MB Insider Trends: Applications and Inventory

Interested in seeing where the hot spots are in mortgage originations? Here are some interesting stats that we are seeing in the data right now.

MB Insider July 8th: 

Disclaimer: These are numbers that we are seeing in the MonitorBase platform and does not necessarily represent stats for the entire country. Although, this should give you a good idea of some interesting trends, and hopefully helps in your current origination efforts.

Over the past few months, there's been a huge increase in mortgage applicants with an underlying mortgage of under 12 months old. This trend has been increasing week over week, and has caused a lot of worry over EPO risk. However, this is the first week we’ve seen the trend start to taper. 

While the application rates of clients with a recently opened mortgage has decreased slightly, that doesn’t mean the total number of applications is decreasing. We’re seeing a higher number of applications from homeowners with an underlying mortgage of 48 month or older. 

This is likely people who are listing their homes and finally feel comfortable enough to move. Interest rates are still low, home values are high, making this an ideal time aside from the pandemic. 

Refinance business is still very high, with many brokerages at capacity, and now there is also more purchase business coming back into the market. This is increasing the purchase volume of existing homes, but inventory is still low. 

Towards the beginning of the year, many homeowners decided to go into forbearance. Now that things are slowly reopening, some of those homeowners are coming out of forbearance, and we think this could lead to an increase in the existing home inventory. Some of those homeowners are coming back onto the market to sell their homes, and they are moving into rentals until things are more normal again, allowing for more homes on the existing home market. 

In addition to the changes in underlying mortgage rates, there was an increase in average credit score of mortgage applicants, putting the vast majority in the above 700 score range. 

With everyone firing on all cylinders, refinance and purchases are going like crazy, it’s important now more than ever to keep focusing on purchase business and building up clients for the future.  

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