We previously reported that HECM endorsements for Nov 2013 were up 11.9% from October, but today we will dive into more detail about retail/direct lenders vs. wholesale/broker channels.
As we’ve mentioned before, a familiar pattern for these channels is to see wholesale as a more volatile channel for loan volume than retail. In periods of increasing volume wholesale goes up more than retail and in periods of decline wholesale takes the brunt of that as well. It usually works that way for individual companies and we’ve seen this happen in the past as well.
In the past year though, this has been more wrong than right as we’ve seen it happen in just 4 of the past 12 months. The other 8 months saw wholesale moderating volume swings in retail by either declining less in down months or growing slower in growth months (and even growing during down months and declining during growth months).
There are many possible reasons for this, not least of which is the less intense timing push for endorsing loans relative to funding that could render this more noise than signal, but looking at counts of companies and other metrics doesn’t lend an easy answer. For now, we’ll just accept that this is another change in an industry that’s been full of them for some time now.
On to the leaderboard:
- Despite some surprisingly low volumes in Sep/Oct, Liberty got back on track in Nov with 702 loans (good for second place) and looks on track to end 2013 with the comfortable #1 ranking
- American Advisors Group had top performance among all lenders for the third month running, at 736 loans
- Cherry Creek Mortgage turned in its second best performance of the year, although it did follow an unusually low October
Find your company in the trailing twelve month rankings (page 3) or November rankings (page 4) by clicking the image below to access the report.
