Editor’s Note: The Mortgage Mix is RISMedia’s weekly highlight reel of need-to-know mortgage-industry happenings. Watch for it each Friday afternoon.
- In a sign of better times ahead, mortgage rates continued to decline this week. The 30-year fixed-rate mortgage averaged 6.13% this week, down from last week’s rate of 6.15%, according to the latest Primary Mortgage Market Survey® from Freddie Mac.
- With mortgage rates on their third straight week of decline, mortgage applications surged 7% this week, according to the Weekly Application Survey from the Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA). Joel Kan, MBA’s vice president and deputy chief economist, said that “Despite a 15% increase in refinances, they were still 77% behind last year’s pace, as rates remained more than two percentage points higher, thus providing very little refinance incentive for most borrowers who are locked into lower rates.”
- Digital mortgage lender Better launched a new product called One Day Mortgage to offer borrowers their mortgage commitment letter in 24 hours or less, according to Finovate. In order to qualify, a borrower must be salaried, make a down payment of at least 3% and upload required documents within four hours.
- As of December 2022, a total of 0.7% of loans are in forbearance, as per the MBA’s latest Loan Monitoring Survey. Marina Walsh, MBA’s vice president of Industry Analysis, said that “For three consecutive months, the forbearance rate has remained flat—an indicator that we may have reached a floor on further improvements.”
Not only is the news on the forbearance front positive, but only 2.9% of all mortgages were in some stage of delinquency in November, according to CoreLogic’s Loan Performance Insights Report. This is a 0.7 percentage point decrease compared to the 3.6% of mortgages in delinquency at the same time last year. Foreclosure rates also remained low, at 0.3%.
