Black Knight’s Walden on mortgage delinquencies in 2021

Today’s HousingWire Daily features an exclusive interview with Andy Walden, an economist and the director of market research at Black Knight. In this episode, Walden discusses Black Knight’s latest report, which indicates that although delinquencies improved in November, nearly 2.2 million seriously past-due mortgages remain.

Here is a small preview of today’s interview with McBride. The transcript below has been lightly edited for length and clarity:

HousingWire: According to November’s delinquency data provided to HousingWire by Black Knight, mortgage delinquencies improved for the sixth consecutive month in November, falling to 6.33% from 6.44% in October. However, while the national delinquency rate is now down 1.5 percentage points from its peak of 7.8% in May, it still remains a full three percentage points above pre-pandemic levels.  While we can largely attribute this climb to the COVID-19 pandemic, can you explain to our listeners what this means for the mortgage market?

Andy Walden: Yeah, absolutely. I think we can fully attribute what we’re seeing in the mortgage market right now to the COVID pandemic. If we look at where delinquencies were heading into the pandemic, we were at record lows and actually seeing mortgage delinquency rates fall. And then obviously, we hit a pretty big speed bump here in 2020, with the pandemic, but I think broadly speaking when we look at delinquency rates, what they tell us is that even though we’re six months into this recovery, we’re still seeing very elevated levels of overall mortgage delinquencies. We’re still seeing 3% of mortgage holders behind on mortgage payments and based on that six-month recovery trend, we could be looking at elevated levels of mortgage delinquencies, not only all the way through 2021, but into 2022 as well.

HousingWire Daily examines the most compelling articles reported from the HousingWire newsroom. Each afternoon, we provide our listeners with a deeper look into the stories coming across our newsroom that are helping Move Markets Forward. Hosted by the HW team and produced by Alcynna Lloyd and Victoria Wickham.