A growing share of the nation’s mortgage loan originators are opting to work at non-bank mortgage companies.
There were
516,679 mortgage loan originators registered through the Nationwide Mortgage Licensing System as of the third quarter.
The total included
127,745 state-licensed originators who held 343,800 licenses. It also included 393,981 federally registered originators.
The sum was reduced by 5,047 to account for originators who had both state and federal registrations.
The statistics were provided by the
Conference of State Bank Supervisors.
Combined registrations increased from 511,233 in the second quarter. Because registrations last through the end of the year even when an originator exits the business at some point prior to year-end, they tend to increase until the first quarter of the following year.
But NMLS registrations dropped from 525,207 in the third-quarter 2013.
The year-over-year decline was fueled by a 3 percent drop in federally registered originators. State-registered originators, however, saw a 2 percent gain from a year earlier.
The number of state-registered originators in Wyoming was elevated by more than 30 percent from the third-quarter 2013 — the biggest gain of any state. Montana saw a nearly 30 percent rise, as did South Dakota. In Alabama, NMLS registrations were up almost 27 percent, while the increase was was nearly a quarter in Vermont..
Registrations in Connecticut were down more than 5 percent from the third-quarter 2013.
In Georgia, 222 originator licenses were terminated — more than in any other state. A distant second was 34 in Florida, followed by 26 in Missouri and 22 in New York.
Of all federally registered originators, 227,763 worked for banks under the watch of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. Another 90,550 were employed by banks regulated by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., 53,081 originated for financial institutions supervised by the Federal Reserve Board and 1,803 were on staff at institutions overseen by the Farm Credit Administration.
Credit unions regulated by the National Credit Union Administration employed 55,061 federally registered originators.
As of the third quarter of this year, 26,290 companies were NMLS-registered.
State-registered mortgage companies
numbered 15,887 in the most-recent period. The group carried 36,107 licenses.
A year earlier, 16,076 state-registered entities maintained 34,663 licenses.
Another 10,502 financial institutions were registered with NMLS in the third-quarter 2014, down from 10,747 in the same three-month period last year.
Total companies in the most-recent period were reduced by 99 to reflect firms with both state and federal registrations.
The report said that there were 20,464 branches of state-registered companies with 42,443 licenses as of the third-quarter 2014.
Loan originations by state-licensed companies were roughly $155 billion in the third quarter, increasing from approximately $140 billion three months earlier but down from around $170 billion a year earlier.
