After a lengthy delay, we finally have the Wholesale Leaders Report for May available, and the results certainly reflect the trends seen in the HECM Endorsement reports.
Overall Wholesale volume for the month of May was down 20% from the prior month, to 4,275 units. This compares to a 35.5% drop in direct endorsed loans, and a 28.4% drop in overall endorsements – and marks a change from the previous months where the wholesale business underperformed.
Financial Freedom regained the top spot on a combined (retail + wholesale) trailing twelve month basis, holding an 18.1% market share, slightly higher than Wells Fargo’s 18% share. If we dive deeper into the numbers, the story changes dramatically – despite holding the overall lead for the trailing 12 months, Freedom’s wholesale business trailed the likes of BofA, MetLife, and World Alliance Financial in the month of May.
On a somewhat odd note, the only two wholesale lenders that saw volume growth in May were JB Nutter and World Alliance Financial. JB Nutter is recovering from their warehouse line issues, and, well, we all know what is happening at WAF right now, so it’ll be interesting to see where their customers go until the situation gets resolved.
As always, your questions and comments are welcomed – enjoy the report.
Our Wholesale Leader’s Report is now up for April. Recent trends are continuing, as retail endorsement growth once again came in stronger than the wholesale channel (+9.9% for Retail, -3.1% for Wholesale).
April’s wholesale numbers showed the impact of the JB Nutter warehouse line issues, and it hit their business hard as wholesale endorsement volume fell sharply to 233 loans from 1331 in the prior month. The majority of the top 10 wholesale lenders saw some volume increases due to this, but the biggest beneficiaries of the Nutter issues were Generation Mortgage and Genworth. Maybe they capitalized on some good information…
Keeping our focus on JB Nutter for a second, we’d like to point out that they have done a very good job of capturing their broker’s business thus far. The box on the lower left of page 2 says it all — for the past 12 months, JB Nutter captured almost half of the business of every broker that submitted a loan to them, and is a full 9 percentage points higher than Financial Freedom, the closest competitor in this metric. This is a decline from last month, but it goes to show how faithful their correspondents were.
It will be interesting to see if JB Nutter is able to get back to their prior volumes, and if so, how long it takes to get there. Or will brokers be wary of going back to the same well that left them dry for a period of time? One thing is certain, there are still a lot of broker loans up for grabs.
