This chapter is designed to give Mortgage Industry Directory readers easy access to residential and commercial industry vendors. The listings here should be viewed as a first point of contact only. Keep in mind this one basic definition: a vendor is a third-party company or person that provides goods and/or services to mortgage professionals. Vendors come in all different shapes, sizes and types. Some vendors are one-man shops, others are more elaborate. Quality can vary greatly.

We list industry vendors alphabetically by the type of service/product they provide, starting with appraisals, and ending with technology related offerings. Wholesale and correspondent buyers of mortgages are vendors as well and we encourage you to view our lending and wholesaling chapters in this book for more detailed information on those companies.

Many of the vendors appearing in this chapter also show up in the Buyer's Guide, a National Mortgage News publication. Vendors that did not fill out a survey sheet with Buyer's Guide editor Keith Wohl will not be listed here. (Sorry about that.)

In general, there are many different categories and sub-categories of vendor services — broker price opinions, compliance, net branching, REO management, subservicing, take your pick. We encourage you to explore further the companies listed in this chapter. Website addresses are presented as well. If you need more information on the vendors in this chapter the website is always the best place to start.

This is the third year in a row that we provide this chapter for the MID and we hope you find it helpful. We added it because our information-hungry readers need assistance in finding vendors. As always, we continue to receive many inquiries from readers who want information on not just lenders and seller/servicers but the firms that provide products/services to them.

If you're a lender or servicer you need to ask yourself: who's going to help me with my business chores? Who's offering the type of products and services that my company might need? Who has the cutting edge technology that will help me beat the competition? Our advice is this: explore new vendor relationships. Don't be afraid to pick up the phone and comparison shop. Don't be a wall flower.

How many vendors are out there in the mortgage space? In the residential and commercial industries we assume that for every funder operating there are at least three vendors per company. For instance, if 8,200 mortgage firms are funding loans in 2005 we estimate that there were 24,600 "core" vendors operating in the U.S. A core vendor is a company that has more than $500,000 in annual revenue.

It was once thought that mortgage industry consolidation (among lenders and servicers) might hammer the vendor industry. But it appears that consolidation is aiding the vendor community. As lenders and servicers move to cut operating costs chances are they will outsource certain chores to a third party provider. This trend could accelerate once the production boom ends. Then again, predicting an end to a boom has never been easy, especially the past three years.