SunTrust Banks Inc. maintained its quarterly pace of mortgage originations while expanding its servicing portfolio and growing its residential assets.
SunTrust originated $4.952 billion during the first-three months of this year.
Business was mostly unchanged from the $4.956 billion funded during the final three months of last year.
The Atlanta-based financial institution provided the details of its operations and finances in its first-quarter 2016 earnings report released Friday.
Mortgage production slipped from the first quarter of last year, a period that saw $5.109 billion in home lending activity.
First-quarter 2016 originations
were made up of $2.251 billion in retail business and $2.701 billion in correspondent acquisitions.
Refinance share in the most-recent period was 53 percent,
widening from 48 percent in the last quarter of 2015.
Business during the current quarter is likely to surge based on applications, which leapt to $9.2 billion in the first-quarter 2016 from just $6.7 billion three months earlier.
SunTrust’s total mortgage servicing portfolio closed out the first quarter at $148.941 billion,
up from $148.232 billion as of the end of last year and $141.760 billion as of the same date last year.
The
“serviced for others” portion of the latest balance was $121.277 billion.
As of March 31, 2016, residential assets on the balance sheet totaled $38.616 billion. The bank’s investment portfolio was bolstered from year-end 2015, when it held $38.544 billion in residential loans, and the end of the first-quarter 2015, when the total was $38.028 billion.
Last month’s total was comprised of $0.623 billion in guaranteed mortgages, $25.148 billion in non-guaranteed loans and $12.845 billion in home-equity assets.
The non-guaranteed portion of residential investments had a
30-to-89 day delinquency rate of 0.35 percent, improving from 0.42 percent as of Dec. 31, 2015, and 0.40 percent as of March 31 of last year.
Home-equity delinquency was cut to 0.59 percent from 0.66 percent but was little changed from 0.60 percent as of the same date in 2015.
SunTrust also held $0.383 billion in residential construction loans as of the most-recent date.
Another $8.532 billion in commercial real estate assets were owned by SunTrust, growing from $8.190 billion as of Dec. 31, 2015, and $7.873 billion as of March 31, 2015.
The March 31, 2016, CRE holdings consisted of $6.034 billion in commercial mortgages and $2.498 billion in commercial construction loans.
Commercial mortgage delinquency crept up a basis point from
both the prior period and year-earlier period to 0.06 percent at the end of March 2016.
Mortgage income
improved to $122 million from $109 million in the final three months of 2015. Earnings were off, though, from $126 million in the first three months of last year.
First-quarter 2016 mortgage earnings consisted of $60 million in production income and $62 million in servicing income.
Across the entire SunTrust organization, income before the provision for income taxes slipped to $644 million from $672 million three months earlier. But earnings increased from $622 million a year earlier.
Employment amounted to 23,945 people as of the end of last month, diminishing from 24,043.
Staffing also subsided from 24,466 employees as of March 31, 2015.
Branch count finished the first quarter at 1,397 full-service banking offices, four fewer than at the end of 2015.
