Last week, 205 originators switched companies and 1,345 individuals obtained their NMLS license. Notable originator movements last week include:
Figures are based on last 14 months’ production.
Top Gainers (non-Bank/CU):
Calculations based on last aggregate production of individual LO’s 14 months’ production. Excludes companies below $100M in 14mo LO production value after gains factored in.
Part 1 of our Agent Loyalty & Risk Series
Earlier this year, we took a deep look at Agent Loyalty Scores and how strongly real estate agents concentrate their mortgage business with individual loan officers.
That analysis looked at the strength of those relationships at a point in time.
This time, we wanted to ask a different question:
How stable are those relationships over time?
More specifically, if you're an agent's #1 loan officer today, how likely are you to still be their #1 loan officer a year from now?
We looked at the data.
We Started With the Agents Loan Officers Care About Most
For this analysis, we started with 95,326 real estate agents currently doing at least 10 buyer-side transactions in the trailing 12 months.
Why 10+ buy sides?
Because we're not particularly interested in measuring movement among agents who close one or two buyer transactions a year.
We wanted to study the relationships that can materially impact an LO's business.
We then looked backward across 13 monthly snapshots, from August 2025 through August 2026, tracking which loan officer held the top position with each agent.
Of those agents, 88,823 had complete data across all 13 monthly snapshots, giving us a consistent group to follow for the full year.
What happened surprised us.
Nearly Half Changed Their Top Loan Officer at Some Point
Over the 12-month period:
47.9% of these agents had a different #1 loan officer at some point during the year.
That's 42,522 agents.
Now, that doesn't mean all of those changes were permanent.
An LO could temporarily fall from #1 and later reclaim the top spot. An agent could spread several transactions among different lenders. A short-term shift doesn't necessarily mean the underlying relationship disappeared.
So we looked at it a couple of stricter ways.
41.9% Had a Different Top LO One Year Later
When we compared August 2025 with August 2026, 41.9% of the agents had a different top loan officer at the end of the period.
That's 37,260 high-producing agents whose leading LO relationship was different one year later.
We tightened the definition again.
What if we required the new loan officer to remain #1 for the final three consecutive monthly snapshots?
That eliminates more of the temporary movement.
Even then:
35.1% of agents had a different top LO, and that new LO remained on top for at least the final three months.
That's 31,213 agent relationships.
So depending on how strictly we define a meaningful change, somewhere between roughly one-third and two-fifths of these high-producing agents experienced a change in their leading loan officer relationship over the course of one year.
A Change in #1 Doesn't Necessarily Mean the Original LO Lost the Agent
This distinction matters.
We're not saying 41.9% of agents completely stopped doing business with their previous top LO.
Our analysis measures who occupies the #1 position in the relationship.
The former top LO might still receive loans from that agent. They may have simply lost share to another originator.
But for an agent doing 10, 20, 30 or more buyer-side transactions per year, moving from the agent's first choice to their second or third choice can still represent meaningful lost opportunity.
And that raises a bigger question.
Are These Relationship Changes Visible Before They Happen?
If this much movement is taking place among the industry's more productive real estate agents, simply knowing who your strongest agent relationships are may not be enough.
What an LO really wants to know is:
Which relationships are beginning to change?
That's where Agent Risk Scores become interesting.
For the next part of this series, we're going to take the same group of agents and go back to their Risk Scores at the beginning of the period.
Then we'll see what actually happened over the following 1, 3, 6 and 12 months.
Did the Agent Risk Score predict which loan officers were about to lose the #1 position?
We'll answer that next.
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