Posted on 09/18/2019 4:19:16 AM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
Lenders thought it was time to shrink their mortgage businesses. Now theyre finding they were wrong.
With rates for home loans sinking to their lowest levels since late 2016, Wells Fargo & Co., the biggest mortgage lender in the U.S., has boosted staffing for the business by about 10% this year and plans to keep hiring. Bank of America Corp. is hiring in areas including sales, processing, and underwriting.
The mortgage industry has added almost 5,000 employees since March, a 1.5% gain, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Its a stark reversal from a year ago, when the Federal Reserve was hiking interest rates and banks were cutting thousands of jobs.
Employment in the mortgage lending business has been shrinking for more than a decade, thanks first to the housing crunch and then to rising rates. In 2006, there were more than half a million workers in mortgages, compared with about 323,000 in June.
Now demand for the loans is rising high enough and fast enough that lenders seem to be doing something. The volume of applications for refinancing mortgages has more than tripled since December, according to a barometer from the Mortgage Bankers Association.
(Excerpt) Read more at finance.yahoo.com ...
First you need to understand the mortgage industry. The banks are the servicers not the lenders. They lend the money for the initial loan then immediately sell it to a large investor like Fannie or Freddie. You make your payment to them but they no longer own your mortgage.
The banks don’t have the money to continue holding a mortgage because they need the money back to loan it out again on new loans next month. Occasionally they will sell to another investor who may service their own loans in which case you might get a letter telling you to start sending your payment to so and so because your loan has been sold.
Most of the time if you are making your payment to Chase, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Fifth Third etc. They are just servicing your loan. They sold it to Fannie or Freddie 30 days after you closed.
Unless the servicer also owns the loan if they take the house back due to non payment they have to assign it over to the entity that holds the note. They don’t get to keep it.
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