It wasn’t very long ago that mortgage brokerages and their employees were dropping like flies. They were the ugly face of the housing finance collapse. They were looked at sneeringly, and perhaps still are, by community bankers.

But guess who’s hiring, now?

Mortgage brokerages aren’t just hiring, either. In many cases they’re taking on employees cast off by a shrinking Bank of America and other large lenders, keeping experienced originators in the industry and helping improve their own loan processes. Bringing on more experienced and skilled talent also helps to purge and replace those orignators who probably should have left the industry years ago, mortgage brokers said.

Still, in other cases, local brokers said they want very little to do with BofA veterans, and so are left casting about for suitable talent to meet growing refinance demand and ambitious expansion plans.

Newly approved originators brought the number of licensed mortgage originators in Massachusetts from 3,865 at the end of the first quarter to 4,070 at the end of the second quarter, according to the Massachusetts Division of Banks – a modest increase, to be sure, but growth is growth. And it may signal a trend set to accelerate in coming months.

Bad Actors

Brokers say many of the bad actors – and in this profession who knows if that’s literal or figurative – have been purged from the ranks of many, if not all, firms.

But brokers still must pick through “people in the industry we still feel we need to drop” to get qualified talent to the interview table, according to Leif Thomsen, president and CEO of Walpole-based Mortgage Master.

Thomsen said the industry is still hampered by brokers who just aren’t good enough. Twenty-five percent to 30 percent of the brokers currently in the industry, “won’t be here three to five years from now,” he said. “A lot of these people aren’t good enough. They haven’t gotten out [of the industry] despite not being good enough. Some of them are just hanging on.”

At the same time, there aren’t a lot of new people coming into the industry, Thomsen said.

For Mortgage Master, which plans to open half a dozen offices along the east coast in the next year, that’s not really a good situation.

Several news reports have suggested that banks and brokerages will readily snap up personnel being laid off from Bank of America as it makes an ignominious exit from the mortgage market, and that cuts at other large banks will also work to the benefit of the market’s smaller players.

But Thomsen said he doesn’t see that connection, at least as far as Bank of America is concerned.

“A lot of people coming out of Bank of America, I have absolutely no interest in,” he said. In Thomsen’s experience, Bank of America mortgage folks know how to fill out and file paperwork, but leave something to be desired when it comes to market and industry knowledge.

“Sometimes I question how buyers decide where they go for a mortgage,” Thomsen said.

It’s Rates, Stupid

It’s no secret that low interest rates are brining prospective buyers to banks and mortgage brokerages alike. And mortgage brokers’ growth owes more to those rates than Bank of America’s exit or the struggles of any other big bank, said Paul Gershkowitz, co-owner of Needham-based Greenpark Mortgage.

In the last year, Greenpark has boosted its operations staff from about 38 to 50 people.

“It’s not so much because of Bank of America not being in the business anymore, it has more to do with interest rates being at historically low levels,” Gershkowitz said.

But unlike Thomsen, Gershkowitz said he is more than happy to give former BofA employees a chance.

Since 2008, the industry giant has greatly improved its loan origination processes, Gershkowitz said, and the local people leaving that department know what they’re doing.

And there could be more to come.

Gershkowitz said he wants Greenpark to remain a small firm, but “from what the Fed has said and what Obama has said, rates should stay low.”

For now, 85 percent of the originations being performed by Greenpark are for refinance loans. The normal ratio is about 50-50, Gershkowitz said.

“We’ve already hired one Bank of America employee and we have an offer out to another,” Gershkowitz said.