As I noted earlier, that extraction appears to parallel the realized capital gains on home sales, which mainly reflect the number of existing home sales. Home price change, of course, is also a factor, but it is the average change over the length of occupancy - nearly ten years for the typical homeowner - that matters, not recent price trends.
Similarly, refinancing and the cash-outs associated with them accelerated last year as the decline in mortgage interest rates on new loans far exceeded the modest decline in the average rate on all outstanding regular home mortgages. This wider spread between the current mortgage rate and the rate on outstanding loans, as you all know, markedly increased the incentive to refinance.