wouldn't have reached a record 68% without the unfettered efforts of brokers, many of them self-made small-business owners.

That's an apt description for Mr. Thomsen, the 42-year-old founder of Mortgage Master. Born in Denmark, the son of a math teacher, Mr. Thomsen was a restaurateur and worked briefly as a mortgage broker in suburban Boston before starting his firm in 1988 in a spare bedroom. In his first year, he sold $50 million in loans, reaping $500,000 in commissions.

"I remember calling people back in Denmark and saying, 'You're never going to believe this business I've gotten into,'" he says.

These days, Mr. Thomsen's firm is literally a financial factory. Mortgage Master last fall moved into a brick building, a former paper mill in Walpole, Mass., a 35-minute drive southwest of Boston. Top-producing brokers have small offices with windows, surrounding a warren of cubicles packed with newcomers and a support staff of 100.

The operation last year handled 100 or more mortgages on a busy day. A typical loan takes about six hours to process and underwrite, in addition to a couple of hours of a broker's time to sell, take an application and follow up with customers. Mortgage Master says it generated $30 million in fees last year, after paying closing costs for some of the mortgages. Support staff, rent and other overhead ran $5 million, or about $500 a loan. The rest was distributed as commissions among Mr. Thomsen and his brokers.

Four years ago, Mark Shippie was driving a Pepsi truck when he was refinancing his own loan and noticed that his Mortgage Master broker was driving a luxury car. He begged Mr. Thomsen for a chance to strike it big. "Do you really want to quit a steady job?" he recalls Mr. Thomsen telling him.

Mr. Shippie did, and he jumped into his Ford pickup and hit up everyone he knew for mortgages, driving 45,000 miles in his first year. He called people at Pepsi and Coke, left his cards at Dunkin' Donuts and dropped by fire and police stations across suburban Boston. Since then, he has managed to build a database of 1,200 customers, the key to success as a mortgage broker.

Last year, Mr. Shippie sold $97 million in loans and made $480,000, 10 times his pay at the soda company. He now lives in a $700,000 home and has a $200,000 condo in New Hampshire. "I'm set for the rest of my life," says Mr. Shippie, 45, wearing a hooded sweat shirt in his windowless office.

Once a broker makes a sale -- "locks" a loan, in broker's parlance -- he or she drops the application in the inbox of the "lock desk," in many ways the nerve center of Mortgage Master. Mr. Thomsen sits at the lock desk, wearing an open collar shirt, blue jeans and leather slippers. He repeatedly checks blinking bond prices on a computer screen. He's trying to guess the direction of interest rates to see whether his brokers should rush loan

Lenders generally send in rate sheets daily to Mortgage Master and other brokers, but can
modify them at any time if interest rates change, often by increments as tiny as one-
eighth of a percentage point. On this day, rates have been ticking up on news about Iraq
and economic data. Mr. Thomsen gets an alert that one lender, the finance unit of General
Motors Corp., is raising its rates. "GMAC is repricing for the worse," he shouts.

Year after year, Mortgage Master employees pack the top of lists ranking highest-
producing brokers from Mortgage Originator and National Mortgage News, two trade
publications. In 2002, Mortgage Master says, every broker who worked a full year at the
firm pulled in a six-figure income.

Mr. Digan, Mortgage Master's top producer, has built up an impressive list of 6,000
clients. To get started, he focused on real-estate agents and potential buyers. He'd even
pay hundreds of dollars to provide food for Sunday open houses, and then stand at the
events handing out his business card and rate sheets.

These days, Mr. Digan rarely leaves the office. The soft-spoken 6-foot-3 salesman can
even knock off early some days to play wing in an amateur ice- hockey league, returning
calls on his cellphone. Last year, he wrote more than 1,000 loans, with a total value of
$310 million.

Many are repeat customers, such as Bradford Smith, a senior partner at Boston law firm
Goodwin Procter LLP. In nine years, Mr. Smith has bought four homes and refinanced 12
times, all through Mr. Digan. Mr. Smith says one refinancing took only an hour,
including 40 minutes with his attorney at closing. Mr. Smith, a litigator who bills $425 an
hour, realizes Mr. Digan's fees are quite similar. "I can't begrudge him," Mr. Smith says.
"He works hard. He's one of the big hitters."

- INDEX REFERENCES -