One question
You pay yourself 200 basis points. How many do you keep?
Your comp rate is not your income. After the rent, the processor, the technology and everything else you cover, what is left on your own book is a much smaller number. Most owners have never worked it out.
Your own book, not the whole company. And what you kept means after rent, staff, technology, licensing, marketing, all of it. Not your commission. What landed in your account.
Every number on this page is editable on the next tab, including ours. Put your real P&L in and see whether the gap survives.
Your production
Your P&L, line by line.
If you run a team, read the dollars rather than the basis points. Basis points on total volume get diluted by production you do not personally write, which makes a bigger shop look worse than a solo one. That is a quirk of the denominator, not of the offer.
This opens with a real broker-owner P&L so you can see the shape of it. Replace every number with yours.
Production
What it costs to keep the lights on
Tap any line we cover to switch it off.
Teal means the line leaves your P&L, either because corporate carries it or because it is passed to the borrower. Grey means it stays with you.
Two of these stay with you on purpose. You still choose and pay your own sales support, and you still cover your space, phone and utilities. Anything you do keep can be run through payroll pre tax, which is not modeled here and makes those dollars go further than they do today.
| Line item | Your cost | Who pays |
|---|---|---|
| Overhead that leaves your P&L |
Our side
Set these to your real offer.
Defaults are carried over from the loan officer model. Branch managers set their own override between 15 and 25 basis points. It applies to your personal production as well as your team's, and it sits outside your originators' comp rather than coming out of it.
What you take home today
- Your own origination splits
- Company net income
- Take-home
What you take home with us
- Your own production
- Override, your production and theirs
- Overhead you still carry
- Take-home
The part that fixes recruiting
What your originators are actually netting.
Your own raise is not what keeps a team together. Theirs is.
| Your team | Today | With us |
|---|
Where the money actually went
Your gross, spent down.
| Stage | Dollars | Basis points |
|---|
The detail
Everything behind the number.
You give up some control to gain security
We are a mortgage company inside a bank. That is the whole trade, and it cuts both ways. A loan officer changing companies gives up a comp plan. An owner gives up more than that, and we are not going to pretend otherwise.
- You stop being the one who decides. Not the equity. Be honest with yourself about what a shop your size would actually fetch on the open market, because for most brokers the answer is close to nothing and there is no sale to give up. What you really hand over is the final say. After twenty years of having it, that is not nothing.
- You stop shopping forty lenders. No more hunting the best price on every file. For most owners that time savings is the point. If your model is built on out-pricing everyone through aggressive shopping, look hard at this one.
- You work inside bank guidelines. Credit policy, marketing review, and how you run your business all sit inside a regulated institution now. It is slower in places than doing whatever you decided on a Tuesday. It is also why the balance sheet, the products, the fifty state footprint and the benefits exist at all. You do not get the second list without the first.
- Your lease does not disappear. If you signed a personal guarantee, it follows you. We should look at the remaining term together before you make any decision, not after.
- Some of your people may not come. We have not turned anyone away. But a move is a move, and some originators will decide to stay where they are. Model your team honestly on the previous tab rather than assuming the whole roster travels on day one.
- You still pay for support and space. Sales support is yours, and so is rent, phone, utilities and maintenance. Corporate carries processing, marketing, technology, benefits and licensing, but not those two. Put your real figures in on the previous tab rather than assuming they vanish.
- Weekly coaching with accountability. To some owners that is the best part. To an owner who has answered to nobody for twenty years, it is a real adjustment. It is not optional.
What leaves your P&L
These are not discounts. They are expenses you stop having. The default numbers on the previous tab come from a real broker-owner P&L on eighty million in volume across 200 units.
| Line item | That P&L | With us |
|---|---|---|
| Processing and ops payroll | $125,000 | $0 |
| Marketing, CRM, social | $70,000 | $0 |
| Technology, LOS, pricing engine | $48,000 | $0 |
| Credit reports and verifications | $43,000 | passed to the borrower |
| Retirement plan and admin | $39,000 | $0 |
| Licensing, compliance, broker packages | $9,000 | all 50, day one |
No more completing broker packages. No more recertification. One system, done one way, instead of going in and out of six. We are bank backed, so you can lend and recruit in all fifty states immediately.
If you like your processor and want to keep her, we can talk about bringing her with you. We would cover her salary.
Two things stay yours, and we would rather say so up front. Sales support is still on you, so if you want an assistant you pay for the assistant. Rent, phone, utilities and maintenance on your own space are also still yours. Everything you keep can run through payroll pre tax.
Why net basis points is the only number that matters
Gross is what you negotiate. Net is what you live on. The P&L behind this tool captured under 200 basis points across the year and the owner kept barely two.
Roughly $1.6 million of revenue. Net income under $15,000.
One early payoff penalty that year cost more than $17,000. That single event was more than the entire bottom line. At a margin that thin there is no cushion, which is the part most owners feel long before they can name it.
A broker owner writing twenty million of his own production, paying himself two hundred or better on paper, keeps eighty to ninety basis points once every expense he covers comes out. That is a good owner having a good year.
The long standing shop above, at eighty million with a full team, kept under sixty. More volume, more staff, more overhead, less money. Scale does not fix this. Past a certain point it makes it worse, because overhead grows faster than margin does.
There is a second cost that never shows up on a profit and loss statement. A one person shop writes around twenty six million a year. Put three or four originators in the building and the owner is down to under ten million of his own. Every hat you pick up comes straight out of your own production, and nobody ever sends you an invoice for it.
How this is built
- Take-home today is your own origination splits plus company net income
- Take-home with us is your own production at our rate, plus your override on every loan the branch writes including your own, less any overhead you still carry
- Our model runs at your stated rate less a flat fee per loan, with the reduced fee under the tier
- Average loan size drives the per loan fee, so a book of small files carries proportionally more fee
- Net basis points divides your total take-home by your total company volume, the same way on both sides. It is not the same as the comp rate on a single loan, which runs far higher
- The override runs 15 to 25 basis points, set by you, and does not reduce what your originators are paid
Using an average loan size rather than your individual files means jumbo caps and outliers are not modeled. Put your real distribution in front of us and we will run it properly.
The part not on this page
You give up some control to gain security.
We are a mortgage company inside a bank. You will not run this the way you ran your own shop, and some weeks you will feel that. What you get back is every hat that was never yours to wear. Compliance. Technology. Marketing. Product research at ten at night. Recertification season.
One broker owner ran his own shop for over twenty years. He was losing his better, more independent loan officers to flat fee comp he could no longer compete with, and that made recruiting almost impossible. His first quarter with us ran thirty six thousand dollars higher on production he had already closed.
His words: he has his time back, his energy back, better profitability, and he is having fun again.