The cost to close a residential loan subsided this year thanks to a decline in loan origination fees.
Average closing costs on a $200,000 purchase-money mortgage
with a down payment of 20 percent are $1,847.
The total excludes title insurance, title search, taxes, property insurance, association fees, interest and other prepaid items.
That is less than the average for a single-family home loan last year, when the total was
$2,539.
(after this story was published, Bankrate.com provided the following clarification about how it changed the way it reported the closing cost data, which reduced the year-over-year change to seven percent:
We decided not to include origination points this year (to ensure consistency: we have long excluded discount points, but we found that some lenders are using “discount” and “origination” points interchangeably). Re-running the 2014 data without origination points yields an average of $1,989. That’s an apples-to-apples comparison with this year’s $1,847 and is where the 7% decline comes from.
Bankrate.com reported the findings based on a survey of up to 10 lenders for each state as of June.
In Hawaii, total closing costs average $2,163 — more than in any other state.
New Jersey’s $2,094 are second-highest, then $2,033 in
Connecticut, $1,971 in West Virginia and $1,969 in Arizona.
At $1,613, Ohio had the lowest closing costs.
The 2015 U.S. total includes
$1,041 in lender origination fees — plunging from $1,877 a year earlier.
Origination fees were highest in Arizona at $1,208 and lowest in Wyoming at $874.
Also reflected in this year’s U.S. total were and $807 in third-party fees, increasing from $662 in 2014.
Hawaii’s $1,130 in third-party fees were highest in the nation,
while Pennsylvania’s, $678 were the lowest.
