This year’s top bank lenders said having sizable suites of loan products were key to meeting homeowners’ needs, and gaining greater wallet-share down the line. iStock illustration

The top lenders in Massachusetts helped buyers navigate a single-family housing market that was filled with volatility in 2025.

Arlington-based Leader Bank was the top bank lender in the single-family market in both dollar volume ($1.3 billion) and number of loans closed (1,953) in 2025 according to The Warren Group, the publisher of Banker & Tradesman. M&T Bank and JPMorgan Chase were second and third in o loan volume and Salem Five and Hyannis-based Cape Cod 5 were second and third in the number of loans closed, respectively.

This year’s top bank lenders said having sizable suites of loan products were key to meeting homeowners’ needs, whether it was more widely-used programs such as first-time homebuyer assistance and MassHousing, FHA and VA loan products, or something more bespoke.

In a housing market with rate volatility, this can make a large difference for buyers, executives said. Chase has its DreaMaker Mortgage product that offers discounts on private mortgage insurance, and more.

Significant investments in these product suites pay off in another way, executives said: They get new customers into a bank’s product ecosystems.

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“A home is probably the most expensive thing a customer will ever buy,” Chase Home Lending Atlantic Divisional Director Darcie Gore said. “When you think about their home, it is not just a product. There’s so much emotion that goes around purchasing a home, and it’s a gateway product for us. If we can get a customer and get their mortgage, we get the rest of their relationship. That’s really important to us at Chase.”

Soft Skills Make the Difference

That relationship banking strategy is even more important for regional or community financial institutions. While a customer might be interested in a mortgage to start, good customer service can lead to some becoming fully engulfed in an institution’s product ecosystem.

“It’s a process, it’s an interaction, it’s a relationship,” Cape Cod 5 President Robert Talerman said. “You want to establish trust. You want the customer to have a good experience. You want them to want to get their next loan with us as well. It’s not a transaction, it’s a relationship. You want to get as many customers as you can. You want to take good care of those customers. You want to keep those customers. You want them to be repeat customers.”

Many prospective homebuyers had been looking for a home for some time last year. And competition for homes remains high going into 2026, and affordability issues and rate volatility only add to buyer stress.

In this environment, bank employees not only need to be good at marketing products, but also need to be good at picking up on emotional cues.

“I think that can really be the difference between success and failure,” said Salem Five Senior Vice President Brian Mahoney, director of sales for the bank’s eponymous mortgage company subsidiary. “It always comes down to personnel. You can have a very technically sound loan officer, but if they’re not able to tune into what their customer needs and what’s important to them, and offer solutions and products and programs that really scratch that itch that customer may have, you could be leaving some customers feeling underserved.”

While some employees can naturally come with these soft skills, others need training.

“We’re providing a lot of upskilling training to our bank associates so they can have confidence talking to a customer,” Chase’s Gore said. “We have home lending advisors that sit in our bank branches, so it’s not like a loan officers in a call center if they’re in our branch. They’re working directly with all the partners in the branch to really figure out what our customers need.”

Creating a good impression when financing someone’s home purchase can help a bank or credit union find more ways to serve the buyer with other products. iStock illustration

Product Suites Buffer Volatility

While banks, credit unions and other financial institutions can control their budgets and other internal factors, they like to remain interest rate-agnostic. That same wide product selection that helps match a customer with exactly what they need can also help mitigate the effect of rate volatility or elevated rates. This leads to many banks focusing their marketing spend on awareness of these products at the expense of specific promotions.

“A lot of the marketing that we do is about awareness about our institution, not so much driven by rate environment,” Mahoney said. “It’s always about ‘We have a solution, we have a very wide variety of products.’ A lot of the stuff you’ll find with any other mortgage company, all the way to our proprietary portfolio products.”

Sam Lattof

Heading into 2026, bankers expect the mortgage rate environment to improve, which could create all-important improvements in affordability.

Demand remains high in a market that is still in a housing shortage, observers say. But political instability and economic uncertainty could still limit overall buyer activity, and in turn affect banks’ single-family loan growth.

“I think the big question is much more to do about things we cannot control, like the interest rate environment and economic uncertainty geopolitically, because that, in the end, is one of the biggest driving forces of what will happen with home affordability and mortgage volume,” Leader Bank President Jay Tuli said. “It’s been messaged very clearly that when Jay Powell steps down, the new Fed governor is going to go in, and the selection process seems to have a agenda to make sure that person agrees on bringing rates down to some extent.”

While this could drive up demand, funding for higher education and biotech research also could impact loan growth, considering that the two industries make up a large part of the Greater Boston economy.

“Economic uncertainty can be a damper, even in a low interest-rate environment,” Tuli said. “This market, you can want a lot of things, but it doesn’t mean that’s a good use of time. It’s more about being prepared for whatever happens. We’re trying to stay nimble.”