In a wholesale mortgage market dominated by giants, Arizona-based lender The Loan Store (TLS) has found a way to grow quickly by hiring a team of “samurai” account executives and underwriters from across the industry and picking up loans that others would deny.
In the first nine months of 2025, the company doubled its origination volume to $8.2 billion compared to the same period in 2024, ranking as the fourth-largest U.S. wholesale lender.
That figure is still a fraction of what United Wholesale Mortgage ($112 billion) and Rocket Mortgage ($25 billion) produced, but only a few billion below Pennymac ($14 billion). Its production translates into a 3.1% market share, according to Inside Mortgage Finance.
Its growth has been driven by well-known industry veterans. TLS’s strategy is rooted in the prior experience of its leadership team — including CEO Phil Shoemaker, president Jason Lee and chief revenue officer William Pendleton — at companies such as Caliber Home Loans, which was sold to the parent of Newrez for $1.675 billion in 2021.
“Caliber made us fall in love with mortgage banking. It feels like when you create a great culture of people that are aligned, have a clear direction and guidance from the leadership team, you can do special things,” Pendleton said in an interview with HousingWire. “When we lost that alignment at the top, that’s when things started to shift.”
Rising from the ashes
Shoemaker and Pendleton later joined Homepoint, backed by Stone Point Capital. Homepoint went public during the post-pandemic low-rate boom and became the third-largest wholesale lender in the country, but it ultimately collapsed after private equity investors pulled back amid difficulties gaining share once the cycle turned.
Homepoint’s origination business was sold to The Loan Store in April 2023. TLS’s main investment group is led by the former CEO of First Magnus, where Shoemaker worked for a decade. About 30 Homepoint employees also bought TLS’s equity early on, while roughly 175 employees left Homepoint to join TLS, Pendleton said.
“When we got to Homepoint in 2018, they were getting out of retail,” Pendleton said. “The attractive part about Homepoint was that they did have a lot of capital; we knew they had an appetite to grow.”
Origination volume at Homepoint grew to $6 billion a month via its broker partners at its peak — but not everything went smoothly. That experience helped the leadership team identify what works, and what doesn’t, as the group built TLS’s business.
A team of ‘samurai’ AEs
While the COVID-19 pandemic fueled much of Homepoint’s growth, another key factor was heavy investment in top-tier account executives (AEs), whom Pendleton calls “samurais.”
That approach has also been central to TLS’s strategy. These AEs can usually tell within the first few loans whether a loan officer is a good fit for the experience TLS provides. The company employs about 30 AEs, compared to hundreds at some competitors.
“Sometimes we take a little longer than the big guys, because they’ve had a 30-year advantage in technology and process,” Pendleton said. “We’re pretty quick — when you’re talking about getting an initial approval, we’re down to 24 hours on the easiest loans. Those guys will turn it in two hours.”
The company inherited roughly 10,000 approved brokers from Homepoint and has since expanded the network to 13,000.
“We are still growing the base and we don’t even have the focus that we did,” Pendleton said. “We feel that the wholesale space is growing — it’s probably bigger than most people understand. We still see the transition of retail LOs to wholesale, and that’s going to continue, if not accelerate.”
Preparing for higher volume
Underwriting is another area where TLS is investing heavily. Shoemaker himself has been underwriting loans, reaching daily records and challenging team members to beat his production — with bonuses attached, Pendleton said.
In 2026, TLS plans to roll out a new underwriting technology platform designed to boost productivity by directing users to the most critical issues without unnecessary distractions.
“For the first two years, we were developing technology around every aspect of our business that would get loans in the door,” Pendleton said. “Now it’s time to focus more on customer experience and supporting our operations teams with better technology and more efficient process flow.”
TLS uses Encompass TPO Connect and builds around the platform — but cautiously. One of Homepoint’s pain points, as HousingWire previously reported, was its inability to fully resolve technical challenges with a semi-customized loan origination system. While brokers liked the platform, it became difficult to layer in additional products.
“You can overcomplicate technology,” Pendleton said. “You have to be very careful as to how you code on top of these platforms. You’d have the best possible platform, but over time, it goes from being nimble to being cumbersome and slow to change.”
Picking the exceptions
TLS’s underwriting investment is critical because its strategy goes beyond vanilla Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac loans. Nonqualified mortgages (non-QMs) are a major focus. TLS aims to close $1 billion per month in non-QM volume and is currently approaching $400 million.
The company is hiring underwriters with non-QM expertise while also planning to develop talent internally. Pendleton brings deep experience in the space, having helped lead Caliber Home Loans’ first non-prime securitization — the COLT 2016-1 transaction — which marked the first rated, nonprime, private-label securitization after the financial crisis.
That expertise has helped TLS cultivate strong investor relationships. The company is now the largest delivery partner for three major non-QM investors, enabling it to pursue exceptions — which can represent up to 40% of non-QM loans.
“While some investors will say these loans are risky, the ones TLS is working with will try to assess borrowers’ ability to repay,” Pendleton said.
Building a resilient business
While TLS is growing aggressively on pricing, it’s not chasing market share for its own sake. The company’s goal is not to become a $100 billion lender but to remain profitable and sustainable across cycles — a different outcome than Caliber’s or Homepoint’s.
“The reward of scale is efficiency and profitability,” Pendleton said. “Then you can retain earnings, and that’s the only way we’re not going to go and take institutional capital. You can only control culture long term if you control the capital.”
Unlike Homepoint, TLS does not plan to pursue an initial public offering.
“Public markets are not good for the cyclical nature of mortgage – some folks make it work,” Pendleton said. “If you’re competing with the big guys and they see your cost structure is higher than theirs, then they can attack your vulnerabilities. Also, it cost a million dollars for Homepoint to maintain its public status and we were in a really challenging market.”