theLender (Hometown Equity Mortgage) Review 2026: HMDA Data

Which company is theLender

The brand and the legal entity differ. thelender.com describes “a national mortgage lender”, its borrower pages sit at retail.thelender.com and its broker pages at wholesale.thelender.com. The retail About page says: “theLender is the retail division of Hometown Equity Mortgage, LLC (NMLS #133519).” The footer reads “Hometown Equity Mortgage, LLC (NMLS #133519) dba theLender”. The federal loan file knows only the legal name, so a search for “thelender” in HMDA, in the CFPB database or in a court docket finds nothing, and a search for “Hometown Equity Mortgage” finds everything. Many unrelated companies share the name root: the 2025 HMDA filer list holds ten filers with “Hometown” in their names, so check the NMLS number, 133519, before reading a record.

The lender sells through two doors. Retail is for borrowers who apply on the site or by phone. Wholesale is for mortgage brokers, with named products: theNONI (a DSCR loan), nearNONI (DSCR below 1.00), NONI58 (5 to 8 units), theBLANKET (3 to 25 properties) and theSECOND. HMDA does not say how many of the 5,138 loans came through each door, so we cannot tell you what share of its borrowers deal with the retail team. It also sells consumer FHA, VA, USDA and conventional loans: 7,098 of its 2025 originations were conventional, 398 FHA, 23 VA and 21 USDA.

What the federal loan file shows: 2019 to 2025

HMDA obliges lenders to report every application and loan. The table counts loans originated (action taken 1) and applications denied (action taken 3) for LEI 549300RA3E0BUFO7YZ21, tabulated by us from the public loan-level files. “DSCR-type” is the filter we use on the site: one-to-four-unit non-owner-occupied property, business purpose, first lien, closed-end, conventional, 360 months or longer, no debt-to-income ratio reported. It is not a field the lender fills in; see our ranking of DSCR lenders by loans made for the definition.

The company's mix changed. In 2021, 5,246 of 7,580 originations were conventional loans on mostly owner-occupied homes and 2,007 were on investment property. In 2025, 5,444 of 7,540 were on investment property. DSCR-type loans went from 132 in 2019 to a peak of 2,234 in 2022, fell to 1,472 in 2023 when rates peaked and nearly doubled in 2025 (+96.0% on 2024, our arithmetic). Note rates in the table are medians of the rate field on the lender's own loans; they include whatever the broker earned in the rate.

The 2025 DSCR book in detail

Size moves the price. Loans under $150,000 (627 of them) had a median rate of 7.5%; $150,000 to $249,999 (1,516) and $250,000 to $399,999 (1,265) were both 7.25%; $400,000 and up (1,730) were 7.375%. On the median $295,000 loan over 30 years, the gap between the 25th percentile rate (6.875%) and the 75th (7.625%) is $1,937.94 against $2,087.99 a month of principal and interest, $150.05 (our arithmetic). That is the range a borrower is trying to land in.

Only the owner of a loan can tell you whether it carries a prepayment penalty. HMDA has a field for it, but it is filled only for loans covered by Regulation Z (12 CFR 1003.4(a)(22)), and business-purpose credit is exempt from that regulation (12 CFR 1026.3(a)). The field is blank on all 5,138 loans, so the file says nothing about prepayment penalties on this lender's investor loans.

The 43.2% denial figure, and what it is made of

Of 9,044 DSCR-type applications that ended in an origination or a denial, 3,906 were denials: 43.2%. Counting every DSCR-type application, including 118 approved but not accepted, 139 withdrawn and 1 closed for incompleteness, the denied share is 42.0%. Across all lenders the DSCR-type denied share is 23.3%. Among the 36 lenders with 1,000 or more such loans, only LendingOne (60.0%) is higher.

What matters is the reason. HMDA lets a lender list up to four reasons; the first one listed for these 3,906 denials is:

Collateral and credit history, the reasons a reader expects from a DSCR lender, account for under a quarter of the denials. “Credit application incomplete” is the code HMDA gives a lender that denies an application because the information it asked for never arrived, and it is the first reason on 4,755 of the company's 6,755 denials of all products in 2025, as it was on 2,836 of 4,406 in 2024 and 2,969 of 4,303 in 2022. The file cannot say why files stay incomplete, whether brokers submit early, borrowers drop out or the lender closes files it could have withdrawn; the same code is first on 1,140 of Champions Funding's 2,340 DSCR-type denials. What it does say is that a denial in this lender's data is, three times in four, a file that did not finish, not a borrower who failed a test. The practical reading for a borrower: submit the full document list on day one.

