Radian Group Inc. (NYSE:RDN) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

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Rick Thornberry : Yes, Mihir, thank you for that question. And Derek, feel free to jump in to add to this. But on the — I would — given what we’ve come through from the great financial crisis all the way through today, I would say lenders remain extremely disciplined from an underwriting point of view. Obviously, the nature of the market today is a purchase-driven market. So we see certain attributes kind of increase generally LTVs because of first-time homebuyers; DTIs, the general purchase market attributes. But I’d say from a credit underwriting point of view, we tend to see lenders remaining very disciplined. As you know, Derek and his team have a very detailed and thorough process of monitoring the quality of our originators from a number of different attributes as well as from a servicing point of view. And I would say today, not really seeing those trends do anything other than what we would expect given the type of purchase market we’re in today.

Derek Brummer: The other thing I would add is we don’t see a lot of dispersion, I think, in terms of performance from the manufacturing quality kind of across lenders. The other thing to keep in mind is just from a pricing perspective, given kind of RADAR Rates platform, we have the ability, and we do exercise that to differentiate price based upon performance and where we see any sort of deterioration in terms of performance or manufacturing quality as well.

Rick Thornberry: Yes. And the regulatory restrictions that went in place as part of the post-financial crisis and really kind of do keep – put constraints on certain types of products that I think are meaningful from the markets we operate in. To your question about Radian Mortgage Capital, it’s a great question. It’s a timely question. As we’ve talked about, we’ve taken over the last couple of years as we’ve built the platform, gotten the license across the country really, put together an extremely talented team, a very lean and mean team, I should say, but they’re highly talented experienced folks. Derek and I have kept it gated and kind of taken a very measured approach because we thought the market was generally not – it was more or less challenging.

I would say, today, we see the opportunity opening, and we’re kind of exploring that opportunity, primarily related to the kind of the changes that have gone on through the banking system with the Basel III, obviously, the higher cost of funds. And then obviously, there are some other challenges, I think, to the banking mortgage product around some of the proposed CRA [ph] regulations, other things that are kind of impacting and causing banks to rethink their presence in the mortgage business, but most of all taking away a large part of the portfolio bid for non-agency production. So we’ve seen that market begin to rationalize and become interesting and attractive, and we just continue to explore the opportunity we see for the platform and the capabilities we have to create the appropriate risk-adjusted returns that we would expect from this business.

Operator: At this time, I show no further questions. I would like to turn the call back to Rick Thornberry for closing remarks.

Rick Thornberry : Thank you. And thank you, everyone, for your interest in Radian. We enjoy talking about our business each quarter with you, and we look forward to spending time with many of you over the coming days and weeks, kind of further interacting through discussions about the business. I also want to just take time, as I always try to do, is just reiterate the great work our team is doing to serve our customers and find ways to help our customers and say, navigate a challenging environment and also help each other as we all kind of find ourselves in different challenges through life. So I want to thank our team, and we look forward to the opportunity to talk to all of you as the days ahead come along. So take care, and I appreciate your time that you stay with us today.

Operator: This concludes today’s conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.

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