More mortgage loan originators are holding multiple state licenses as changes in state laws make it easier for companies to operate in more than one state, according to the Conference of State Bank Supervisors’s report on state-licensed and federally register mortgage entities in the Nationwide Mortgage Licensing System (NMLS).
Originators logged a 22% increase in the total number of state licenses held in the first quarter of 2013 from the year before. While three-quarters of MLOs are licensed in just one state, the number of originators holding more than 10 licenses increased 52%, according to the NMLS Federal Registry report, released Tuesday.
The number of mortgage loan originators grew 7% to 112,970 in the first quarter on an annual basis, while the number of total licenses held grew to 252,555, the report said.
While the total number of companies licensed through NMLS actually declined slightly by 20 basis points to 15,842 from the first quarter of 2012, the number of licenses held by those companies increased 3.5% to 32,797.
“When looking at the data from a macro-level, one sees that the total number of state-licensed companies declined slightly over the last year, but the number of licenses held by these companies increased,” said Bill Matthews, CSBS Executive Vice President and President of the State Regulatory Registry LLC (SRR), the subsidiary of CSBS that operates NMLS on behalf of state regulators. “This is due, in part, to changes in state laws and a nationwide system such as NMLS that makes it easier for companies and mortgage loan originators to operate in multiple states.”
Nearly nine in ten (87%) of institutions have MLOs registered in at least one state, but just ten have registered MLOs in 30 or more states. About 81% of companies hold a license in just one state.
Access the NMLS 2013 First Quarter report on state-licensed mortgage entities.
Written by Alyssa Gerace
