Posts Tagged ‘mic report’
Happy New Year! 2012 may yet become a fantastic year or a dismal one, but the best thing about this year is the vast potential presented by an entire year stretching out in front of us.
December finished on a modest down note, with HECM endorsements down -0.4% from November to 4,636. Active lenders increased 4.4%, although this measure of competition remains at a low level since stabilizing earlier this year.
We’ve been saying that fewer competitors yields benefits for surviving lenders for at least a year, and Metlife provided a poignant demonstration of this effect. The company’s November and December totals were its two highest endorsement figures of the year, with each month higher than the low months for Wells Fargo before their exit announcement in June.
Of the 10 regions we track, 5 were up including the 2 largest, Southeast/Caribbean and Pacific/Hawaii. And in a year when national volume fell -5.6%, it’s worth noting the winners among our market rankings:
- Jackson, MS took top growth honors, finishing up 41.3% from last year. Honorable mentions go to booming metropolis Casper, WY, up 39.4%, and Shreveport, LA, up 29.8%
- New York rose to the top market in the country with 3,133 loans, up 1.2% from 2010. The big apple swapped spots with Los Angeles, which dropped -10.7% to 2,960.
Click on the image below for this month’s report.
It’s been a while since we wrote about a hot HECM market bucking the national downtrend, but this month we have a very interesting one for you. As you might have guessed by the title of this report, we’re talking about Saint George, Utah. The city has more than doubled total Max Claim dollars year to date, and at 100 loans with two more months to go is on track to easily surpass its prior loans record of 104, set in 2007.
We’ve previously written about Baltimore, New Orleans, Philadelphia, and North Carolina, but as the housing bust has progressed there have been fewer growth stories to find. Saint George caught our eye as it rose to the top of our listing of cities by MCA growth on page 2 (bottom), finally taking the crown from Philadelphia.
Our first guess was that this might be another refinance driven surge as we saw in Baltimore and Philadelphia, but there hasn’t been a single HECM to HECM refinance yet in 2011 for the city. That of course got us even more curious, so we started looking at lenders – and hit the jackpot.
Cherry Creek Mortgage has created substantial business in Saint George as a new industry participant, in a place where the rest of the industry put together is essentially following the national volume trend. There are lots of ways to interpret the company’s success, and we won’t pretend to know their secret sauce. But we’ll hazard a couple of thoughts:
- Small, under-penetrated industries like ours still have niche opportunities that have not been fully understood nor harnessed by existing competitors
- Single companies with an innovative approach to the customer, product and/or market can change the shape of the industry in a city, state or even nationally
- Our industry is well served by new competitors that thoughtfully pursue new strategies
Congrats to Dan and the rest of the team on an amazing success story.
Click on the image below to view the full HECM Trends report for this month.
Now that we know November’s endorsement totals weren’t as scary as they could have been, it puts October’s reports in a different light. We reported in last month’s HECM Lenders that October endorsements were down -16.8%, owing primarily to Wells Fargo’s first big monthly decline.
Now that we have details available to report, it’s perhaps even more interesting that the broker/wholesale channel still declined faster than retail/direct, even though Wells Fargo’s decline was almost entirely felt on the retail side (Wells was 93% retail). Wholesale declined -18.3% vs. -16.1% for Retail, marking the fifth consecutive month of under-performance.
It’s logical then, to assume that other retail lenders did better in October than brokers in aggregate, and page 4 of our report makes it clear how each of the top 100 fared (although the list doesn’t distinguish retail lenders vs. brokers). A few notables:
- American Advisors Group (#4) was up 49.3% in the month (and 132.5% year to date) – Retail
- New Day Financial (#11) was up 34% – Retail
- Great Oak Lending (#17) was up 34.8% – Retail
- Open Mortgage (#23) was up 25% – Broker
Click the image below to access the full report:
