Owing largely to the lowest mortgage interest rates in more than three decades and rising home prices, close to 10 million of regular home mortgages were refinanced. I use the term regular mortgage to exclude both home equity and construction loans.
The outsized dollar volume of these refinancings - by our estimates, $ trillion net of cash-outs - was an all-time record and represented almost one-third of the value of all regular home mortgages outstanding at the beginning of last year. Total regular mortgage originations, at $ trillion, also proceeded at a record pace.