How Does Your Lender Rate on the Implode-O-Meter?

Before you settle on a new lender, you may want to check the Mortgage Lender Implode-O-Meter at ml-implode.com. The site proclaims a mission of transparency, education, and accountability for the mortgage industry. The site was started in January 2007 by blogger Aaron Krowne who realized that the housing market was critical to the success of the US economy and grew frustrated by the lack of coverage of the sub prime housing crisis by the mainstream media. Starting with a single page with only 6 lenders listed, ml-implode.com soon had dozens of lenders listed and began picking up national media coverage from Bloomberg and CNN. It is now consdered and authority on the current state of the mortgage crisis in the US and received over 100,000 visitors a day.

The site breaks down the large mortgage companies into 3 categories.

• Imploded Lenders: Lender may be operating in some capacity but has possibly filed for bankruptcy or halted major operations. Can include prime, subprime, retail, or wholesale lenders.
• Ailing Lenders: Lender is scaling back operations or have recently been in manifest financial, legal, or operational distress. Most of the industry currently falls into this cateogory so Aaron reserves this list for the most glaring cases.
• Non-Imploded Lenders: Unfortunately, this area seems to include only sponsored listings so you may want to check another independent source before taking this portion at face value.

Although it is a community centric forum, the editorial staff requires that 2 out of 3 of the following criteria be met before a company makes it to the “implosion” or “ailing” list:

• At least $20 million/month in origination volume (any stage of origination)
• At least 3 states of origination
• At least 50 employees

Over all the site has some great information and is organized in a consistent manner. I highly reccomend giving it a look or even subscribing to the feed if you want to stay up to speed on the latest mortgage implosions.