Category Archives: HECM Lenders

HECM endorsements increased 36.2% in October, providing a nice sugar rush to this post-Halloween morning for reverse industry folks

The regions were all higher, with several showing significant growth:

• New York/New Jersey jumped 72% to 215 loans
• New England gained 59% to 124 loans
• Southwest leaped 53.9% to 314 loans

7 of the top 10 (excluding Live Well) were up […]

HECM endorsements increased 3.4% to 2,420 loans in September, continuing a second consecutive month of low production levels. The last time volume was lower than Aug-Sep was during the lingering effects of a partial government shutdown in January.

The regions were mixed, with 4 reporting gains and 6 declining:

• Mid-Atlantic rose 17.4% to 169 loans
• Northwest/Alaska grew 12.6% […]
  

HECM endorsements dropped -15% in August to 2,341 loans, throwing a little cold water on the industry after 6 months of relatively optimistic endorsement volumes eased concerns over Dec-Jan readings <2,000 loans per month. This could easily be a blip given the lower interest rates easing lenders’ path to higher principal limits, but that’s always […]

HECM endorsements rose 8.2% in July to 2,754 loans. Lower interest rates on the 10 year swap rate in particular help HECM volume, plus an extra business day in July never hurts.

Here’s the regional breakdown:

• Southwest jumped 51.8% to 299 loans
• Rocky Mountain gained 38% to 287 loans
• Midwest increased 31.5% to 213 loans

Three of the top ten […]

HECM endorsements dropped -5.6% in June, lending further support to the idea that 2,500 endorsements per month is the default volume setting for the industry right now. Some regions looked better than others:

• New England jumped 23.9% to 109 loans
• Northwest/Alaska grew 16.5% to 212 loans, despite Seattle and Portland both being down more than 40% from […]
  

HECM endorsements dropped -7% in May, reinforcing the lumpiness and uncertainty around HECM volumes after an encouraging April tally. Most of the larger regions declined but a few of the lower volume regions built on April gains:

• Midwest jumped 23.1% to 213 loans, its highest level since October (outside of the catchup boost in Feb)
• Great […]
  

HECM endorsements grew 12.7% to 2,901 loans in April after several months of noisy data due to the government shutdown and a seasonal slowdown at the end of 2018. Combined with the highest HECM case number issuance level in March since last August (strongly correlated with applications for HECMs), reverse is looking fairly positive as […]

HECM endorsements dropped -35.7% to 2,573 loans. That is certainly a lot, but is actually very close to the average for Dec-Feb we discussed last month as a way of reducing the noise of the government shutdown shifting volume between those months. Now that we finally have a clean month it looks like the last […]

HECM endorsements rocketed 142.7% higher to 4,002 loans, but it’s hard to feel too excited about it given part of that might be catch-up from January’s government shutdown. Regardless, it’s a good test of who in our industry is an eternal optimist vs. a more stoic realist approach – we already know the pessimists left […]

HECM endorsements dropped -5.8% to 1,649 loans, but it’s hard to honestly know what to make of that given the noise introduced by the government shutdown. HECM loans were not endorsed during the shutdown, so from December 22-January 27 we have a big gap in activity.

The January total surely represents more loans that we’d normally […]