that business, you’ve seen originations shrink dramatically, which we think were prudent steps taken on the origination side of the market. And so it’s just a smaller pond.”

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Month after month of data show Western states — particularly Colorado and Washington state — as hotbeds for reverse mortgage activity, and local originators say multiple factors make these locations ripe for volume.

Much of this reverse mortgage activity is in the Seattle and Denver metropolitan areas, where property values are exploding and helping drive reverse mortgage volume, originators said.

Lynn Wertzler, president of Greenleaf Financial in Portland, Ore., called the Seattle area an “ideal market,” with high property values and record appreciation.

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