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It is a very critical time for the HECM world. HECM endorsements for the month February 2023 were just 2,185. There have only been three times that monthly HECM endorsement volume has been lower than the total volume since we saw 1,572 HECM endorsements for the month of January 2004. The volume drop in all three months were Covid related according to those who track this information. They were as follows:
1) December 2018 — 1,750
2) January 2019 — 1.649
3) April 2020 — 1,601
While 2,185 is better than all four, imagine if someone told you that in the last 5 years we have had four months where endorsements totaled less than 7,200 and one of those months was unrelated to Covid conditions.
To address the old story about there were not enough working days (i.e., excluding holidays and weekends) in February to generate more HECM endorsements, let us look at the per working day HECM endorsement volume for each month beginning with November 2022:
1) November 2022 (assuming that the only day HUD took off was Thanksgiving Thursday) — 155
2) December 2022 — 133
3) January 2023 — 119
4) February 2023 —115
As can be readily seen, the problem was not average working day production. The production in February 2023 was 25.8% lower than in December 2022. The only thing that can reasonably account for this difference is a lack of submitted closed HECMs to HUD and that only seems to be getting worse.