A named person, not a queue
One originator who owns the file, with a direct line, and a named colleague who covers when they are out. Most of what agents describe as “a bad lender” is really a file with nobody’s name on it.
Floor one
What a lender owes an agent
The page a lender usually puts here promises agents faster approvals, priority access and — implied but rarely written down — something in return for sending clients over. Two of those are outside a lender’s control and the third is illegal. So this page is about the parts that are neither.
Storey Home Lending is a demonstration. It takes no applications, issues no pre-approvals and has no relationships to offer — the material below is what the page would say if it did.
Floor two
Section 8, and why the quiet arrangement is the risky one
Section 8 of the Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act is short and blunt. No person may give, and no person may accept, any fee, kickback or thing of value pursuant to an agreement or understanding that business incident to a federally related mortgage loan will be referred to any person. It also forbids splitting a charge for settlement services with anyone who did not actually earn part of it.
The two details that matter most are easy to miss. The first is that it bindsboth sides: an agent who accepts is exposed exactly as the lender who offers is, and the statute carries criminal as well as civil exposure. The second is that “thing of value” is interpreted broadly. It is not limited to cash. Free leads, a paid booth at your event, your listing photography, the rent on a desk in your office at a figure nobody would pay on the open market — all of these have been treated as things of value when what they were really buying was referrals.
There is a reason worth caring about beyond the enforcement risk. A referral fee is paid by the borrower, always, because it comes out of a price they are quoted. It also silently converts a recommendation into a sale: the moment a lender is buying an agent’s introduction, the agent’s recommendation stops being information about the lender and becomes information about the payment. RESPA exists to keep that recommendation worth something.
Which is why an honest version of this page cannot promise you anything for sending clients here, and why the section below is about work rather than incentives. A lender that wants an agent’s business has exactly one legitimate route to it: be markedly better to work with, in ways the agent can observe on a live file.
Floor three
Six things worth more than a referral fee
Every one of these is a behaviour rather than a promise about speed, volume or outcome — which is what makes them checkable on the next file rather than on a landing page.
A pre-approval that means something
Documents actually reviewed, credit actually pulled, and the outstanding conditions written down. A letter that says only “prequalified” is an opinion about a conversation, and everybody in the transaction deserves to know which one they are holding.
Status you did not have to chase
A short update at each real milestone — file submitted, appraisal ordered, appraisal in, conditions cleared — sent without being asked. The alternative is an agent phoning on day eleven to find out whether anything happened on day four.
Bad news early
The single most valuable thing a lender can do for an agent is say “this is not going to work” in week one rather than week four. Nobody enjoys the call, and every alternative is worse for the client, the seller and both sides of the commission.
Straight arithmetic your client can check
A payment your buyer can reproduce, with the mortgage insurance and the tax escrow shown separately rather than folded into a single number. A client who understands the payment does not renegotiate it at the closing table.
Honesty about the calendar
A lender does not control the appraiser or the title company, and an agent who is told a date that depends on both without being told that is being set up. Ranges with the dependency named beat confident numbers that slip.
Floor four
Co-marketing, done in a way that survives an audit
Shared marketing between an agent and a lender is not forbidden. What is forbidden is a payment whose real function is to buy referrals, whatever the invoice says. The test regulators have applied in practice is unglamorous and quite easy to apply to yourself: is each party paying its own proportionate share of the actual cost, and is each receiving proportionate exposure for it? If a lender is on a tenth of a flyer and paying half of it, the other forty per cent is buying something else.
Keep the documentation that proves the answer at the time you make it, not afterwards. What the item cost, how the split was arrived at, what share of the space or the audience each party got. An arrangement that was defensible in year one and drifted by year three is the common failure, and the drift is usually invisible until somebody asks for the invoices.
The other honest form of co-marketing is education, because it is a service actually delivered and its value is obvious to everybody in the room. A lender who will sit in front of your first-time buyers and explain why FHA mortgage insurance usually does not stop, or what the three-day Closing Disclosure window is for, has given your clients something real — and has demonstrated to you, on the spot, how they will talk to a borrower on a live file.
Material you can use from this site
- The nine calculatorsEach link carries its inputs, so what you send is exactly what you saw.
- First-time buyerThe conversation run backwards, from a payment somebody can live with.
- FHA mortgage insuranceThe duration rule printed beside the number, where clients will read it.
- Licensing and disclosuresWhat to verify about any lender, in about ten minutes.
Nothing here is co-branded, gated or tracked. There is no analytics on this site and no lead capture behind any of those links.
Floor five
Introduce yourself (to nobody)
Agent enquiry
The fields a lender would want before an introductory call — and, on this demonstration, a form that validates them and stops.
Validated — and nothing was sent.
No introduction was made, no record was written and nobody will call. There is also nothing being offered in exchange for anything, here or anywhere else on this site.
What is genuinely reusable is the material: send a client acalculator link rather than a rate, and they will see the same numbers you did along with the rule behind them.