Our first visit to New Orleans was a memorable week filled with business meetings by day and good food by night. Our industry has been having a banner year in New Orleans, with the city showing the largest gain in HECM lending volume in the past 12 months.
The city has been coasting a bit since an amazing first quarter got them off to a fast start, but 31% growth in MCA year to date is an impressive performance with the industry down -42%. There’s much more on top markets around the country in the report, so be sure to view the whole report by clicking the report image at the bottom.
We’ve had quite a few conversations about October application trends with clients in the past few months, specifically wondering how the principal limit changes would affect the industry. Last year’s dramatic effects have been top of mind for everyone, but thankfully this year did not see a repeat.
October applications were down as expected, off -38.8% from September. You can see the resemblance in pattern from last year in the chart below:
We saw another (smaller) surge in applications ahead of the new fiscal year program changes, with a similarly smaller decline in October. What’s important is that the decline was not as dramatic as last year, and we’ll predict that we get back to an uptrend in apps per business day in November.
If you insist on being cynical then October was the lowest figure for apps per workday since April, which was the first point above the red trend-line on graph. We won’t argue with cynics and critics, except to say that we’ll bet a bottle of wine that endorsements in Q4 will be higher than Q3, despite the slow start.
Click on the image below to view the full Industry Trends report for this month.
