The beginning of the year brought widespread predictions of gloom and doom among mortgage brokers, spurred by expected spring interest rate spikes and burdensome RESPA reforms.

But a funny thing happened, or didn’t happen, on the way to mortgage lending oblivion. Rates have thus far stayed at or near historic lows, and business was kept floating by a surge in tax-credit driven spring sales.

“We’ve had a little bit of a pickup, a few refis coming through,” said Brian Koss, managing partner at the Mortgage Network in Danvers. “Purchases haven’t dropped off as much as we thought they would.”

The Greek debt crisis threatening European banks has lured safety-seeking investors back to U.S. Treasuries, which has in turn kept interest rates low. According to Freddie Mac’s Primary Mortgage Market Survey, both 15- and 30-year fixed mortgage rates nationwide have hit historic lows and stayed there for the past several weeks.

The extended trough in bank rates has been a welcome surprise to most industry observers. Many predicted a rate spike when the Federal Reserve stopped buying mortgage-backed securities in March.

Not So Fast

But that doesn’t quite mean the sun has broken out either – even with rates as low as they’ve ever been, brokers still have plenty of worries on their plate.

Brokers say they’re just not seeing strong interest from first time homebuyers now that the first time homebuyer tax credit has ended.

Mortgage purchase applications have declined nationwide. Weekly mortgage purchase applications dropped 35 percent at the beginning of June, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association, before ticking up slightly in recent weeks.

“Applications have been bouncing up and down a little bit, but if you look at where they are relative to where they were from where we were during some of the refi-booms, we’re less than a third of the level of the peak in 2003 and less than half of where we were when rates hit an all time low in March of 2009,” Michael Fratantoni, MBA’s vice president of research and economics, told Banker & Tradesman.

Brokers also said one of the biggest obstacles is that there simply aren’t enough homeowners with equity in their homes to spark strong refinance interest.

“There’s not nearly the flurry of activity that one would expect given how low rates are,” said Amy Tierce, president of Fairway Independent Mortgage in Needham. “Most of the people who could do it have done it.”

Over the past decade, the average time between a home purchase mortgage and a mortgage refinancing has been about three years, according to Freddie Mac data.

But buyers who purchased three years ago were buying into the tail end of the boom, often using low- (or no-) down payment loans. After almost three solid years of price declines in most areas, that has left a much smaller pool of new owners with sufficient equity in their property to refinance. Statewide, median single-family and condo prices have fallen to $263,000 at the end of May from 2005 highs of $332,000, a 20.7 percent plunge, according to data from The Warren Group, publisher of Banker & Tradesman.

A Silver Lining

Appraisals, too, have been a problem in many areas.

“Sometimes it’s not just value, it’s that there are no [comparable sales],” said Tierce. “It doesn’t matter [what the price is], because I can’t find anything that’s sold in the last three months.”

But she is hopeful that with more recent closings generated by spring’s tax credit-oriented sales will make obtaining fair appraisals easier.

Of course, it’s not just potential homebuyers and those eligible for refinancing whose ranks have thinned in the past few years. The number of brokers has dropped, too. In 2007, the Division of Banks had 1,511 licensed mortgage brokers in the state. By the end of last year, there were approximately 600 remaining.

Still, some see a silver lining in that precipitous 60 percent drop. Fewer brokers fighting for pieces of an admittedly smaller pie can still mean bigger slices of market share for those remaining.

“The rates are getting out there. The fact that my volume’s what it is is also directly related to the fact that there’s [fewer licensed originators] in the state of Massachusetts now,” said. Rich Bettencourt, Jr., director of the Mortgage Assistance Co. in Danvers. “For us, May, June, July and August are going to be great months.”