The stakes are rising. MBA forecasts that total single-family mortgage origination volume will reach $2.2 trillion in 2026, with purchase originations climbing 7.7 percent to $1.46 trillion and refinance originations increasing 9.2 percent to $737 billion. That headline growth sounds like a rising tide that lifts all boats, but the competitive reality is more complicated. According to a HousingWire report on Community Home Lenders of America data, independent mortgage banks originated 84.1 percent of all U.S. single-family mortgages in a recent year. The market is not just growing, it is concentrating. Lenders that rely on national macro trends to anchor their internal targets, rather than scrutinizing who is winning at the county and zip-code level, are making plans against a market that does not quite exist.
The good news is that the data to do this right is available. The challenge is knowing which data actually supports granular, actionable target-setting, and which only tells you what already happened at 30,000 feet.
Why National Forecasts Are a Starting Point, Not a Strategy
Macro volume projections set context. They do not tell an individual lender what share of a local market it currently holds, how that share has shifted over the past four quarters, or which loan officers at competing institutions are responsible for a spike in a particular county. One senior lending executive told National Mortgage Professional: “You’ve still got more or less the same number of lenders competing for a 50 percent smaller pie, so those competitive pressures have absolutely intensified.” That pressure does not distribute evenly. It concentrates in specific geographies, product types, and originator relationships.
Per NCRC analysis, mortgage companies now hold 69.8 percent of the top 50 home-purchase market share, up from 62.1 percent in 2020, while banks have declined to 29.5 percent. Shifts of that magnitude happen loan by loan, originator by originator, county by county. A lender that sets a statewide production target based only on MBA forecast percentages has no visibility into whether it is gaining or losing ground at the market level where it actually operates.
Production targets grounded in observed marketshare data answer a different, better set of questions: What is our current share in this county? Which competitor gained share here last quarter, and who are their active loan officers? Where is there demonstrable whitespace in a neighboring market worth allocating resources toward? Those are the questions that separate planning from guessing.
How Recorded Transaction Data Reveals the Real Competitive Map
The most direct way to measure marketshare in mortgage lending is through recorded deed and mortgage documents. Every closed loan leaves a paper trail at the registry of deeds, and that trail identifies the lender, the origination amount, the loan type, and the date. Aggregated across a market and compared over time, that record tells you exactly who is originating what, where, and at what pace.
HousingWire coverage notes that origination costs remain elevated and the pull-through of loan closings to applications has declined over the past four years, pushing many lenders to look for efficiency gains wherever they can find them. In that environment, allocating capacity correctly matters more than it did when volume was abundant. Lenders can no longer afford to staff up in markets where their natural share has eroded, or ignore markets where competitors have let attention drift.
The Warren Group collects and maintains New England deed and mortgage data directly, without routing through a national intermediary. That distinction matters for lenders operating in Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont, because the data reflects actual recorded transactions with coverage and timeliness that a passthrough aggregator often cannot match. The dataset captures transaction history back to 2010, including sale price, mortgage amount, loan type, and interest rate, giving planning teams the longitudinal view they need to understand market movement, not just a point-in-time snapshot.
TWG offers two connected tools built specifically for this kind of competitive intelligence: LO/Lender Marketshare for tracking lending activity at the market level, and the LO Module for following individual loan officer production down to the transaction. Used together, they turn a general sense of “the market is competitive” into a specific answer about which originators, in which counties, are actually driving that competition.
Connecting NMLS Activity Data to Marketshare Gaps
Deed and mortgage data tells you what closed. NMLS activity data tells you who closed it, and how that person’s production is trending. For competitive target-setting, the two together are considerably more powerful than either alone.
TWG’s LO/Lender Marketshare product, built directly on New England NMLS Enhanced transaction data, produces market-share reporting at the lender and loan-officer level. A production manager can use this to answer questions that are otherwise nearly impossible to answer cleanly: In which counties did our closest competitors gain share last quarter? Which individual originators are driving that growth? Are there LOs at competitor institutions with strong local production histories who would represent a material opportunity for recruiting?
That last question is increasingly common. Some lenders are choosing to pursue mergers or acquisitions to reach scale rather than build volume organically, and originator recruiting is the lower-risk version of that same instinct: acquiring production capacity directly rather than an entire institution. Acquiring volume through strategic originator recruiting works best when the decision is driven by data on who is actually producing in a target geography, not by informal intelligence or guesswork.
The LO Module extends this further by tracking individual loan officer and lender activity down to the specific mortgage, with loan officer name and NMLS ID attached to each transaction. Over more than a decade of historical records, that level of detail supports trend analysis, territory planning, and realistic goal-setting that accounts for what is genuinely achievable in a given market at a given time.
Turning Data Into a Planning Discipline
The practical application is straightforward. Before a lender finalizes quarterly or annual production targets for a specific territory, the planning team should know at minimum: the total origination volume in that territory over the prior four quarters, its current share of that volume broken out by loan type, which competitors hold meaningful share and whether that share is growing or eroding, and which loan officers are responsible for the most active origination relationships.
That baseline lets teams anchor targets to observable market conditions rather than to top-down percentage-growth ambitions. It also enables more honest conversations about what incremental share gain would actually require in terms of originator capacity, product competitiveness, and geographic focus.
New England lenders are particularly well-positioned to build this discipline using TWG’s directly maintained datasets. The combination of deed and mortgage recording data, New England NMLS Enhanced data, LO Module transaction detail, and LO/Lender Marketshare reporting gives a planning team all the inputs it needs in a consistent, well-maintained schema, collected by the same organization that has tracked New England real estate transactions for decades.
How The Warren Group Can Help
TWG‘s LO/Lender Marketshare product and LO Module are purpose-built for the kind of competitive intelligence that supports credible production planning. Built on New England NMLS Enhanced data that TWG collects and maintains directly, with over ten years of historical depth, these products let lenders and their production leadership see the market as it actually is: originator by originator, county by county, quarter by quarter. Pair that with TWG’s New England deed and mortgage recording data and you have a closed-loop view from recorded transaction to the individual originator who drove it.
For lenders that operate in New England, this regional precision is not a compromise relative to a national feed. It is an advantage. The data is fresher, the coverage is more complete, and the sourcing is direct.
Conclusion
Marketshare data does not make target-setting easy. What it does is make the targets honest. In a market where competition is intensifying, production profitability is sensitive, and every basis point of share matters, that honesty is the difference between a plan built on evidence and one built on optimism. Lenders that build competitive intelligence into their planning cycle, using granular recorded data and NMLS activity tracking at the originator level, will consistently set more achievable targets and identify growth opportunities before their competitors do.
To learn more about how The Warren Group’s LO/Lender Marketshare, LO Module, and New England deed and mortgage data can support your production planning process, contact our team.
Recent Comments