“What do you call James Bond having a bath? Bubble 07.” In different bond matters, mortgage rates will always be higher than Treasury rates, in part because of the prepayment risk in mortgages that doesn’t exist with Treasury bonds. With the drop in rates, sales management personnel at lenders are busy figuring out how best to remind the staff about EPO (early payoff) penalties levied by investors while at the same time working on ways to save money besides furloughing, cutting staff, outsourcing, and re-doing vendor contracts. The recent decline in rates and increase in applications is welcome: According to Curinos, November 2023 funded mortgage volume decreased 11 percent YoY and 10 percent MoM. In the Retail channel, funded volume was down 22 percent YoY and 10% MoM. The average 30-year conforming retail funded rate in November was 7.45 percent, 25bps higher than October and 85bps higher than the same month last year. (Curinos sources a statistically significant data set directly from lenders to produce these benchmark figures, and drills into this data further here.) Today’s podcast can be found here, and this week’s is sponsored by nCino, makers of the nCino Mortgage Suite for the modern mortgage lender. nCino Mortgage Suite’s three core products, nCino Mortgage, nCino Incentive Compensation, and nCino Mortgage Analytics, unite the people, systems, and stages of the mortgage process. Hear an Interview with nCino’s Ben Miller on incentive compensation data and origination cost reductions that are separating profitable from unprofitable companies in the mortgage industry.