In 2020 and 2021, mortgage rates fell below 3% and almost every lender in the country looked like it was booming. Refinance volume exploded across the industry. But a boom built on rate-driven refinancing isn't the same as a boom built on a growing business — and once rates rose, the difference became impossible to hide.
We pulled application volume by loan purpose (purchase, refinance, cash-out refinance) for the 100 largest FHA lenders, 2018 through 2024, from CFPB HMDA data. The question: who was still standing once the refi wave receded — and who was just riding it?
Total application volume (purchase + refinance + cash-out combined), ranked by change:
| Lender | 2020 apps | 2024 apps | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| UWM | 40,317 | 57,760 | |
| CrossCountry | 3,481 | 3,490 | |
| Guild Mortgage | 5,163 | 4,014 | |
| Planet Home | 3,374 | 2,520 | |
| NewRez | 38,711 | 28,570 | |
| Freedom Mortgage | 27,765 | 12,277 | |
| Rocket | 201,249 | 75,263 | |
| loanDepot | 63,987 | 20,033 | |
| PennyMac | 54,859 | 12,993 | |
| Mr. Cooper | 29,406 | 5,358 | |
| Wells Fargo | 115,459 | 14,283 |
UWM is the only lender in this dataset with more application volume in 2024 than in 2020 — a year usually remembered as the industry's peak. Whatever UWM was building, it wasn't dependent on sub-3% rates.
CrossCountry didn't boom in 2020 and didn't bust in 2024 — its volume is almost perfectly flat across the entire period. That's a different kind of signal: less explosive, but it suggests a business that wasn't structured around the refi wave in the first place.
Wells Fargo, Mr. Cooper, and PennyMac lost 76-88% of their volume. Some of that mirrors the broader industry-wide refi collapse as rates rose from under 3% to over 7% — but the scale of the drop here is steeper than the across-market average, which raises the question of how much of their 2020 volume was rate-driven rather than durable.
Lenders with steadier volume in this dataset also tend to show lower overall denial rates in our 2024 HMDA analysis (UWM and CrossCountry are both below the group average). That's a real, observed relationship — but it's a correlation, not a proven cause. It could mean disciplined underwriting helped retain a stable client base. It could equally mean these lenders simply serve a different, more consistently-qualified applicant pool, and both the volume stability and the lower denial rate are downstream of that same factor. This data can't tell us which explanation is correct, so we're not claiming one.
This analysis is free to cite with attribution to FinanceRateCalc.com. Full lender-by-lender data, additional cuts (by loan purpose, by year), or a quote for your story — reach out at [email protected].
Prices and rates are widely reported. Whether a lender says yes is not. In the complete 2025 federal record, denial rates across the 100 largest FHA lenders ran from 1.8% to 78.7% — same programme, same year.
And it is not simply who applies where: standardizing on state, loan amount, income, debt-to-income and loan-to-value, applicant mix explains only a 2.7× range in expected outcomes.
CFPB HMDA 2025, computed by FinanceRateCalc. Covers the highest-volume lenders published per market, not all lenders. Historical observations, not predictions. CC BY 4.0, not independently reproduced.