It is, of course, impossible to view the human suffering wrought by Hurricane Ida without being reminded of Hurricane Katrina’s impact 16 years ago. Fortunately, the levees are holding and Ida’s toll appears likely to be less severe. It is nevertheless worth taking a look at what happened to mortgages in the wake of New Orleans’s last major catastrophic weather event as it is reasonable to assume that prepayments could follow a similar pattern (though likely in a more muted way).
Following Katrina, prepayment speeds for pools of mortgages located entirely in Louisiana spiked between November 2005 and June 2006. As the following graph shows, prepayment speeds on Louisiana properties (the black curve) remained elevated relative to properties nationally (the blue curve) until the end of 2006.
Comparing S-curves of Louisiana loans (the black curve in the chart below) versus all loans (the green curve) during the spike period (Nov. 2005 to Jun. 2006) reveals speeds ranging from 10 to 20 CPR faster across all refinance incentives. The figure below depicts an S-curve for non-spec 100% Louisiana pools and all non-spec pools with a weighted average loan age of 7 to 60 months during the period indicated.
The impact of Katrina on Louisiana prepayments becomes even more apparent when we consider speeds prior to the storm. As the S-curves below show, non-specified 100% Louisiana pools (the black curve) actually paid slightly slower than all non-spec pools between November 2003 and October 2005.
As we pointed out in June, a significant majority of prepayments caused by natural disaster events are likely to be voluntary, as opposed to the result of default as one might expect. This is because mortgages on homes that are fully indemnified against these perils are likely to be prepaid using insurance proceeds. This dynamic is reflected in the charts below, which show elevated voluntary prepayment rates running considerably higher than the delinquency spike in the wake of Katrina. We are able to isolate voluntary prepayment activity by looking at the GSE Loan Level Historical Performance datasets that include detailed credit information. This enables us to confirm that the prepay spike is largely driven by voluntary prepayments. Consequently, recent covid-era policy changes that may reduce the incidence of delinquent loan buyouts from MBS are unlikely to affect the dynamics underlying the prepayment behavior described above.
RiskSpan’s Edge Platform enables users to identify Louisiana-based loans and pools by drilling down into cohort details. The example below returns over $1 billion in Louisiana-only pools and $70 billion in Louisiana loans as of the August 2021 factor month.
Edge also allows users to structure more specified queries to identify the exposure of any portfolio or portfolio subset. Edge, in fact, can be used to examine any loan characteristic to generate S-curves, aging curves, and time series. Contact us to learn more.
