Published December 2002

Mortgage brokers, lenders report brisk business

By Kimberly Hilden
SCBJ Assistant Editor

While other sectors of the economy have been hurting this past year, the mortgage industry isn’t one of them.

Thanks to interest rates near historic lows during the past few months, many Snohomish County mortgage brokers and lenders have experienced an explosion in business as people take advantage of those rates to buy their first home, buy “up” to a better home or refinance.

“Every time that we’ve thought that it was going to slow down, rates have gone down and business picks up again,” said John Fairchild, chief executive officer of Phoenix Savings Bank, noting that in November, the Federal Reserve lowered the federal funds rate by a half point.

“The sheer volume of the last 120 days is way up,” added Mark Palmer, president of Integra Pacific Mortgage Inc., a Lynnwood broker. “There’s a statistic I recently read from the Washington Association of Mortgage Brokers: We’re up 1,000 percent from year 2000.”

And those volumes represent a wide spectrum of clients, from first-time homebuyers to people close to retirement who are considering refinancing for a 10-year mortgage, Palmer said.

“We’re seeing a lot of buyers, because they can get a bigger house. Or the kind of house they couldn’t afford last year, they can get now,” said Roy LaRue, managing partner of Lake Mortgage Associates, a mortgage broker and banker.

According to reports from the Northwest Multiple Listing Service, which represents a group of real estate agents from 14 area counties, the volume of pending sales in the Puget Sound region in October increased 32.4 percent compared to October 2001, rising from 4,364 to 5,777.

Over at Phoenix Savings Bank, lenders are seeing three to four times the volumes they usually see in home loans, especially refinancing requests, Fairchild said.

Refinancing has definitely gone up, not only for Phoenix, but for the county as a whole, Fairchild said, citing a report from Rocky Mountain Statistics, which found September loans for home purchases in the county totaled $143 million, while loans for refinances totaled $713 million.

“Normally, refinances are about 20 percent of the purchases,” he said, adding that the bank has increased its clerical staff by about 25 percent to handle the higher volumes.

Back to the top/December 2002 Main Menu