ATTOM, a leading curator of land, property, and real estate data, has officially published results from its second-quarter 2024 U.S. Residential Property Mortgage Origination Report, which reveals that 1.62 million mortgages secured by residential property (1 to 4 units) were issued in the United States during the second quarter. This represented a 23.2 percent increase over the prior three-month period. Now, while the uptick in question would be 1.6 percent lower than the second quarter of 2023, it marked an estimated 61.2 percent increase from a high point hit in 2021. Furthermore, it also translates to the first gain in a year. More on the same would reveal how increase in overall lending resulted from improvements across all major categories of residential loans, especially for home buying. Purchase-loan activity, for instance, jumped by 32.7 percent quarterly to about 783,000. On the other hand, refinance deals also went up by 10.3 percent to about 546,000, with home-equity credit lines going up by 26.5 percent to 286,000. If we contextualize the increase in monetary terms, though, we would learn that lenders issued nearly $533 billion worth of residential mortgages in the second quarter of 2024. The number edges what we saw in the first quarter by almost 27.6%, and at the same time, beats the volume of last year’s second quarter by 1.1%.
Among varying loan types, purchase loans remained the most common form of mortgages around the U.S. in early 2024, comprising almost half of all mortgages, followed by refinance packages and home-equity lending. In fact, the second-quarter purchase-loan total i.e. 782,937 was meaningfully up from 590,058 that we saw during the first quarter of 2024. Monetary value would purchase loans reaching $311 billion dollar from the $223.4 billion mark reported during the first-quarter level. Having said that, the total was still 7 percent down from a year earlier and remained 50 percent lower than a high point hit in the Spring of 2021. On top of that, the dollar amount was also down by 2.2 percent from $318.1 billion in the second quarter of last year and 42 percent beneath its 2021 peak. All in all, residential purchase-mortgage originations increased quarterly across 98 percent of the 205 surveyed metro areas, whereas it remained down across 74 percent of those markets. The largest quarterly increases were in Wichita, KS (purchase loans up 183.5 percent from the first quarter of 2024 to the second quarter of 2024); Boulder, CO (up 148.8 percent); Honolulu, HI (up 143.5 percent); Indianapolis, IN (up 86.8 percent) and Fort Wayne, IN (up 82.8 percent). Staying on that for a second, as aside from Honolulu and Indianapolis, the biggest quarterly increases in metro areas boasting a population of at least 1 million came in San Jose, CA (up 68.5 percent); Boston, MA (up 65.9 percent) and Minneapolis, MN (up 60 percent). Turning our attention towards the areas, again having a minimum population of 1 million, where saw the highest decreases in purchase lending, they include San Antonio, TX (down 32 percent from the second quarter of 2023 to the second quarter of 2024); Dallas, TX (down 24 percent); Austin, TX (down 22.1 percent); Houston, TX (down 20.3 percent) and St. Louis, MO (down 19.6 percent).
Beyond purchase loans, lenders issued a total of 545,928 residential refinance mortgages in the second quarter of 2024, up from 494,862 in the first quarter of 2024. From a monetary value standpoint, the value of these mortgages stood at $168.1 billion dollar, up 10.6 percent from $152 billion in the prior quarter. Moving on, we would also see an increase in home-equity lines of credit (HELOCs), which went up from 226,417 in the first quarter of 2024 to 286,416 in the second quarter. Monetary value of the same stood at $53.6 billion, marking a significant increase from over $42 billion reported in the prior three-month period. As for mortgages backed by the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), they decreased by 16.4 percent, compared to the first quarter of this year.
