LEVEL THE PL AYING FIELD
MORTGAGE BROKERS AIME TO
LEVEL THE PLAYING FIELD
BY: JIM MORRISON
IN A white-hot real estate market with low and declining
mortgage interest rates, everyone in the mortgage business
was making money and big wholesale lenders with retail
divisions could afford to ignore mortgage brokers. But when
markets cooled and rates started heading north in 2017,
mortgage brokers united. Shortly after, the Association of
Independent Mortgage Experts (AIME) was born and things
started to change. AIME gave brokers a voice for the first time,
and now, in a market that is more than 70 percent purchase, big
wholesale lenders are listening.
President of New Jersey-based Garden State Home Loans,
fired the shot heard around the mortgage world, beginning the
broker revolution in 2017. Like many mortgage brokers, he found
out that wholesalers he had long worked with and trusted were
going around him and his loan originators, instead using their
own retail divisions to refinance the same clients he’d brought to
them. He actually confronted them about the practice, but after
they wouldn’t play nice, Casa started a BRAWL.
The Brokers Rallying Against Whole-tail Lenders (BRAWL)
movement immediately got a lot of attention and traction.
As brokers in increasingly high numbers united behind the
AIME Founder and Chairman Anthony Casa, who is also
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