New MI Rises

Private mortgage insurers wrote $34.9 billion of primary new insurance during the month of August, compared with $30.6 billion in July, according to data provided by the Mortgage Insurance Cos. of America.The figures for July and August do not include production from The Radian Group Inc., because the Philadelphia-based company withdrew its membership in MICA in a policy dispute. But including Radian, volume totaled $26.9 billion in August 2002. Traditional insurance written in August 2003 was $28.0 billion, down $246 million from July, while bulk policies written increased from $2.37 billion in July to $6.94 billion in August. A bad sign is that application volume was down in August. In July there were 291,678 applications, while in August there were 265,792. (However, that is still strong because in August 2002, with Radian included, the mortgage insurers received just under 5,000 more applications.) New pool risk written totaled $519.3 million in August, up from $387.8 million the previous month. For the first time since February, the cure/default ratio is heading in a positive direction, although defaults still outnumber cures. In August, the ratio was 91.2%, up from 78.5% in July, with 37,714 cures and 41,341 defaults. MICA can be found on the Web at www.micadc.org.