TD Bank was the top volume gainer among residential lenders in the second quarter but barely made the top 50 volume ranking in the first half of the year. Moral of story: the bigger you are, the harder it is to post huge percentage gains.

Mortgage brokers accounted for a record 14.8% of single-family business in the agency MBS market during the second quarter. Credit trends suggest sellers may have focused on the low-hanging fruit as production volume ramped up significantly.

Low revenues, high expenses and trend lines moving in the wrong direction are causing large bank-owned mortgage companies to underperform compared to independent mortgage banks in the retail space, according to a report by Stratmor Group.

Broker originations accounted for a growing share of first-quarter production in all three major mortgage products. United Wholesale accounted for the channel's growth.

A bird's-eye view suggests retail originations had higher credit scores and lower DTI ratios than loans produced by correspondents and brokers. But third-party originators generated lower-risk loans at the agency level.

The wholesale-broker channel appears to be gaining ground in the tightly competitive primary market in agency conforming mortgages. A new Inside Mortgage Trends analysis reveals that broker originations accounted for 12.5% of single-family loans pooled in agency mortgage-backed securities during the first quarter of 2019. That represented a substantial leap of 1.3 percentage points from the broker share of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and Ginnie Mae ... [Includes two data charts.]

Retail mortgage lending remained the dominant originations channel in 2018, but it lost some luster to third-party production channels. [Includes two data charts]

Loans originated on retail production platforms and sold to Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and Ginnie Mae during the fourth quarter tended to have stronger credit characteristics than those generated by third-party originators. [Includes two data charts]