Rocket Pro TPO, the wholesale arm of Rocket Mortgage, upped its agency conforming loan limits to $802,650 in 48 states, ahead of an announcement by the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) that is expected in November.
For Alaska and Hawaii, the ceiling on loans originated by Rocket Pro TPO and purchased by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac rose to $1,204,000.
Rocket Pro TPO will honor these expected loan limits for mortgage applications on Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac conventional products starting Friday, the company said.
“We’re doing it way sooner than we typically do, which is a pretty big deal,” Mike Fawaz, executive vice president at Rocket Pro TPO, said in an interview with HousingWire.
“With Rocket’s liquidity and our position, we’re able to do so before anyone else. We’re able to hold these loans on a book for quite some time. When I think of the significance of it, if you have a client today that’s looking to purchase and they fall between these two limits, instead of getting a jumbo loan, you can now do a conventional loan.”
The increased conforming loan limit will enable Rocket’s broker partners to help a larger pool of people who didn’t move forward because of the existing loan limits, or those who are waiting for the new loan limit announcement from the FHFA, Fawaz added.
Rocket’s decision shows that the mortgage lender is confident that the maximum loan limit set by the federal government will rise by at least 4.71% in 2025. FHFA’s baseline conforming loan limit for mortgages backed by Fannie and Freddie in 2024 was $766,550, up 5.5% from 2023.
Conforming loan limits usually follow the changes in home prices. National home prices rose by 4.3% year over year in July 2024, according to CoreLogic data.
With Rocket Pro TPO being the first to raise conforming loan limits on agency-eligible loans, other lenders are expected to follow suit.
In 2022, Rocket Pro TPO announced in September that it would be increasing conforming loan limits by 3.3% to $715,000. Rocket’s competitor, United Wholesale Mortgage, made the same move the following day.
The Housing and Economic Recovery Act (HERA) established a formula in 2008, which mandated that the conforming loan limit could only rise after home prices returned to pre-recession levels. That condition was finally met in 2016 when the FHFA increased the conforming limits for the first time in a decade.