Reverse Mortgage Endorsements Slide By More Than 4 Percent In June

Reverse mortgage endorsements decline by 4.4% to 4,160 loans, increasing the streak of more than 4,000 loans per month, according to Reverse Mortgage Daily.

The report, which cited Reverse Market Insight data, also revealed that Home Equity Conversion Mortgage-backed-securities notched just over $1 billion in HMBS issuance, in the four-month period following the LIBOR era. 

“Given the preponderance of H2H refi activity we’ve been seeing, it looks to me as though the industry could be testing the limits of loans available to be refinanced in some of the historically higher volume areas,” said RMI president John Lunde, according to RMD. “So, [the industry is] now looking a bit more to other parts of the country.”

“I look at recent months as being high enough to not warrant concern, but more the beginning of concern that volume could start trending downward more significantly,” added Lunde, according to RMD. “We’ve seen some ebbing in earlier indicators like case numbers issued and applications, so we’ll just have to see if that continues.”

“For new issue pools, each month in 2021 is outpacing the same month in prior years,” said Michael McCully, partner at New View Advisors, according to RMD. “June production of new issue pools was approximately $600 million in 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020. It was $823 million in 2021. For overall issuance, Q2 2021 was a quarterly record with $3.16 billion of HMBS issued.”

Read more about the latest data on reverse mortgage and endorsements and why a refinance burnout could be on the way.