Wells Fargo taking bigger piece of mortgage pie

Wells Fargo, the nation’s largest lender for home loans, is continuing to grow its mortgage business, issuing a record 33.9 percent of mortgages in the first quarter.

Other lenders now remain even further from reaching Wells Fargo’s mortgage totals. JPMorgan Chase & Co. has the second-highest market share of mortgages, but at 10.6 percent, it’s less than one-third than Wells Fargo’s mortgage volume, Reuters News reports. Also, some lenders, such as Bank of America, are continuing to scale back their mortgage volume.

Meanwhile, like Wells Fargo, U.S. Bancorp has increased its market share in the mortgage lending business, rising in the rankings from fifth to third in the first quarter.

“We see a market share [opportunity] that you only get once in a lifetime,” U.S. Bancorp CEO Richard Davis said recently about the bank’s mortgage business.

Bank of America, when it purchased Countrywide Financial in 2008, once had been the largest mortgage lender in the country, but now ranks fourth. The bank saw its mortgage volume drop by more than 25 percent from the fourth quarter to the most recent quarter.

Here are the top five lenders for the first quarter of 2012:

1. Wells Fargo
2. JPMorgan & Chase
3. Bancorp
4. Bank of America
5. Citigroup Inc.