Mortgage loan officers are renewing their origination license for 2025 at a comparable pace to last year, contradicting social media chatter within the home lending community about fewer LOs planning to stay onboard for the year ahead.
As of Jan. 1, 158,152 individuals requested to renew their MLO license, data provided by the Conference of State Bank Supervisors, which oversees the Nationwide Multistate Licensing System, shows.
Regarding state license renewals, there have been 568,786 since the beginning of January, CSBS data reveals.
Last year, 160,893 individuals requested renewals of their MLO license. The cut off to renew a license is at the end of February, per CSBS, so this year's registration numbers could match or top numbers from 2024.
Numerous mortgage professionals, retail loan officers and mortgage brokers, shared posts on LinkedIn and TikTok in early January claiming that mortgage loan originators are opting to originate in the new year at a much smaller rate.
Stakeholders pointed to a challenging origination environment as the reason for the decline and highlighted the importance of being proactive in a climate
The LO renewal numbers provided by CSBS "validates the fact that everybody expects 2025 to be a repeat of 2024," said Paul Hindman, industry consultant and an active voice on LinkedIn.
"Maybe not in the next minute or two, but there is a chance that rates will eventually do what all the experts said they were going to do and drop, and so that solidifies somebody going ahead and renewing their license," he added.
While the year-over-year difference in registrations between this year and last is negligible, license renewals have declined compared to the boom years prior to that.
In 2020, 143,082 individual MLOs renewed their licenses, and the following year saw a 16% increase, with 166,759 MLOs applying for licenses to originate.
However, license renewals as of Jan. 1, 2025, have dropped 18% from the 2022 peak.
Despite uncertainty around how the economy will fare
In an interview with National Mortgage News, Barry Habib, the founder and chief executive of MBS Highway, said he
"I believe that there will be more cuts to come in 2025. Perhaps somewhere between 75 to 125 basis points," he said. "That should help the 10-year Treasury yield to decline to somewhere around 3.6%."
"I think we'll see rates in the five and three quarter or five and seven eighths range. I could always be wrong, but I think this is a reasonable baseline with some variance depending on future news."
