In the Spring of 2005 National Mortgage News, the publisher of this book, and its affiliates embarked on an Internet survey of loan officers. The survey — conducted on our broker portal, BrokerUniverse.com — was in addition to our annual loan broker survey which targets brokerage companies and not necessarily individuals that work with the public and facilitate the closing of loan packages.

We intentionally targeted LOs because that's where the rubber meets the road in residential finance — dealing with the retail customer on a face-to-face (usually) basis. We initially hoped to garner 200 LO responses, thinking that 200 would be a good sample of the industry. By the time the survey ended in June we had more than 1,000 responses to our LO survey, surpassing all expectations.

In the process we learned quite a few things about LOs, namely that they (at least the ones who answered our survey) work predominately for loan brokerage firms and are quite involved in the hot interest-only loan and non-conforming markets. Several LOs are involved in making controversial "payment option" loans. We also discovered that quite a few LOs facilitate not only residential mortgages but commercial loans too, specifically multifamily.

How the Survey Was Done

In this chapter we rank the top 400 LOs in the U.S. The 1,000 professionals answering the survey work in all 50 states. The volumes stated here are "as is," meaning there is no way for us to verify the information. That said, we calculated an average loan size where possible and questioned large volume answers — unless the LO indicated that he/she was a commercial facilitator. We did this a few times and discovered that several LOs play in the jumbo and super jumbo market.

If an LO would not provide a name, or a last name and first initial they were dropped from our ranking. (Sorry about that.) For those interested in a deeper and more detailed analysis of the LO segment, we wil publish a special report on LOs later this year. (For more information on that report email: Elizabeth.Washington@SourceMedia.com.) We would like to thank the 1,000 LOs that were kind enough to answer our survey. Without them this chapter would not be possible. We hope to publish not only the volume leaders but all of the respondents later this year — either in NMN, Origination News, Broker magazine, or on the NMN website.