March 2016 H OUSING N EWS R EPORT
NEWS BRIEFS
Home Equity Lending Rebounds Home equity portfolios have shrunk at banks, but credit unions and nonbank lenders like Quicken Loans, Lending Tree, and loanDepot helped fuel the surge in home equity lines last year. During 2014, home equity balances at credit unions grew by 7.2 percent, and in 2015 they grew by 6.1 percent. But bank home equity balances declined by 3.2 percent in 2014, and they fell another 5.3 percent to in 2015, according to the National Association of Federal Credit Unions. Data from Equifax shows that the total credit limit of new home equity lines originated between January and October of 2015 was $121.6 billion, a 19.7 percent increase from same time a year earlier. With a home equity line of credit, or HELOC, lenders make available a certain amount of borrowed money over a set period with the home as collateral. The total number of new lines originated was 1.17 million, an increase of 11.8 percent. It was the best 10-month period for HELOCs since 2008.
Time to Close a Loan Climbs to 50Days A new report from Ellie Mae shows that the impact of TRID is being felt in the mortgage industry, with the time to close a mortgage loan now taking 10 days longer to close than a year ago. According to Ellie Mae’s latest Origination Insight Report, the average time to close a loan increased to 50 total days in January 2016, up from 38 in January 2015. Since October 3, 2015, when the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau implemented the new TILA-RESPA Integrated Disclosure rule, the average time to close a loan has grown steadily. GoogleEndsMortgageComparisonTool Four months after announcing it was launching a mortgage comparison tool via its Compare service, Google is shutting down its Google Compare service for auto insurance, credit cards and mortgages in both the U.S. and England. “Beginning on February 23, 2016, we will start ramping down the Google Compare product, which is currently live in both the U.S. and UK,” the company said in an email posted on website Search Engine Land. “We plan to terminate the service as of March 23, 2016.” Google, whose parent company is Alphabet Inc., has been running Google Compare in Britain for three years and started a United States site last March. The shutdown is a setback to the Alphabet Inc. unit’s efforts to provide niche shopping services and financial-services tools. In the United States, insurers wrote $481 billion in premiums for property and casualty insurance, which consists of mostly auto, home and commercial insurance, according to the Insurance Information Institute, an industry group. SOURCE: Ellie Mae
SOURCE: National Mortgage News
SOURCES: Search Engine Land, The New York Times
SOURCE: National Mortgage News
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