This Is the City Where the Most People Refinance Mortgages

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Jun 3, 8:10AM EDT

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This Is the City Where the Most People Refinance Mortgages — © marchmeena29 / iStock via Getty Images

The housing markets have been on fire. Home prices have surged across most of the nation. One reason for this is lower mortgage rates. Another is the migration of people from large cities, mostly on the coasts, to more affordable, smaller cities. Finally, middle- and upper-class incomes stayed solid over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, for the most part. The mortgage activity has come in two parts. The first is new home mortgages. The second is the refinancing of mortgages as people go for lower rates.
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Research firm ATTOM Data Solutions has just issued its “Q1 2021 U.S. Residential Property Mortgage Origination Report.” The 3.77 million mortgages issued in the quarter secured by residential properties was 71% higher than in the same quarter a year ago. Of these, 2.55 million were refinancing, which was up 113% from the same period last year.

Todd Teta, chief product officer at ATTOM Data Solutions pointed out:

Homeowners lined up to refinance their loans in ever-growing numbers during the first quarter of 2021, making for a highly unusual quarterly increase in total lending activity for that time of year. The home-mortgage industry almost always slows down in Winter, but not this year because of so many homeowners hopping on super-low interest rates to reduce their monthly payments.

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Refinancing also rose from the fourth quarter of last year in 78.7% of the 211 metro areas with populations over 200,000. This activity rose by at least 10% in 114 of these markets.

Among markets with more than 200,000 people, the largest increase since the fourth quarter of last year was in Jackson, Mississippi, where it rose 92.8%. In Springfield, Massachusetts, it was higher by 59.5%, and Medford, Oregon, saw a jump of 57.3%. Buffalo, New York, followed with a rise of 55.0%, and then Macon, Georgia, where the figure was 53.3% higher. Clearly, there was no geographic pattern.

Among cities with over a million residents, aside from Buffalo, were Las Vegas (up 37.2%), Milwaukee (31.8%), Atlanta (31.3%) and Providence, Rhode Island, (31.2%). Once again, there is no geographic pattern.

While it is difficult to forecast if this refinancing activity will continue, interest rates have started to move higher, which at some point will make the action less attractive.

Click here to see which county has the most expensive homes.
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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.