As publicly traded organizations prepare to report second-quarter earnings and mortgage originations, monthly data suggests there was a slump in lending. Despite record equity, home owners are reluctant to extract it.
Retail and consumer-direct home lenders originated 504,000 new residential mortgages during April of this year.
New single-family production was slightly diminished versus the preceding month, when mortgages originated were reported to number 538,000.
Those details and more were provided in Black Knight Inc.’s Mortgage Monitor Report.
The decline was more apparent versus May 2017, when 617,000 residential loans were closed.
Black Knight said that during the first quarter of this year, U.S. homeowners pulled out $63 billion through a cashout refinance or a home-equity line of credit. That was down 7 percent from the fourth-quarter 2017. But a 1 percent rise in the volume of equity extracted was noted from the first-three months of last year.
The report said that the $35 billion withdrawn through HELOCs in the first quarter of this year was a two-year low.
Black Knight reported that total first-quarter tappable equity of $5.8 trillion was the most ever recorded and 16 percent higher than the mid-2006 peak. The $380 billion in growth was the largest single-quarter growth since tracking of the metric began in 2005.
