TransUnion released its quarterly Mortgage Credit Industry Insights Report early Tuesday. The consumer credit reporting agency looked back on the mortgage business the first half of 2024. Here are three tidbits from the report.

Area 15. It’s no surprise that the 30-year mortgage is the dominant type of mortgage loan in the U.S. It’s been the standard for decades. But the TransUnion reports make it clear just how popular is this loan term.

Of the mortgage originated in second quarter of 2024, 88.6% were of the 30-year variety compared to shorter-term loans or balloon mortgages. (In the same quarter in 2015, just 74.3% of all mortgages were for a 30-year term.) The 15-year mortgage hasn’t gone away, but it’s dropped from 13.4% of all mortgages in the second quarter of 2015 to just a tiny fraction of all mortgages in second quarter 2024.

Bleeding stopped. The last two years the mortgage market was a nightmare with steep double-digit decreases in year-over-year originations, according to TransUnion. Just look at 2022: Mortgage originations dropped 44.6% year over year in the first quarter, 47% in second quarter, 56.4% in third quarter and a mind-numbing 64.5% in the fourth quarter.

Last year, the drop in volume wasn’t as pronounced, but every quarter saw a drop of 10% or more year over year. That’s finally changed in the first half of this year. TransUnion reports that mortgage origination volume increased 1.8% year over year in the first quarter 2024 and 3.6% in second quarter 2024.

Refinance bounce. Home equity origination volume rose 8% year over year, according to TransUnion. Those loans eclipsed more than 600,000 in origination volume for the first time since 2022. That also ended five straight quarters of annual declines.

Still, purchase volume outpaced refinance originations by six to one in the second of quarter 2024, according to the report. That’s a far cry short of what was happening in second quarters of 2020 and 2021 when purchase and refinance volume was one for one.