New MI Plunges

The amount of primary new insurance written by the members of the Mortgage Insurance Cos. of America totaled $22.0 billion in November, down 28% from $30.6 billion in October.November was mortgage insurers' worst month of the year by far in terms of volume, as the total fell below the levels of the traditional category alone in the earlier months. Rising mortgage rates seem to have put a damper on the volume of business written, but many in the industry are welcoming the rise because it will stem the problems the companies are having with persistency. (The data were affected by the fact that Radian Guaranty left MICA in July 2003 and no longer supplies data to the trade group.) By type, there was $17.2 billion of traditional and $4.9 billion of bulk insurance written. The number of applications received fell from 233,393 in October to 154,348 in November. Pool risk written totaled $124.5 million in November, and the cure/default ratio was 95.5%, with 40,071 cures and 41,979 defaults. MICA can be found on the Web at www.micadc.org.