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Top Producers

Secrets of 2021's Top Producers

By Brad Finkelstein
April 15, 2021 5:00 AM

After one of the most tumultuous years on record, the loan officers who brought in the largest volumes opined on what they experienced in the market and what they see on the horizon in the world of mortgage. This sampling of data from the 2021 Top Producers Survey was fielded from January 1 to February 22 of this year.

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The shift in the third party origination market from correspondent lenders towards the wholesale channel has been a telling trend in the survey over the past three years.
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Compared to 2020, this year's top producers increasinly rely on past client referrals, attorneys and financial planners and organic social media. They also saw a small increase in leads from live online seminars, but far less than they had in 2019.
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Attitudes have shifted regarding the importance of non-qualified mortgages in an originator's business — a change that might be attributed to proposals to revamp the definition of non-QM.
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As the future of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac remain cloudy in spite of recent actions by the Federal Housing Finance Agency, survey respondents declared that they would largely rely on these loans for their business this year.
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Fewer mortgage loan officers in the 2021 survey agreed that the U.S. housing market was moving in the right direction, with a growing number either feeling neutral on the statement or stating that it was heading the wrong way.
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But when the 2021 results were broken out by region, the areas with the fewest loan officers — albeit still the majority — that said the housing market was heading in the right direction were in the Northeast and the West.
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The pandemic's economic toll likely caused many of the respondents to become bearish this year, with the share of those saying they agreed the economy was moving in the right direction reduced by more than half from 2020.
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The inventory shortage, especially when it comes to properties marketed to first-time home buyers, has been a major concern for the market. However, a significant percentage of Northeast-based mortgage loan officers were neutral or not concerned to any degree.
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Conditions surrounding the pandemic also contributed towards a tightening of underwriting standards. Yet, surprisingly, the 2020 and 2021 responses to this question were exactly the same, with the overwhelming response being that underwriting standards are currently just right.
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There was a significant variance by region in the 2021 survey as to whether mortgage loan officers felt their companies were meeting their technology needs, especially among those in the West (home to Silicon Valley and Seattle).
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While over 80% of the respondents to this year's survey said their company was taking the right steps to promote diversity, a larger share when compared with 2020 neither agreed nor disagreed with that proposition.
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Neither Pinterest nor Snapchat had any traction among the loan officers surveyed as means of developing business using social media.
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Ironically, most respondents said they would continue to use Twitter as much as they had last year, despite the site having the lowest share of use among the four sites.
Brad Finkelstein
Originations Editor, National Mortgage News
Top Producers Marketing Originations
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