Mortgage Loan Origination

The Complete Loan Officer

From NMLS Licensing to Closing — the Professional Guide to Mortgage Lending

A practitioner's textbook on residential mortgage origination: the licensing that lets you do the work, the arithmetic that decides every file, the programs and guidelines that determine who gets approved, the law that governs every disclosure and every referral, the markets that set your rate before you wake up, and the business you are building while you do all of it.

Published by DataField.Dev

Released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-SA 4.0). You may share and adapt this material, including commercially, provided you give appropriate credit and license derivative works under the same terms.

A necessary caution. This book teaches the structure of American residential mortgage lending. It is not legal, tax, or investment advice, and it is not a substitute for your compliance department, your regulator, the current agency guides, or counsel.

Mortgage lending runs on figures that are revised on a schedule — conforming and FHA loan limits, mortgage insurance factors, funding fee schedules, price adjustment grids, assistance programs. Every specific number in a worked example here is illustrative and labeled as such. Verify current values at the source before you quote anything to a borrower.

Every borrower, property, document, rate sheet, and loan file in this book is constructed for teaching. Any resemblance to an actual borrower or transaction is coincidental.