Why a lender shortlist always shows at least two names

If you're an agent and a buyer asks "who should I talk to about financing," the safest answer has always been more than one name. A single recommendation, even an honest one, even your actual best relationship, creates the appearance of steering, and appearance is most of what RESPA risk is made of.

Why this is easy to get wrong without meaning to

Nobody sets out to steer a buyer. It happens by default: you work closely with one or two lenders, you trust them, and when a buyer asks, the natural answer is the name that comes to mind first. Multiply that by every transaction and you've built a pattern, even if every individual recommendation was well-intentioned.

What we actually built

Farhove's lender shortlist component won't let a shared list go out with fewer than two lenders on it. Not a warning, not a confirmation dialog you can click past. The component itself enforces the floor. There's also no payment field anywhere near where a lender gets placed on that list, and no way to rank or feature one lender above another based on anything but the agent's own stated order.

The same discipline, in reverse

The flip side matters just as much: a buyer who already has their own lender can use them instead of anything on the shortlist, with one tap, no friction. The shortlist is a convenience for buyers who haven't chosen yet, not a funnel. If it looked like a funnel, it would defeat the entire point of building it carefully in the first place.