Mortgage lenders are ranked based both on how many new loans they originate and how many loans they service. By those measures, industry data released Monday shows that the biggest originator of home loans is based on the West Coast, while the biggest mortgage servicer is based on the East Coast.
[IMAGE]""Wells Fargo & Co."":http://www.wellsfargo.com held onto the top spot among mortgage originators during the third quarter of this year. ""Bank of America"":http://www.bankofamerica.com took the lead spot in the mortgage servicer rankings.
Mortgage originations represent transactions where the purchase of a home is financed or an existing mortgage is refinanced. According to ""industry data compiled"":http://www.mortgagedaily.com/MortgageLenderRanking.asp by the online industry resource ""MortgageDaily.com"":http://www.mortgagedaily.com, during the third quarter, total U.S. mortgage originations were up one-third from the second quarter. Business was down 37 percent, however, from the third quarter of 2009.
[COLUMN_BREAK]Based on origination volume, San Francisco-based Wells Fargo -- with more than $100 billion in residential originations -- was the biggest mortgage lender during the third quarter. The company's mortgage subsidiary, Wells Fargo Home Mortgage, operates from Des Moines, Iowa.
Bank of America was ranked as the second largest mortgage originator, followed by ""Chase"":http://www.chase.com, ""GMAC Mortgage"":http://www.gmacmortgage.com, and ""CitiMortgage"":http://www.citimortgage.com.
Rounding out the top ten in _Mortgage Daily's_ rankings were ""US Bank"":http://www.usbank.com, ""PHH Mortgage"":http://www.phh.com, ""Quicken Loans"":http://www.quickenloans.com, ""SunTrust"":http://www.suntrust.com, and ""Flagstar"":http://www.flagstar.com. Quicken Loans managed to move up two spots from the previous quarter's report to claim the No. 8 slot on the top-10 list.
The second measure of mortgage lender size is the amount of mortgages they service, including loans originated in prior periods. Servicers collect payments each month and pass on interest earned to investors or to their own bottom lines.
Based on mortgage servicing portfolio size, Bank of America is the biggest U.S. servicer, according to _Mortgage Daily's_ rankings, with just over $2 trillion in residential home loans in its servicing portfolio as of September 30th. While BofA is headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina, its mortgage subsidiary, Bank of America Home Loans, is based in Calabasas, California.
Wells Fargo took the No. 2 spot on the servicing list, with $1.8 trillion in residential mortgages serviced. Chase came in third, followed by Citi and then GMAC.
Making up the bottom half of the top-10 servicer list is US Bank, ""PNC Bank"":http://www.pnc.com, SunTrust, PHH, and ""OneWest Bank"":http://www.owb.com. OneWest was formed out of the old IndyMac Bank.