Home Equity Conversion Mortgage data has been added to the data libraries of RiskSpan, a leading provider of mortgage data analytics, the company announced Wednesday.
The HECM addition includes more than half a billion records from Ginnie Mae, expanding the ways industry professionals can analyze reverse mortgage data. Available through RiskSpan’s Edge platform, the data will serve as a standard of comparison for users’ own numbers, informing their credit models.
Since 2000, the National Reverse Mortgage Lenders Association has collaborated with the Arlington, Va.-based RiskSpan to produce their Reverse Mortgage Market Index, a proprietary senior home equity index released every quarter. The RMMI found a 1.9% increase in home equity for Americans aged 62 and older in the first quarter of 2018, while its index of 244.73 represented a record high.
Current conditions, like the growing boomer population and frequent warnings about Americans’ paltry retirement savings, make this an ideal time to start paying attention to HECM data, RiskSpan CEO Bernadette Kogler told RMD.
“We have also seen an increased interest from both investors as well as originators who appear to be positioning themselves for launching private programs,” she said. “Perhaps this is related to recent FHA program changes.”
RiskSpan’s interest in monitoring the mortgage market and its risks also makes it advantageous to add HECM data.
“With the exit of the large banks several years back, there is a concentration of counterparty risk with non-depository institutions who have varying degrees of financial strength,” she said. “We know that FHA has made several program changes to mitigate risk and we plan to study the impact, if any, on delinquencies and defaults from FHA program changes.”
The Edge platform contains more than 5 billion records spanning decades of collection.
Written by Maggie Callahan
