Black Knight, Inc. recently released its latest Originations Market Monitor report, looking at mortgage origination data through August 2021. Leveraging daily rate lock data from Black Knight’s Optimal Blue PPE, the Originations Market Monitor provides the industry’s earliest and most comprehensive view of origination activity.

“After starting the month below 3 percent, interest rates spent much of August hovering just above that point, with the conforming 30-year at 3.05 percent at month’s end, according to our OBMMI daily interest rate tracker,” Black Knight Secondary Marketing Technologies President Scott Happ said in the report. “That sub-3 percent period seems to have been enough to spur some high-credit-score and high-balance borrowers to refinance, as average credit scores rose along with the non-conforming share of the market.”

The month’s pipeline data showed that overall rate locks were up 1.3 percent from July, driven by a 7.6 percent increase in cash-out activity. The month’s rise puts cash-out refinance lending up more than 41 percent over the last three months, according to Black Knight.

The increase in cash-out activity was enough to push the overall refinance share of the market mix back above 50 percent for the first time since February even with rate/term lending remaining essentially flat (-0.5 percent). Locks on purchase loans stayed roughly flat as well, ticking down 0.8 percent from July as rising home prices and constrained for-sale inventory continue to put downward pressure on purchase lending volumes.

“The rise in cash-out lending is hardly surprising given the extraordinary growth we’ve seen in tappable equity this year,” Happ said. “We’ve now seen cash-out activity increase for three consecutive months, and with $173,000 in equity available to the average homeowner with a mortgage and home prices still climbing, there is still room in the market for growth. With equity levels at record highs and interest rates broadly expected to tick upward in coming years, cash-out lending is likely to play a much larger part in the overall refinance market.”