As quarterly loan production fell, independent home lenders added more employees — lifting personnel expenses and cutting into profits.
Average mortgage production among independent mortgage bankers came to 2,507 loans closed for $0.596 billion during the third quarter.
Business was not quite as good as during the previous three-month period, when an average of 2,579 loans were funded for $0.632 billion.
Those were some of the findings from
the Quarterly Mortgage Bankers Performance Report Q3 2015 provided by the Mortgage Bankers Association to Mortgage Daily.
The quarter-over-quarter comparison reflects data from 331 firms that participated in the survey for both periods.
Among all 347 lenders that participated in the third-quarter 2014 survey, average production was 1,901 loans for $0.437 billion.
The latest activity worked out to just under 2.4 loans closed per month per production employee, fewer than the 2.6 average in the second quarter and the just over 2.4 average in the third quarter of last year.
Sales employees closed an average of 6.5 loans per month, down from 7.3 mortgages closed the three months earlier and 6.7 average 12 months earlier.
Average staffing was
326 employees, more than the 314 average people employed as of the prior quarter and the 267 average headcount one year prior.
Lenders earned an average of 41 basis points in origination fees
during the third-quarter 2015, more than the 40 BPS earned in the previous quarter but far less than the 53 BPS earned in the year-earlier period.
Third-quarter 2015 origination fees jumped to 48 BPS at companies that closed less than $0.050 billion per quarter and fell to 33 BPS at firms with more than $0.250 billion in volume.
Retail lenders earned an average of 46 BPS in origination fees during the most-recent period, while companies that generate at least 75 percent of their business through the wholesale channel earned an average of seven BPS.
As of the latest period, 202
BPS of each loan went towards personnel expense, increasing from the second quarter’s 196 BPS but rising from the third-quarter 2014’s 199 BPS.
Net interest income from warehousing was six BPS in the third quarter, and net secondary marketing income was 290 BPS.
Total net production income dropped to 53 BPS from 68 BPS in the second quarter but increased from 42 BPS in the third-quarter 2014.
