The new threshold for jumbo loans won’t officially revise until January, however, a number of our lenders are already increasing the limit for conforming loans in advance of the Federal Housing Finance Agency’s (FHFA) official announcement in November.
Several lenders have raised conforming mortgage limits to $750,000 ($1.125 million for high cost areas) ahead of the announcement.
To offer some background: Mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac buy most of the residential mortgages issued in the U.S. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were created by Congress in 1938 and 1970, respectively. They perform an important role in the nation’s housing finance system – to provide liquidity, stability and affordability to the mortgage market. They provide liquidity (ready access to funds on reasonable terms) to the thousands of banks and mortgage companies that make loans to finance housing. The maximum loan amount for a Fanne Mae or Freddie Mac loan is set once a year by their federal overseer, the Federal Housing Finance Agency. For 2023, the conforming loan limit is $726,200 in most parts of the country (in high-cost areas the cap is $1,089,300). Borrow more than that, and you’ll need a jumbo loan, a type of mortgage that typically requires more rigorous underwriting and imposes more rigid qualifying criteria than Fannie/Freddie loans do.
Lenders are anticipating that the new loan limit imposed by the FHFA for 2024 will be very close to $750,000, or perhaps slightly higher. When the FHFA announces the new limits for 2024 in late November, those numbers will be based on the agency’s quarterly home price indices for the year.
The lenders who are boosting loan limits in advance are allowing buyers to lock in loans today at the 2024 loan limit, assuming those new loans will close near the end of the year. They will simply hang onto those larger loans until early 2024 when the presumptive 2024 loan limits will take effect before selling them to Fannie/Freddie. Call us to take advantage of 2024 loan limits in 2023.