Prepayment speeds for qualified mortgages (QM loans) have anecdotally been faster than non-QM loans. For various reasons, the data necessary to analyze interest rate incentive response has not been readily available for these categories of mortgages.

In order to facilitate the generation of traditional refinancing curves (S-curves) over the last year, we have normalized data to improve the differentiation of QM versus non-QM loans within non-agency securities.

Additionally, we isolated the population to remove prepay impact from loan balance and seasoning.

The analysis below was performed on securitized loans with 9 to 36 months of seasoning and an original balance between 200k and 500k. S-curves were generated for observation periods from January 2016 through July 2021.

Results are shown in the table and chart below.

Edge-QM-vs-Non-QM-Refi-Incentive


Edge-QM-vs-Non-QM-Refi-Incentive

For this analysis, refinance incentive was calculated as the difference between mortgage note rate and the 6-week lagged Freddie Mac primary mortgage market survey (PMMS) rate. Non-QM borrowers would not be able to easily refi into a conventional mortgage. We further analyzed the data by examining prepayments speeds for QM and non-QM loans at different level of SATO. SATO, the spread at origination, is calculated as the difference between mortgage note rate and the prevailing PMMS rate at time of loan’s origination.

Edge-QM-vs-Non-QM-Refi-Incentive

Using empirical data maintained by RiskSpan, it can be seen the refinance response for QM loans remains significantly faster than Non-QM loans.

Using Edge, RiskSpan’s data analytics platform, we can examine any loan characteristic and generate S-curves, aging curves, and time series. If you are interested in performing historical analysis on securitized loan data, please contact us for a free demonstration.