Lending standards move a lot less than people assume, and the changes that do happen are quiet ones inside the automated underwriting systems. Most loans are underwritten to FHA, VA, Fannie Mae, or Freddie Mac guidelines, and those stay roughly stable. Even near the top of a hot market, this cycle brought no true loosening, largely because the reforms that reshaped mortgage lending after the last downturn made the system fundamentally safer. If anything, guidelines have tightened at the margin, aside from occasional loan-level price adjustments that make certain loans more expensive without changing who qualifies. The meaningful movement lives inside engines like Fannie Mae's Desktop Underwriter. Lenders never announce what changed between software versions, but loan officers routinely watch a borrower who would have qualified two weeks earlier now qualify only at a lower debt-to-income ratio. So when fewer people qualify, the usual culprit is home prices and rates rising faster than incomes, and lenders slamming the door is rarely the story. Watch the qualifying numbers your own file produces. Any real change shows up there first.