Over the past 40 years home mortgages have grown to represent about half of credit union lending in the States. This paper was developed in the belief that the US experience would provide useful insights to credit unions over here that are looking to expand into the mortgage market.
Major lessons learned by the Americans: the need to mitigate interest rate and diversification risks by creating collaborative support companies to interface with secondary mortgage markets, obtaining affordable liquidity from credit union-owned central finance facilities, hiring and retaining staff with specialised mortgage lending skills, and developing win-win relationships with local estate agents (the major influencers of where people go to finance their new homes).
The paper is available here for download.
