A licensing footprint is one of the hardest things for a competing team to replicate, because it cannot be bought quickly. Every state is applied for, examined and maintained one at a time, by a named person. Ours has been built that way over four decades — and it is still growing.
These are the states Leslie Bergen holds a personal mortgage loan originator licence in. They are listed rather than mapped, because a licence is a precise thing and a drawn map is not.
Licensing is held individually, not by the team as a whole. The twenty-three states above are Leslie Bergen's personal licensing; Dwayne Graham is licensed in Texas. Every other loan officer holds their own licences, so coverage varies by person. Tell us where you are buying and we will put you with someone licensed there.
Almost nobody outside the industry is told how this works, and it catches good buyers out every year. Four things are worth knowing before you choose a lender.
Companies are licensed to lend in a state. Individual loan originators are licensed separately, by name and by NMLS number, in each state they work in. The two are not the same thing.
So a lender can be approved to do business in forty states while the particular person you are speaking to is licensed in three of them. When a team says it covers a list of states, the honest reading is that somebody on the team does — not that everybody does.
Not where you live now, not where you work, not where your bank is. The licence has to match the location of the home you are buying.
You can be sitting in Ohio buying in Arizona, and the person originating your loan needs Arizona. It is the single most common misunderstanding we hear, and it is worth checking before you get attached to a lender.
You do the work. You send in the documents, explain the self-employed income, get pre-approved, build a rapport with someone who understands your file. Then the job offer lands in another state and that person cannot originate the loan.
A new lender, a new set of documents, a new explanation of the same story — usually against a moving date that is already fixed. Nothing has gone wrong with your finances. It is purely a licensing boundary.
Breadth of licensing on the team, and a handover that keeps your file rather than restarting it. Where the destination state is one Leslie is licensed in, the same person can carry the loan the whole way.
Where it is not, we look across the team for someone who is, and pass across everything already gathered so you are not re-explaining your life to a stranger. And if nobody on the team holds that state, we say so on the first call, not the third week.
Because the licence sits with the individual, the only honest way to publish coverage is name by name. Here is exactly where that stands.
Personally licensed in twenty-three states, built up over four decades of lending with a VA specialism throughout. This is the licensing the twenty-three-state figure refers to everywhere it appears on this site.
AL · AZ · CA · CO · FL · GA · IA · IL · IN · KS · KY · MD · MO · MT · NC · NE · NM · OK · SD · TN · TX · VA · WA
Licensed in Texas. Twenty years originating across Houston and the surrounding areas as one of the region's top producers, with first-time buyers, VA, FHA, jumbo and investment property all in regular rotation.
TX
Every other loan officer at Atlas holds their own licences, in their own states, under their own NMLS number. We are not going to publish a combined figure and let it read as though any one of us can help anywhere — that is precisely the claim this page exists to correct.
Tell us where you are buying and we will put you with someone licensed there. If nobody on the team is, we will tell you that instead.
Military families do this on orders. So do people following a job, buying a second home, moving closer to grandchildren, or picking up an investment property two states away. It is one of the reasons the footprint was built in the first place.
Two things are true at once. The footprint is still expanding, so a state that is not shown above today may well be covered by the time you are ready. And a licence is either held or it is not, so there is no version of this where we work around it.
New licences are applied for as the team grows and as clients keep asking for the same places. It costs you one message to find out where a particular state currently stands.
If we cannot originate in the state you are buying in, you will hear that on the first conversation, in plain words, rather than being kept warm while somebody works out whether it is possible.
We would far rather send you somewhere useful than waste a fortnight of a moving timeline. Where we can point you in a sensible direction instead, we will.
The question worth asking is where the property is. Tell us the state you are buying in — not the one you live in now — and we can answer this in a single reply.
One conversation, no obligation, and a straight answer about whether we hold the licence you need. If we do not, you will know inside a day rather than a fortnight.