Usually, when we talk about financial institutions in our posts, we focus on sellers and/or servicers as we have a clear view from the Agency disclosures. An interesting distinction in this regard is to break down originations between those sourced through a retail channel within the lending institutions and those purchased from other lenders, known as third-party originations (TPOs). We are often asked the question in the case of TPO lending, where only sponsors of the mortgages are reported, who are the originators? This information is not reported in the agency loan-level disclosure. We can supplement this information by examining originators in the HMDA data by observing the fact a TPO (correspondent or broker) loan is often reported twice, one record reported by the originator and another reported by the sponsor. At Recursion, we conducted an exercise by matching the pairs together, and we were able to identify the counterparty pairs for about 50% of the mortgages marked as “purchased”, and also made this revealing data point to our HMDA Analyzer users.
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According to the 2021 HMDA preliminary release, about 2.65 million loans were purchased from other lenders that year, about 18% of all originations. Roughly half of these purchases were made by 10 institutions:

​Mortgage lenders obtain loans through three channels 1) The retail channel through which they originate loans, 2) The wholesale channel through which they purchase loans that are originated by other financial institutions, and 3) the broker channel through which they acquire loans that are originated by the lender through an independent mortgage banker not affiliated with the originating institution. Channels from outside the selling institution are called Third Party Originations or TPO’s. Every month Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac report the selling institution of every loan delivered to them, and the channel by which the loan was obtained. Over the last couple of years there has been a notable rise in the share of the broker channel. This note looks at recent trends and looks for market segments in which these are most pronounced, with an emphasis on the broker channel. Table 1 shows the market shares of sales to the GSE’s by channel.