Category Archives: HECM Lenders

HECM endorsements dropped -5.6% in June, lending further support to the idea that 2,500 endorsements per month is the default volume setting for the industry right now. Some regions looked better than others:

• New England jumped 23.9% to 109 loans
• Northwest/Alaska grew 16.5% to 212 loans, despite Seattle and Portland both being down more than 40% from […]
  

HECM endorsements dropped -7% in May, reinforcing the lumpiness and uncertainty around HECM volumes after an encouraging April tally. Most of the larger regions declined but a few of the lower volume regions built on April gains:

• Midwest jumped 23.1% to 213 loans, its highest level since October (outside of the catchup boost in Feb)
• Great […]
  

HECM endorsements grew 12.7% to 2,901 loans in April after several months of noisy data due to the government shutdown and a seasonal slowdown at the end of 2018. Combined with the highest HECM case number issuance level in March since last August (strongly correlated with applications for HECMs), reverse is looking fairly positive as […]

HECM endorsements dropped -35.7% to 2,573 loans. That is certainly a lot, but is actually very close to the average for Dec-Feb we discussed last month as a way of reducing the noise of the government shutdown shifting volume between those months. Now that we finally have a clean month it looks like the last […]

HECM endorsements rocketed 142.7% higher to 4,002 loans, but it’s hard to feel too excited about it given part of that might be catch-up from January’s government shutdown. Regardless, it’s a good test of who in our industry is an eternal optimist vs. a more stoic realist approach – we already know the pessimists left […]

HECM endorsements dropped -5.8% to 1,649 loans, but it’s hard to honestly know what to make of that given the noise introduced by the government shutdown. HECM loans were not endorsed during the shutdown, so from December 22-January 27 we have a big gap in activity.

The January total surely represents more loans that we’d normally […]

HECM endorsements dropped -31.4% to 1,751 loans in December, establishing a second consecutive low point after the FHA product changes took effect in October 2017.

• Last month we wondered if November’s decline was just some volume shifting from HECMs to proprietary, calling that the best case scenario
• This month’s drop looks a lot more like our worst […]
  

New lows, here we are. HECM endorsements dropped -17.4% to 2,553 loans in November, setting a new low after the October 2017 product changes.

• Just one region out of the ten tracked rose and that was the smallest, Great Plains, up 3.2% to 65 loans
• A good example of how far the industry has fallen is Pacific/Hawaii, […]
  

HECM endorsement volume crept back above 3,000 loans in October, rising 7.3% to 3,091.

• 8 of 10 regions were up, with New England leading the way – growing 34% to 126 loans (and a World Series title for extra umph)
• Southwest also fared well, increasing 29% to 360 loans in its highest month since May

Lenders also struck […]

HECM endorsement volume fell -9.9% to 2,880 loans in September, re-visiting the lows from June but not making new ones (yet?).

• 9 of 10 regions were down, with the lone exception in New York/New Jersey which managed to grow 6.6% to 94 loans
• Southeast/Caribbean was the best of the rest, dropping -2.5% to 585 loans

Lenders fared a […]