Mortgage Refinance Offers Up 42% Over Past Year [New LendingTree Report]

As the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic subsided and inflation rose, interest rates also increased. Specifically, mortgage rates more than doubled from their record 2021 lows, with sub-3.00% interest rates giving way to rates closer to 8.00%. Owing to this dramatic rise, demand for mortgage refinancing declined sharply, cratering from its highest level in around a decade to a more than 20-year low.

However, that’s rapidly changing. Inflation has cooled, the Federal Reserve has begun making cuts to its benchmark rate, and average mortgage rates have fallen by dozens of basis points from their 2024 highs. With that in mind, LendingTree analyzed mortgage refinance offers given to users of our online marketplace and compared how they’ve changed since 2023. 

• Nationwide, the share of 30-year, fixed-rate mortgage refinances offered to users of the LendingTree marketplace jumped by 41.59% from September 2023 to September 2024. 
• APRs on offered mortgage refinances fell by 156 basis points from an average of 8.19% in September 2023 to an average of 6.63% in September 2024. This decline in rates helped reduce the average monthly payment on offered loans by $136, even though average loan amounts increased by $16,245.
• The share of mortgage refinance offers increased by more than 100.0% (more than doubling) in 10 states — West Virginia, Connecticut, Oklahoma, Illinois, Iowa, Indiana, New Jersey, Arkansas, New Hampshire and Maryland. 
• Of the 10 states where refinance offers jumped the most, West Virginia, Connecticut and Oklahoma saw the largest increases. Refinance offers more than tripled in West Virginia, jumping by 235.69%. 

You can check out the full report here: https://www.lendingtree.com/home/mortgage/refinance-offers-study/

LendingTree's Senior Economist and report author, Jacob Channel, had this to say:

"The road to lower mortgage rates is going to be a bumpy one. As the last month showed, mortgage rates are often volatile and when there is as much economic uncertainty as there is now, we should expect them to be even more erratic than usual. While there is still a good chance that mortgage rates will come down over time, we may not see them show sustained declines until next year. If that’s the case, we probably aren’t going to see sustained refinance demand until 2025 either."

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