It’s always more fun to report good news (since no one shoots the messenger in these cases!) and August continued a welcome trend higher in reverse mortgage business volumes. Endorsements were up 12.6% from July, again coming in ahead of increases in competition since the trough in May.
We also saw modest success in applications, coming in at 8,961 for the month of July. While that’s lower than June’s figure by 1.4%, there is a reason to be hopeful here. First, the updated chart with applications and endorsements (with timing adjusted 4 months for endorsements):
This first chart shows endorsement volumes following nicely along our application path, but the second chart shows a more optimistic trend in applications than the raw number suggests:
July had 2 fewer business days than June, which turns a -1.4% decline in the raw number to 8% growth in the per business day results. If we maintained the same pace in August (with 23 business days like June), then we would have been over 9,800 applications.
Lots of additional trend data and analysis is available in the full report by clicking the image below. Enjoy!