The ""Federal Housing Administration"":http://www.fha.gov (FHA) insured 1.74 million single-family mortgages during fiscal year 2010, which for the federal agency ended in September. The collective value of the loans endorsed was $318.8 billion.
FHA's loan volume for the year was down 10.3 percent from 2009, and came in below the 1.87 million mortgages it had previously projected would be endorsed in the 2010 fiscal year.
[IMAGE] [COLUMN_BREAK]The federal mortgage insurer's 2010 business included 1.1 million mortgages for home purchases, 80 percent of which were for first-time homebuyers.
In addition, some 558,000 refinance transactions were insured, as well as 79,000 reverse mortgages.
With respect to refinancing, approximately 252,000 were former FHA mortgages, and 306,000 endorsements were conventional mortgage loans converting to FHA insured mortgages. Included in the refinance total for the year were 107 Hope for Homeowners (H4H) cases.
According to FHA's ""year-end operations report"":http://search.hud.gov/search?q=cache:7tAUFg75DPAJ:www.hud.gov/offices/hsg/rmra/oe/rpts/ooe/olcurr.xls+FHA+Outlook+Single-Family+Operations%2C+September&output=xml_no_dtd&ie=UTF-8&client=hud2009_frontend&proxystylesheet=hud2009_frontend&site=default_collection&access=p&oe=ISO-8859-1, just over 553,000 mortgages in its insurance programs were in a seriously delinquent status, meaning 90 days or more delinquent, at the end of September. That gives the agency a serious default rate of 8.4 percent. At the same time last year, its serious default rate was 8.3 percent.
During the fiscal year, FHA paid 303,402 claims to lenders -- 182,968 loss mitigation retention payments, 99,653 conveyance type claims, and 20,781 other claims.
As of the end of September, FHA had 6,624,780 mortgages in force with an outstanding balance of $897.5 billion.