MBA Chart of the Week: IMB Total Production Expense
Source: MBA’s Annual Mortgage Bankers Performance Report
In 2025, the simple average pre-tax net production income for the 292 independent mortgage banks (IMBs) and mortgage subsidiaries of chartered banks included in MBA’s Annual Mortgage Bankers Performance Report (APR) was 21 basis points. Companies in the top 20% of net production income averaged 115 basis points in net production income, while those in the bottom 20% reported an average loss of 64 basis points.
For this week’s Chart of the Week, we compare total loan production expense for the companies in the top 20% for net production income (in basis points) versus the companies in the bottom 20% over the past eighteen years. Total loan production expenses include commissions, compensation, occupancy, equipment, and other production expenses, as well as corporate allocations. The companies in the top 20% cohort averaged $10,074 in total per loan production expense in 2025, while the companies in the bottom 20% cohort averaged $12,603 per loan. This represents a difference of $2,529 per loan between these two cohorts.
From 2008 through 2019, the difference in total per loan production expense between these two cohorts averaged $941 per loan. From 2020 through 2025, the difference in total production expense widened to an average of $2,626 per loan, peaking in 2023 when the difference between these two cohorts was almost $5,000 per loan. Containing origination costs is increasingly a differentiator between top and bottom performers of profitability.
For further insight and discussion, join MBA’s Closing the Performance Gap webinar on May 13, free registration for MBA members.
Note: Pre-tax net production income is defined as total revenues (fee income, secondary marketing income, value of capitalized servicing/servicing released premiums at origination and net warehouse spread) minus fully-loaded production costs (sales, fulfillment, production support and corporate costs), divided by production volume in dollars ($), multiplied by 10,000 for basis points, and divided by loan production count for dollars per loan.
– Jenny Masoud (jmasoud@mba.org); Marina Walsh, CMB (mwalsh@mba.org)
