One industry veteran says she keeps seeing the same two problems, and nothing in between
With current market conditions slowing down pipelines in many parts of the country, some organizations are making renewed pushes to increase originator training to prepare for a wave of business in the future.
The National Association of Mortgage Brokers (NAMB) rolled out NAMB MORE, short for Mortgage Originator Resources and Education, at its annual event in Las Vegas earlier this month.
That same week, the Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA) announced its MBA Homebase program, partnering with MLO Force and FirstHome IQ to create a coaching and training curriculum.
One industry veteran said training originators means solving two very different problems.
Dionne Bass (pictured top) is a veteran in the industry with almost three decades as a mortgage banker. She has been an underwriter for companies like Fannie Mae and Wells Fargo. She said that now that the flood of originators from the low-rate environment has subsided, the ones that remain are looking for guidance.
"We were flooded with originators because of COVID and just all this, hey, join the industry, join the industry," Bass told Mortgage Professional America. "And so what you've seen is all this stuff falling off of people who wanted quick money. And what's left are the people that are like, 'Listen, I need help.'"
Two groups, nothing in between
Marina Walsh, vice president and head of industry analysis at the MBA, said industry employment is down more than 35% over the past four and a half years, though it has held steady lately. She said independent mortgage companies have fallen from about 881 in 2021 to 707 at the end of 2025.
Newer originators who stayed have cleared the licensing exam, Bass said. Building files is the part nobody has taught them.
"They know how to pass the test," she said. "And so now they're in the water, and they're trying to figure out, 'How do I create this file?’ They don't have the confidence to talk to the borrower about creating a file, about prequalifying people."
Product training is the easy part to find, Bass said. Lenders have every reason to provide it.
"You got account executives, you got salespeople. They listen. They will come to your house and train you, okay? They want to sell," she said. "But the newbies don't need that. The newbies need to know what to do. ‘Show me what to do. How do I do it?’ And most mortgage companies are not set up to support them."
Experienced originators have the opposite problem, Bass said. They have the volume but not a system to handle it.
"You've got the older people who have been in the industry for a long time, and they don't have any processes set up," she said. "So they've got all this business, but they're drowning because they don't have any type of procedure in order to take this business in. Because what do you do? You take the file, and you just toss it to the next person, and that's where the file explodes."
The two groups need different things, Bass said. She said most who need help lie in one extreme or the other.
"I haven't really seen the in-between," she said. "'I've got the business, I need a process,' and then I've got, 'I am new, please help me.' I don't even know what the in-between is."
Why people aren't leaving yet
Newer originators don't look ready to walk away, Bass said. The strain hasn't pushed them out, in her view.
"A lot of them work other jobs. Is that not crazy?" she said. "Everything's online now, so you actually can work a full-time job and be an originator. And so what I find is, they're frustrated because they don't have the help, but they're not frustrated enough to leave. They're just trying to find the help."
In her personal opinion, experienced originators without a process tend to change employers. Bass said the move doesn't change the underlying problem.
"That's where you see the company jumping," Bass said. "They'll go to a different company because that company is saying, 'Oh, we can help you with that.’"
The warning sign is how stretched the people handling the files are. Bass said it applies even to teams that think they have a system.
"You might think that you have a process, but if you're frustrated, if you're overwhelmed, if your processor's hair is always on fire, as a close friend of mine says, then you need to find out what's going on in that pass-off," she said.
The breakout sessions at the Association of Independent Mortgage Experts (AIME) Fuse event give originators something larger conferences usually don't, Bass said. They put originators in front of practitioners they otherwise see only on screens.
"You're not in a room with 1,000 people. You're in these small rooms where you're able to ask questions, where you're able to see real results," Bass said. "You're able to exchange information with people because the environment is smaller."
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