What Fairway is like
How big is Fairway?
Holly Mattson President of Recruiting, Fairway
Fairway is the #2 retail mortgage lender in the United States, licensed in all 50 states, with headquarters in Madison, Wisconsin and Carrollton, Texas. It hit $1 billion in annual fundings within five years of its 1996 founding and now has well over 2,500 employees — big enough to have partnerships with both Anthropic and OpenAI, small enough to still answer fast.
Big enough to matter, small enough to still pick up the phone. Specifically:
- #2 retail mortgage lender in the U.S. — full-service, employee-owned.
- All 50 states licensed, with branches nationwide.
- $1 billion in annual fundings within five years of opening in 1996.
- 2,500+ employees — the award category Steve Jacobson’s 2026 #1 Leadership Award was judged in.
- Two headquarters — Madison, WI and Carrollton, TX.
- Partnerships with Anthropic and OpenAI behind Navigator, Fairway’s proprietary AI layer.
What size buys you as an originator: product depth that smaller shops cannot carry, a real in-house marketing studio, an AI layer built in-house, FairwayLeads at national scale, and an operations machine tuned for turn time.
What size usually costs you — becoming a number — is the part Fairway has been deliberate about not doing. That is the whole national strength, hometown service idea.
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