Ideal Mortgage Bankers, Ltd. - Wholesale - FHA

In a press release issued a short while ago, Ideal Mortgage Bankers announced they were exiting the wholesale lending business. "The Company will accept submissions until Thursday July 31, 2008 and will honor all commitments, and close its wholesale pipeline in the normal course of business."

"Our core competency has historically been as a direct-to consumer retail lender, which is validated by the enormous success over the last two years of Lend America our rapidly growing retail platform. With the new housing bill on the horizon, and the momentum that Lend America continues to demonstrate, we have made a strategic decision to refocus 100% of the Company's energy and resources on building on the success of our retail platform."

Chief Business Strategist Michael Ashley told us all internal operations staff have been "redeployed" to Retail. About 85 account executives nationally were affected.

"Lend America, the Company's direct-to-consumer FHA retail platform, generated approximately 85% of the Company's FHA production volume, compared to only 15% by the wholesale business."

Ideal Mortgage Bankers, Ltd. (Melville, NY) is a wholesale operation dealing exclusively with FHA brokers or those non-approved but licensed in their states who may do FHA through Ideal on a referral basis, subject to HUD & RESPA restrictions. Monthly originations for the NY lender in 2006 averaged $49.8 million according to AllMortgageDetail.com. Based on the above statement, that could put monthly wholesale volume around $7.47 million on average. They also have a branch office in Brooklyn, NY according to CityTownInfo.com.

In addition to their wholesale operation, Ideal Mortgage Bankers, Ltd. has a (much larger) retail unit operating under the DBA Lend America. Additional DBA's include Consumer First and Lending Key, per information on the State of New York's Banking Department web site.

Previously, we'd received tips that Ideal Mortgage Bankers had discontinued purchase business on 2008-07-11:

"Ideal has just cutoff accepting Purchase app's and loans that are less than a $100k loan amount."

"Refi's that are 100k+ are the only thing you can send us now."

"They are only allowing a par rate, no YSP, low score FHA with tight restrictions, loan amt. over 100k only and no purchases."

We also received a copy of an AE's email to brokers:

"Over the past 2 weeks and since the announcement of us going down to 500 scores... that kind of explosive uptick in apps across the board with over 100 AE's would create a nightmare situation for the inside staff. If we didn't do something to slow it down some, our turn time and overall service levels to you would be horrendous...

We have been working with HUD for over 6 months to obtain our Ginnie Mae issuance so that we could have a portfolio program like this to bring to our brokers. Now that it is in place, hopefully it will only get better from here on out and we can bring back some of the things we have cut back on... soon."

See the most recent Forum Discussion on this company. As always, please contact us if you can provide additional detail. Your comments are welcome.

Ideal Mortgage Bankers, Ltd. of Melville NY is not to be confused with Ideal Mortgage of Jefferson City, TN.