Rate lock data suggests $4 trillion in 2020 mortgage origination volume

New rate lock data suggests 2020 will end with over $4 trillion in mortgage origination volume, easily a record.

The data, from Black Knight’s “Mortgage Monitor” report, shows that rate lock activity in the first half of October was up 4% from September, with purchase locks up 6% and refinance locks up 3%. Add low mortgage rates to the recipe and quarterly mortgage origination volume is expected to reach record levels across both purchase and refi.

Mortgages in forbearance fall across all loan types

The U.S. forbearance rate measuring the share of mortgages with suspended payments fell seven basis points to 5.83% last week, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association.

“With more borrowers exiting forbearance in the prior week, the share of loans in forbearance declined across all loan types. Almost half of forbearance exits to date have been from borrowers who remained current while in forbearance, or who were reinstated by paying back past-due amounts,” said Mike Fratantoni, MBA’s senior vice president and chief economist.

The share of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac loans in forbearance fell 6 basis points last week to 3.66% – marking the 21st week in a row the GSEs’ forbearance rate has dropped.

Though the rate for Ginnie Mae loans, which include loans backed by the Federal Housing Administration, rose slightly the week prior, last week’s rate leveled off after falling 4 basis points to 8.13%.

Core Logic - A Joke (Fred’s headline)

November 3 - Like King Canute (Cnut) ineffectively commanding the ocean tide to recede, CoreLogic continues to command home prices to stop rising, and with similar effect.

Last month they forecast that month-over-month prices for September would increase by 0.1% over August. Today they report that the actual increase was 1.1%, 11 times greater than their forecast. One month is not difficult to forecast, especially as they are forecasting for a month that has already ended. However they still manage to get it wildly wrong again and again. They are forecasting a month over month increase for October of 0.2%. In Greater Phoenix we have already measured 4.8%, for October. I am going to go out on a limb here are predict that their forecast for October will be extremely low again.

Their longer term forecast is for US home prices to rise by 0.2% between September 2020 and September 2021. This is likely to prove even more incorrect than their short-term forecast, but I do admit that long term forecasting is a fool's game in which the Cromford® Report does not participate.

We make no price forecast at all for September 2021, but we do know a silly forecast when we see one.