Not sure about the US, but in Australia the broker's cut comes from the bank side and is not something you'd recover otherwise. They do however get a long trail

Not sure about the US, but in Australia the broker's cut comes from the bank side and is not something you'd recover otherwise. They do however get a long trail of commissions from the loan. Used a broker recently to refinance and it saved me over 1% on the rate and she did all the legwork in picking up documents, scanning, etc. Friend refinanced themselves and they were forever printing documents, driving across to banks to ID in person, etc.