A broker arranges credit, and a lender funds it
A mortgage broker arranges a loan; a lender makes it. That is the legal shape of what we do. Under Regulation Z, a loan originator is a person who takes an application, offers, arranges or negotiates a loan for someone else, and a mortgage broker is a loan originator who is not an employee of the lender. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau puts it more plainly: a lender makes direct loans, and a broker does not lend money. We have no loans of our own to sell. California Mortgage Solutions is a corporation licensed as a real estate broker by the California Department of Real Estate, and the company holds the mortgage loan originator endorsement the Department adds to that license, registered with the Nationwide Multistate Licensing System. The numbers are in the footer of every page, and the licensing page explains what each one is and where to check it. A license is the floor: it says we are allowed to do this work.
A brokerage works with a panel of lenders, each with its own guidelines
Your file goes to a panel of lenders, not to one. Each lender on it writes its own guidelines: which income it counts, which credit it accepts, which properties it lends on, and how it treats what makes a file unusual. Lenders draw their lines in different places: the self-employed income one lender reads one way and the next another, the condo project one has approved and another will not touch, the recent job change one shrugs at and one does not. So a file that one lender declines can fit another, because the second lender reads it under different rules. A bank's loan officer can offer you that bank's loans; a broker has none of its own and can take the same file, and the documents you already gathered, to another lender on its panel. Some files have no lender today, and some need months of work before one will take them.
Your loan officer reads the file against lenders' guidelines
A file is matched to a lender by reading it against the lenders' guidelines, and that reading is your loan officer's work. Four things sort it. How your income is earned and documented: a salary, self-employment, rent, retirement income, or bank deposits. Your credit. The property: a house, a condominium, a rental, land, or a home that needs work. And timing: when the money has to be there, and whether something recent in the file needs a lender that is relaxed about it. Against those four, each lender's guidelines say yes, no or not yet, and the ones that say yes are the ones your file can go to. The program pages on this site describe what each kind of lender weighs: an FHA lender, a conventional lender, a jumbo lender writing its own rules above the county's limit, a DSCR lender reading rent rather than tax returns. Nothing in the file is changed to make it fit. Where no lender on the panel fits it yet, your loan officer says what would have to change.
This site publishes no rate, and shopping a loan does not need one. A rate is quoted to a file, by a lender, on a day. It depends on the program, the loan amount, the property, your credit, the down payment and the market when it is quoted. A rate printed on a website is none of those things. It is an advertisement, and federal rules require an advertised rate to carry further terms this site cannot state truthfully for every reader. Shopping, here, is reading one file against each lender's guidelines and placing it with the lender whose rules fit it. The Loan Estimate is the form that lender then gives you: the CFPB requires every lender to use it in the same layout, and it states the rate, the payment, the closing costs, and whether anything can change later. Your loan officer says which lender the recommendation rests on, and why.
What you get back: a recommendation, its reason, and your decision
What you get back is what we found: which lenders' guidelines your file fits, which one your loan officer recommends and why, and what the choice between them trades off. A file can fit more than one lender, and the differences between them are real: one lender's guidelines against another's, one that closes on your timeline against one that does not. You hear those trade-offs, and the decision stays yours. The person giving you that answer is the person who took your application. The loan officer who takes it keeps working on it through underwriting: the appraisal, the title work and the conditions an underwriter adds, until the loan funds. Your calls go to that loan officer. If you are buying, this is also where a pre-qualification letter can be written, naming the program the recommendation rests on and the amount the file supports. And when what we found is that no lender on the panel fits the file yet, you get that too, with the reason and what would have to change.
When a bank is the better answer
Sometimes a bank is the right call. A straightforward file, salaried income, strong credit, a conventional loan under the county's conforming limit, at a bank you already keep your accounts with, can be a good fit there. The difference a broker makes does not show up on the straightforward files. It shows up where lenders draw their lines in different places, and a file like that sits inside every lender's lines. Whichever you choose, get the terms in writing, read the Loan Estimate line by line, and ask what in the file could change the answer later. A decline is one lender's reading of one snapshot of the file. If that is what you hear, the same file and the same documents can come to us.