How it compares with the other big DSCR lenders

Hometown is the largest of the ten by median loan and has the highest interest-only share: 15.6% against 10.4% for all DSCR-type loans. It is also near the top on denied share. A borrower with a $150,000 rental sits in a different market from one with a $500,000 rental, and the lender's own file says the second is its customer. For the other nine, see our reviews of RCN Capital and Kiavi, and the Florida and Texas state pages.

The program on paper

Everything in this table is what the company says on its own sites on October 21, 2026, not something we tested. The wholesale pages are written for brokers and may differ from the retail pages.

Two things to notice. The company's own numbers disagree: the home page shows “$15.4B” loans funded and, further down, “$10.1B+”; the retail About page says “$5.5B+”; the wholesale About page says over $11 billion of non-QM funding. HMDA's own total for 2018 to 2025 is $12.94 billion (our arithmetic), and none of the four claims matches it. Second, the retail page repeats that terms “vary by transaction, property, borrower, state, and current program guidelines”, so the numbers above are ceilings and floors, not a quote.

Licences, complaints and regulators

Licensing. The home page says the company is licensed in “48 States”. The retail licensing page lists 46 states and DC in its state filter, with New York absent, and is marked “Information accurate as of April 27, 2020”. The 2025 HMDA file shows 704 DSCR-type loans in New York (714 loans of all kinds). Business-purpose lending is licensed differently from state to state, and we cannot say what licence a New York loan closes under; the Pennsylvania order shows the company holds Pennsylvania Mortgage Lender licence 71874. Check the licence for your property's state at NMLS Consumer Access, which we could not read.

CFPB complaints. We searched the Consumer Complaint Database for “thelender” (0 results), “the lender llc”, “hometown equity mortgage llc” and “NMLS 133519” in the company field. The name “HOMETOWN EQUITY MORTGAGE” returns four complaints: settlement process and costs (April 5, 2012), loan modification and collection (April 4, 2014, Missouri), an unsolicited credit card (August 15, 2016, Kansas) and trouble during the payment process (May 24, 2019, Missouri). All were closed, three with an explanation. The database does not give an NMLS number, so we cannot confirm these belong to the Lake Forest company, and the credit-card complaint is probably not a mortgage-lender matter. Zero recent complaints is weak evidence for a lender whose borrowers are investors on broker-arranged business loans, who rarely use the CFPB.

Enforcement. The Pennsylvania Department of Banking and Securities and Hometown Equity Mortgage, LLC signed a consent agreement and order, filed July 20, 2022. It states that the company “is licensed as a Mortgage Lender” but not as a Mortgage Servicer, that it applied for a servicer licence on May 11, 2022, that it “contracted the servicing of these mortgage loans to a subservicer”, and that by servicing through a subservicer it acted as a mortgage servicer without a licence. The company agreed to pay $4,200 and the department said it would issue the servicer licence. It is an administrative licensing matter with a small fine, not an allegation about how borrowers were treated. We found no other state order, but state databases and NMLS are where more would appear, and we did not read them.

Reviews. The home page shows “4.9 | 1,440+ Google reviews”. That is the company's own display, and the quotes it prints are from borrowers and brokers it chose. We did not read the underlying reviews and do not use them.

What a reader can do with this

• Send the complete package on day one. The lender's own file shows three denials in four ending as “credit application incomplete”. Ask for the document checklist for your exact scenario and answer all of it before the appraisal is ordered.
• Ask which door you are in. Retail (thelender.com) and wholesale (through a broker) are separate teams with separate pages. If a broker quotes you, ask for the lender's price and the broker's compensation separately.
• Get the prepayment penalty in writing. HMDA says nothing about it for business-purpose loans, the borrower pages do not state it, and the one wholesale number we found (“min prepay of 1 yr” on recently listed properties) belongs to one program.
• If your property is in New York, or you are buying a 5 to 8 unit building, ask which licence the loan closes under and which program applies before paying for an appraisal.
• Compare a same-day quote. The 7.375% median is a 2025 figure and tells you where this lender's loans landed, not where yours will. Compare a second quote on the same loan size and score; our DSCR rates page, requirements page and lender legitimacy check show what other lenders publish.

This is analysis of public documents, not investment, legal or tax advice.

FAQ

Sources: FFIEC HMDA public loan-level files for LEI 549300RA3E0BUFO7YZ21, 2019 to 2025, and our nationwide DSCR-type tabulation for 2025; CFPB Consumer Complaint Database; Pennsylvania Department of Banking and Securities consent agreement and order, July 20, 2022; thelender.com, retail.thelender.com and wholesale.thelender.com pages read October 21, 2026; 12 CFR 1003.4(a)(22) and 12 CFR 1026.3(a).