Richard Bitner

Richard Bitner (born 1966 in Los Angeles) is an American author and publisher in the mortgage loan industry. He is the publisher of HousingWire magazine, a real estate publication.

Career A subprime lender, Bitner collaborated with mortgage brokers from 2000 to 2005. Bitner and his friends started a mortgage business, Plano-based Kellner Mortgage Investments, in September 2000. Kellner was funded through a $175,000 mortgage on his parents' home. Each year, the company loaned $250 million to people. After closing loans, the company would sell them to larger lenders, including Countrywide Financial.

Books In his 2008 book, Confessions of a Subprime Lender, he discussed how their salutary aims were overridden by a hunger for financial gain. Julian Delasantellis of Asia Times Online wrote in a review of the book that "Bitner is admirable in that he is willing to take a measure of blame onto himself, when so many others are flailing about furiously trying to do the opposite, but I still think he judges himself somewhat harshly."

Bitner self-published the 2008 book Greed, Fraud & Ignorance: A Subprime Lender's Look at the Mortgage Collapse to reveal his story about the 2007 mortgage collapse. Newsweek said that his book "conveys the authority of someone who was in the trenches where this dirty work was going on".

Bitner is married and has two children.