Forecasting, Data, Underwriting Tools., Credit Monitoring Tools; Webinars and Thought Leadership; STRATMOR Insights

As an industry, we tend to care about interest rates, especially mortgage rates. (A recent STRATMOR piece is titled, “Mortgage Rates Are Not Random.”) But there is a group of people much less sensitive to rates and represent competition to lenders. All-cash home purchases have remained structurally elevated since early 2023, averaging 28 percent of existing home sales, well above the post-2015 norm of 23 percent, and consistently exceeding that benchmark since late 2022. Affluent households, relocating homeowners cashing out of higher-cost markets, investors, and increasingly ordinary savers primarily make up this group, underscoring how accumulated equity and liquidity are reshaping housing demand. While cash activity is far less prevalent in new home sales (largely due to higher price points) both segments have still seen above-trend cash buying in recent years. For housing finance markets, the implications are significant: elevated cash transactions effectively bypass mortgage origination, reducing the flow of loans into the Agency mortgage-backed securities market. Using current run rates, this translates into roughly 1.2 million annual home purchases (or about $385 billion in potential mortgage issuance) being removed from the system, tightening supply, and reinforcing technical support for mortgage spreads even as overall housing activity remains constrained. (Today’s podcast can be found here and this week’s ‘casts are sponsored by Figure, which is shaking up the lending world with their five-day HELOC, offering borrower approvals in as little as five minutes and funding in five days. Figure has hundreds of partners in the Banking, Credit Union, Home Improvement, and of course, IMB space embedding their technology. Today’s has an interview with CI&T’s Tim Von Kaenel on building, integrating, and optimizing technology to drive differentiation, modernize operations, and navigate an increasingly complex and fast-evolving digital landscape.