The past few years for mortgage brokers have been a lot like being the elephant sweeper in a circus. Just when you thought you’d swept up all the mess, another big load plopped down right in front of you – and if you weren’t lucky, right on you.

The Great Mortgage Implosion fell heaviest on mortgage brokerages and mortgage loan originators. The media made Wall Street the evil masterminds of the mortgage crisis, but it cast brokers as the villainous henchmen who carried out the dirty deeds. As in any profession, there are good practitioners and bad ones. But mortgage brokers were painted as being uniformly bad.

And it didn’t take long for political and regulatory authorities to decide they were going to break the backs of the brokerages. New licensing requirements, new bonding requirements, new compensation restrictions, new rules of every stripe were coupled with mortgage banking organizations backing away from their wholesale operations. And added on to that was a rapid decline in the size of the market, as real estate deals evaporated.

The results were predictable. The number of mortgage loan originators licensed in Massachusetts has dropped to a third of what it was just four years ago.

But maybe that’s not such a bad thing.

The mortgage brokers who are left are still here because they’ve been able to meet all the new regulations. They’re the cream of the crop from what we had before. And they’re also, on the whole, not the kind of brokers who staked their fortunes on forcing bad loans down borrowers’ throats. The mortgage brokers who are left represent the best of the profession.

A New Start

So maybe this is the year that mortgage brokers individually – and through their trade group, the Massachusetts Mortgage Association – started making a little noise about why consumers ought to be using mortgage brokers. This ought to be a pivotal year for Massachusetts’ real estate industry. And it ought to be a time when mortgage brokers reassert their relevance, instead of continuing to hunker down while being shelled by enemies wishing to eradicate them entirely.

Although the final numbers aren’t in yet, Massachusetts was on track to end 2011 with one of the worst real estate sales volumes in the past 25 years. Even worse, despite the record low interest rates that should have spurred both sales and home refinancing, the commonwealth’s mortgage volume also hit a two-decade low. That’s the bad news for 2011.

But the signs indicate 2012 will likely be the first year in a long time that Massachusetts will report an annual sales gain.

The last few months of sales in 2011 were all stronger than they were for the same month in 2010. If even that modest increase continues – and low, low interest rates coupled with improving employment and depressed home prices indicate that’s a pretty good bet – it could be a very good spring home buying market.

But consumers have heard for months how difficult it can be these days to qualify for a mortgage. This is exactly the opening that mortgage brokers need.

Start a campaign: “You Can Get A Mortgage. Here’s How.” Hold mortgage fairs in the local community center. Start getting out there and aggressively show why consumers benefit when they use a broker.

Clearly, this is going to take some doing. But mortgage brokers can point to some of the country’s most popular personal financial planning gurus who have already come around to this point of view. Suze Orman, for one, touts the benefits of using mortgage brokers.

The shakeout in the industry can be marketed as a good thing for brokers and a good thing for consumers. Now, borrowers can be more confident they’re dealing with someone who can help find the best deal for them, not just the best deal for the broker. And with the elimination of so much deadwood competition, the remaining brokers should be able to leverage their pipelines with more deals. That will make them financially stronger, just as they’ve presumably gotten ethically stronger.

Consumers who have someone on their side shopping for the best deal will benefit. And the mortgage industry will be healthier if it can keep the brokers as productive contributors.

But the brokers have to break out of their funk to end their downward spiral. They’ve got to start showing the world that they bring value, and they can be trusted. They can make 2012 the year that mortgage brokers came back.

Or, if they continue to do nothing and let the stigma grow, they could make 2012 the year they finally went away.