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A New Look At Originators – HECM Originators July 2011

This is the first issue of the HECM Originators report, which takes the place of “Wholesale Leaders” for rankings of retail and TPO/broker/wholesale business.

July summary

July endorsements showed a continued trend of better results for retail/direct lenders compared to wholesale/brokered volumes, with Retail declining -5.2% while Wholesale shrank -7.0%. We also saw the gap between the two channels remain fairly small, as the past four months (April to present) have shown Wholesale consistently within 3% of overall industry growth rate each month.  In the 8 months prior to April, we only saw that gap under 3% once and one month was as high as 13.6%.

Bottom line, the industry has basically finished the transition to the TPO world and further changes in volume will be related to other factors like lender exits and other events more than the past regulatory changes.

Report Updates – Rankings Description

For long time readers of our reports, you’ll notice the biggest change in our reports is the addition of page 4. We previously provided rankings of top HECM origination companies through our Retail Leaders report, but as FHA is no longer approving brokers, two things happened on that report: companies that are not FHA approved can no longer see their volume ranked against their peers there, and wholesalers can no longer see which of their clients and potential clients are originating HECM in volume.

That change has made the rankings on page 3 of this report which display lender volume by business channel (retail vs. broker) the single best source for ranking origination companies. But it also means the longest running report in our industry (FHA’s HECM MIC report that appears faithfully on the 1st of each month) no longer serves the purpose of broker companies.

We invite you to review the new page 4 on our HECM Originators report which replaces the basic functionality of the old FHA report by showing the single month volume rankings of the top 100 origination companies, but we also added to it by showing calendar year to date totals and rankings for each company along with monthly and YTD growth rates.

Housekeeping Notes:

  • The Retail Leaders report has been re-named “HECM Lenders” to identify it as a ranking of FHA approved lenders closing HECM loans and includes both retail and TPO business for these lenders. The report will continue to be published during the first week of each month.
  • Industry Trends has been re-named “HECM Trends” in keeping with the above changes. First report will be issued week of 9/19 and during the third week of each month thereafter.

Click the image below to access the full report:

HECM Originators