Interest rates offered for mortgages generally track with pricing for the loans in the secondary market. However, new research published by the National Bureau of Economic Research suggests that lenders offer worse pricing to borrowers when demand for loans is relatively strong. The findings were detailed in a working paper authored by Andreas Fuster, Stephanie Lo and Paul Willen. Fuster and Willen are in research departments at Fed banks, while Lo is currently a ...
The latest mortgage lender sentiment survey from Fannie Mae finds that industry leaders are paying increasing attention to enhancing the borrower experience, thanks to competitive market pressures. To what degree they can actually pull that off remains to be seen. Doug Duncan, senior vice president and chief economist for the government-sponsored enterprise, noted in an online post that the company’s previous survey found that senior mortgage executives were worried ...
Changing demographics will be the private mortgage insurance industry’s most powerful growth engine over the next 20 years, predicts an industry report published by the Urban Institute’s Housing Finance Policy Center. The new report cited U.S. census data showing a 10 percent increase in the share of minority households in U.S. homeownership over the last two decades. It forecasts the share will increase to 38 percent by 2030. Demographic shifts, growth of minority households ...
During the second quarter, the housing market witnessed the largest number of first-timers buying homes in almost two decades and that’s helping to drive price appreciation through 2018, according to a new study by Genworth Financial. Second-quarter numbers show that FTHBs accounted for 570,000 single-family home purchases, compared to 424,000 in the previous period. Genworth said this marks the highest quarterly number since 1999 and is the continuation of a trend that began in the third quarter of 2013. That number accounts...
Mortgage lenders harvested a landmark crop of purchase-money mortgages during the second quarter, fueled partly by continuing growth in the first-time buyer segment, according to a new ranking and analysis by Inside Mortgage Finance. An estimated $307.0 billion of purchase loans were originated in the second quarter, up a stunning 49.8 percent from the first three months of the year. That was the highest quarterly volume for purchase-mortgage lending since the third quarter of 2006. Purchase loans accounted for 67.5 percent of the estimated $455.0 billion in first-lien mortgage originations during the April-June cycle, the highest such share since at least 2003. First-time buyers contributed...[Includes three data tables]