Loan Origination
Mortgage Refinance Applications Triple from a Year Ago, But Will They All Fund? By Colin Robertson, The Truth About Mortgage
While the mortgage market has become a bit of a mess lately, lenders are apparently still totally slammed and doing record business. For example, Quicken Loans CEO Jay Farner told Bloomberg today that, “March will be the largest closing month in our company’s history and we imagine April will be even bigger.” Amazingly, loan applications are only taking an extra day or two to process, with the average 30 or 31 days, per Farner. That’s significant because they are the nation’s top retail mortgage lender, so it bodes well for the industry as a whole. This despite some 98 percent of Quicken’s 18,000-strong workforce doing it from home, The MORTGAGE BANKER Magazine
including Farner. The reason is obvious—mortgage rates are super cheap, and had actually hit all-time record lows in early March before a flood of applications oddly crippled the market. Then came the coronavirus outbreak, which further complicated matters, forcing the Fed to take action and start a new round of quantitative easing known as QE4 to boost liquidity on the secondary market. It has also forced Quicken to double its call center workforce in anticipation of the many calls it will receive from borrowers about loan forbearance and loan modifications as job losses surge. 24
April 2020
