The real lender list lives on a legal pad at a kids' swim meet

Sat next to a man in a folding chair at a kids' swim meet last spring. He had a legal pad on his knee with columns of lender names and little marks next to them, and he was updating it between heats, which is a strange thing to do at a pool.

He's a mortgage broker. Mostly investor loans now. I asked what the pad was and he said it's who's actually funding this month. He has a CRM with a couple hundred lenders in it and he said the CRM tells you who's approved and the pad tells you who's answering the phone. Two of his bridge lenders had pulled back on new originations in the spring and he found out from another broker before he found out from the lender.

He said his conventional business is roughly half of what it was a few years ago and he's stopped expecting it back. Every bit of the growth is investors. Flips, small rental portfolios, a couple of ground-up guys who can't get a bank to look at them. He said the fun part is that nobody's terms are the same anymore, so a borrower calling around on their own gets four quotes that can't be compared.

I've done a lot of due diligence on sponsors and funds and I've never once thought about diligencing the person who sources the debt. Watching a guy maintain a live list of who's real, on paper, while his daughter swam the 50 free, changed that.