Are mortgage lenders hurting right now?
High interest rates is hurting one more industry: Mortgage lenders. Mortgage brokers, who rely on commissions, are struggling as their income has dipped as home buyers move to cash. Colin Clark is a mortgage lender in a suburban community outside of Houston, Texas.
Indeed, independent mortgage banks and other mortgage lending subsidiaries reported a net loss of $534 per mortgage origination in the second quarter of 2023, according to data produced by the Mortgage Bankers Association. That's the fifth straight quarter that banks lost money on mortgages.
Mortgage industry employment has already declined 20% to about 337,000 people, from 420,000 in 2021, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data compiled by the MBA, which anticipates a further 10% decline.
According to Fannie Mae, overall mortgage activity is down 74% from the 3rd quarter highs in 2021 versus the 1st quarter of 2023, evidently reflecting on industry employment. “Fourteen percent of producing loan officers changed employers, and almost 12% left the industry entirely in the last year.
According to data from Ingenius, tens of thousands of loan officers exited the industry in 2023. In October, 67% of current LOs produced less than one unit of closed loans in October. An additional 21% closed 1.5 units per month and only 12% closed greater than 2.5 units.
“The rapid rise in mortgage rates over a relatively short period of time, combined with extremely low housing inventory and affordability challenges, meant that both purchase and refinance volume plummeted,” Marina Walsh, MBA's vice president of industry analysis, said in a press release.
The US mortgage industry is seeing its first lenders go out of business after a sudden spike in lending rates, and the wave of failures that's coming could be the worst since the housing bubble burst about 15 years ago.
Lower mortgage rates in 2024 — NAR is predicting the average will be 6.3% by the fourth quarter, down from 7.8% in 2023's final three months — will entice more owners to give up the super-low rates they got during the pandemic and put their homes on the market, Yun said.
Mortgage and Housing Layoffs
Most of America's largest mortgage lenders have instituted at least one round of layoffs this year. A rapid rise in mortgage rates and a big drop in origination volume has led to thousands of industry job losses in 2022 and 2023.
Due to lending companies' high standards and requirements, the number of mortgages that have been given has decreased over the years. According to the Housing Financial Policy Center, about 6.3 million fewer mortgages were given out, and that is because of the strict regulations and policies.
Is the mortgage market going to crash again?
Is the housing market going to crash in 2024? Though many Americans believe the housing market is at risk of crashing, the economists who study housing market conditions overwhelmingly do not expect a crash in 2024 or beyond.
Delinquencies increased by 16% year over year as consumers grapple with evolving macroeconomic challenges. With roughly 84 million mortgages active in the U.S., according to data from LendingTree, that would mean about 1,092,000 Americans are more than 60 days past due on their mortgages.
What Happens To Your Mortgage Rates & Payments? If you have a fixed-rate mortgage, then your monthly payments will remain the same, which can be beneficial in a high-inflation environment. However, if you have an adjustable-rate mortgage, expect your payments to increase.
Key findings. 29.6% of Americans in the 100 largest metros were behind on their debt payments between July 1 and Sept. 30, 2023. These debts include credit cards, auto loans, personal loans, mortgages, student loans and others.
Aside from St. Louis and Atlanta, metro areas with a population of least 1 million that had the biggest decreases in total loans from the second quarter of 2023 to the third quarter of 2023 were San Jose, CA (down 12.6 percent); Washington, DC (down 11 percent) and San Francisco, CA (down 10.9 percent).
Housing demand has ground to a halt as rates move higher. Applications for a mortgage to purchase a home dropped 10% from the previous week. Application volume is down 13% compared with the same time last year. Demand for refinancing also fell last week, declining 11% from the previous week, according to the survey.
The mortgage industry plays a vital role in the U.S. economy
After the 2008 financial crisis and during the coronavirus pandemic the federal funds rate was as low as 0.1 percent, resulting in the 30-year conventional mortgage rate dropping to an all-time low.
In the current market climate, mortgage brokers are not merely surviving; they are flourishing. How? By not just waiting for opportunities but actively creating them, answering every call, leveraging social media platforms, and fostering stronger connections with real estate agents.
In fact, mortgage originations totaled $2.75 trillion in 2022, compared with $4.51 trillion in 2021. Originations in 2023 are on pace to cut 2022's number in half — $1.1 trillion in the first three quarters of this year, compared with $2.2 trillion the prior year.
If your mortgage company goes bankrupt, you'll still have to make your mortgage payments, but all terms should stay the same. If your loan is active or has just closed, it'll be sold off to another company. If you're in the midst of closing a loan, any escrow funds should be safe, but you'll have to find a new lender.
Is lending getting harder?
Loan officers are pulling back on lending, requiring higher credit scores from borrowers and raising interest rates they charge for all kinds of loans, a survey showed. The survey shed light on how much high interest rates are making life harder for borrowers and lenders, who experienced decreased demand for credit.
In July 2020, Lending Works was sold to alternative investment manager Intriva Capital, and in December 2021, the platform announced that it was placing its P2P business into run-off in order to focus on the embedded finance market.
Many prospective homebuyers chose to wait things out in 2023, in the hopes that 2024 would bring a more advantageous market. But so far, with mortgage interest rates still relatively high and housing inventory stubbornly low, it looks like 2024 will remain a challenging time to buy a house.
It's possible that rates will one day go back down to 3%, though if current trends hold that's not likely to happen anytime soon.
While McBride had expected mortgage rates to fall to 5.75 percent by late 2024, the new economic reality means they're likely to hover in the range of 6.25 percent to 6.4 percent by the end of the year, he says.
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