Our first report of the new year and we have a new top wholesale lender to report.  After an extended run of growth in the wholesale business assisted in no small part to being early in the fixed rate product, Metlife has risen to take the top volume spot among wholesale lenders.  Bank of America also climbed into the number 2 spot, with longtime leader Financial Freedom slipping to 3rd.  JB Nutter and Generation remained at numbers 4 and 5, respectively.  Congrats to Mike Mooney and team!  (full disclosure, they reinvested part of their earnings from growing the business in an add on the top lender ranking page in this report, but we promise it didn’t influence their rankings at all…)

For those keeping score, we continue to see a counter-intuitive theme in the marketplace as volume declines seem to be hurting the direct lenders (”Retail”) more than brokers so far.  Direct lending (”Retail”) volumes were down almost 20% from December, compared with a 2.9% increase in broker business through wholesale lenders.  We don’t expect brokers to swim against the tide of overall industry volume declines for long, but we’ll continue to watch these numbers as a quick indicator of the relative health of these business channels.

Of course, we’re dealing with endorsements here so there’s a possibility it could mean that broker loans are slower to get endorsed and the decline might show up later.

We’re excited to report that we’ll soon be able to look at additional data to answer questions like this, as we now have 3 of the top 5 lenders participating in the industry data repository.  This puts our estimated coverage of reverse mortgage industry loans at over 40%, and we will start publishing reports talking about apps and fundings (instead of endorsements) once we have at least 5 of the top 10 and 50% coverage.  If you’re interested in finding out how you can participate and what this means for the industry, check out our status page or contact us directly for more information.

A few other highlights from the full report:

• Among the top 10 lenders, only 1 active company (excluding World Alliance, which is in runoff mode) had a volume increase from December: Generation Mortgage, which more than doubled.  Much of this appears linked to a large increase in fixed rate volumes, but obviously Sherry and the team have been doing something right to see such a dramatic increase.
• In case you’re wondering if the call center model works, One Reverse Mortgage continues to prove there are enough seniors comfortable completing a reverse transaction without a loan officer at the kitchen table to exclusively power a top 10 ranking.  They grew their retail volume faster than all others (including Metlife and Bank of America) in the past 12 months, showing that there’s more than one definition of “distribution” for all of us to consider.

Click the image below for the full report.

The retail endorsement numbers for February 2010 are now available.  Endorsement volume came in at 7,024 units for the month, a 7.9% drop from January, and a decline of 22.7% from last year.  It seems like each month we’re reaching further back for a comparable volume period – we have to go all the way back to July 2006 to see a lower endorsement number.

Some highlights for the month:

• The number of active lenders decreased to 1,311 year to date. This is a drop of 19.1% vs. 2009, an even bigger drop than last month’s comparison although still outpaced by the 22.7% decline in loan volume.
• We continue to see very few new lenders entering the business each month, with less than 50 taking the plunge in February.  We also saw a definitive drop in total active lenders for February below 1,000 – a significant threshold that the industry has been flirting with for 2 years now.
• Regional strength is all relative at this point, with the Southwest and Mid Atlantic leading the charge with growth on an average volume per lender basis.  All regions saw declines in total volume vs. 2009, with Southwest falling the least at just a 1.1% drop while the Great Plains was off 31.7%.
• Among Field Offices, New Orleans led the way with 50% growth from 2009.  Other winners included Houston (31%), Shreveport (26%), Anchorage (23%), and San Francisco (15%), with just 6 others scratching out a gain.  We’ll know more about specific winners and losers as we start looking at more detailed county/city/zip level data, but as of now it looks pretty grim across the board.

Click on the image below for this month’s Retail Leaders report: