Mortgage origination volume increased 1.9% during the third quarter, according to ATTOM’s U.S. Residential Property Mortgage Origination Report.
About 1.67 million residential mortgages were issued during the quarter, according to the firm’s data.
Driving the increase was a drop in mortgage rates that came in September. Still, volume is down by nearly two-thirds compared with the high point hit in 2021.
Most of the increase was refinances and home-equity lending as opposed to more buyers taking out loans. Mortgage rollovers increased 6.9% quarterly, to about 588,000, while home-equity packages increased 2.3%, to roughly 297,000.
Those improvements more than made up for a 1.7% decrease in purchase loans, to 782,000, as the annual peak home-buying season wound down and supplies of properties for sale remained tight.
Measured monetarily, lenders issued roughly $550 billion worth of residential mortgages in the third quarter – up 2.9% compared with the second quarter and up 6.6% from the third quarter of 2023.
“Mortgage lending rose again in the third quarter, but at a far slower pace than during the spring of this year when activity spiked nearly 25 percent,” says Rob Barber, CEO at ATTOM, in a statement. “The latest increase, small as it was, likely came mainly from homeowners trading higher-rate loans they got in 2021 and 2022 for cheaper mortgages resulting from declining mortgage rates. But it looked like the third-quarter rate dip wasn’t as helpful for purchase lending as buyers kept facing elevated prices and low supplies of properties for sale.”
Photo: Ian MacDonald