Let's retake the mortgage market!

Community financial institutions are grappling with the recent and pending mortgage rules. We fear the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau (CFPB) and government's tendency to fire a bazooka at an ant, causing tremendous collateral damage.

New rules aside, we were not that significant in the mortgage market anyway. Aggressive mortgage brokers hawking products and programs from money center and category killer banks, and government or quasi government agencies such as Fannie and Freddie, were killing us in terms of competition. Lastly and perhaps more importantly, because we collateralize and sell a significant percentage of mortgages into bonds and off of bank balance sheets, the 30-year mortgage became the most prominent. The 30-year carries too much interest rate risk for us.

So we opened the door, let the competition through, and we ceded the mortgage market to brokers, specialists, and the government.

As most FIs are hungry for assets, they are looking for loan volume wherever they can get it. I encourage you to rethink the residential mortgage loan. Two of our clients recently did so, and are finding ways to profitably offer this staple loan product to their customers and communities. With many brokers now out of business, and the government looking for ways to reduce their participation, can we find opportunities to retake what we have previously ceded? I think so.

I recently ran an analysis of all of my firm's product profitability clients to determine exactly how profitable residential mortgages are in the industry. The results were surprising to the client and helped them to peel back the onion further to uncover opportunities to increase production and reduce per-unit costs in their residential lending unit. See the table below for a portion of this analysis.

A note on the data. The profitability of the residential mortgage product is based on fully absorbed costs. So the per-unit cost not only contains direct origination and maintenance costs such as the mortgage originator and the loan servicing department, but also the indirect costs such as a portion of the FIs senior lender, and overhead expenses such as portions of the Finance Department.

What the data shows is that, in an era of needing loans on our books or revenue through our income statement, mortgage loans are doing relatively well. Why shouldn't we do more of it?

One reason may be the variability of volumes. For example, volumes were down in my home state of Pennsylvania from 2009 through 2010, the latest year HMDA data is available. In 2009, there were 374 thousand loans funded for $62 billion. In 2010, 334 thousand loans were funded for $55 billion. This variability is common, and FIs must build their capability with a greater percentage of variable expenses than other lines of business so they can decrease expenses as volumes decrease. But come on people, although down, $55 billion of loans are being funded per year in Pennsylvania alone!

Residential mortgages are critical components of being a community FI. Most of our customers either have them, will need them, or have had them. A fair amount of small business funding can be achieved through residential lending, either through straight mortgages or home equity loans. Big government and aggressive loan brokers made us small players in the market.

I say we should take it back! What do you say?

~ Jeff