Lykken on Lending

[Alice] Thanks, Dave. Hello, everyone. First up is the change in the maximum loan limits today. Lenders across the country are announcing that they are all okay with conventional loan limits moving up to $802,650. This is an increase from the $766,550 that we used in 2024. Now that gap in between those two numbers means a couple of things. Means we can’t deliver loans in that gap until after January 1^st and during that time, you’ll have to make sure your warehouse lender’s okay with you hanging on to the loan for that long and then secondly, be careful because you’ll always need to make sure you get a full appraisal during that window. For the loans that are in that gap, Alaska and Hawaii, their loan amount for single family is now going to be up to $1,203,975. There’s proportionate changes for two, three, and four units. These are all good for conventional only. We’ll look for our formal number at probably around Thanksgiving is when we get our formal number, which should be a little bit higher and be firm where we can now start closing loans and deliver those to the agencies. So, good news that we’re ready to roll with our increased bump for 2025.  The second thing I’d like to make sure we have a few minutes to talk about is a shout out to the MBA for their chart of the week on the HMDA respondents and this was for one to four unit closed loans, first liens, very interesting set of data there. Of course, IMBs are the biggest share of the purchase and refine business representing 63% of the overall market, even though we’re a total of 842 non depositories. Great marketing information always exists within that HMDA data. So, two tools I want to give this group our listeners an opportunity to check out. First of all, there is a book Let me pull up the title here. The CFPB has that Beginner’s Guide to Accessing and Using HMDA Data. I thought this was the greatest little guide. It actually shows you how to export an Excel and goes as far as showing you how to set up a pivot table to analyze the data and filter the data. I thought, wow, that was really cool that they went that far. So, I’ll give that link to Dave so that you’ve got it on the website so that you can access it. I’m sure if you do a search for it through your favorite browser, you will be able to find it quite easily. Also, the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council, FFIEC, has a HMDA data browser. This has great ready made graphs for those of you who have to teach on or talk about historical information about our market. Take a look at those ready-made graphs on applications, interest rates, denial rates. It really is telling. The graph does a history back to 2018, and it shows that the number of applicants have changed dramatically, but FHA and VA volume is actually higher than it was in 2018, which is the next lowest point on the graph. We’ve dropped in overall mortgage volume, but FHA has slowly had a little bit of a tick up. Interesting, as also on the graph is showing that FHA costs have gone up. Lots of great info at those two links that I will have available on the LOL website. That’s my update for today. Dave, back to you.

 

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Alice Alvey, Master CMB
Vice President Partner Education and Training at Union Home Mortgage
8241 Dow Circle
Strongsville, OH 44136
D: 440.420.4294
C: 248.941.1939

She handles development of their World Class Training program designed to support UHM partners and organizational effectiveness.

Prior to UHM, Alice served as Senior Vice President at Indecomm leading the Indecomm-Mortgage U division, Internal QA and Compliance and SaaS technologies. Indecomm acquired Mortgage U in 2013, where Alice was President/Co-founder, providing training and consulting since 1996. Prior to MU she served as SVP of Operations at a national bank overseeing operations for wholesale, retail and correspondent from underwriting through servicing, and compliance.

She has been in the trenches of mortgage lending operations from application through servicing for over 30 years. Her authoring work in training content, policies and procedures and the FHA/VA Practical guides illustrates her ability to bridge regulatory requirements with day-to-day operations.

Alice has been a weekly contributor to the Lykken on Lending show since its beginning in April 2009 and has made her weekly contributions to 450+ episodes!