Picture a member who bought their home in 2021. They locked in a 2.9% mortgage, watched rates climb to seven percent, and made a quiet decision somewhere along the way: they're not going anywhere. Not because they don't want more space, or a better school district, or a shorter commute. They do. But giving up that rate to get it doesn't make financial sense, and they know it.
So they stay. And their home, which has appreciated considerably in the years since they bought it, just sits there. Equity building. Needs accumulating. Life moving forward without the house changing with it.
This is not a niche scenario. According to Callahan & Associates' Trendwatch 4Q25 report, HELOC utilization across credit unions climbed to 56.7% by the end of 2025, up from 52.3% the year before. Home equity and first mortgage lending posted the highest growth rates in the loan portfolio. Members are not waiting for the housing market to unlock. They are finding other ways to put their equity to work.
The demand is there. The question is who is capturing it.
Here is what most credit unions are doing with this information: watching it. Tracking the volume. Noting that home equity is having a moment. Maybe refreshing the product page or updating a rate sheet.
Here is what most credit unions are not doing: looking at their own membership and identifying, specifically, which members are the most obvious candidates for a conversation right now.
That gap is not from lack of interest. Every credit union leader reading this wants to deepen member relationships. The problem is structural. Member data lives in multiple places. Mortgage history is in the core. Service interactions are somewhere else. Whether a member has had any recent touchpoint with the institution, what products they already hold, what life events have surfaced in conversation, those things rarely exist in one place where anyone can see the full picture clearly enough to act on it.
So the outreach doesn't happen. Or it happens in the form of a quarterly blast to everyone with a checking account, which is not a conversation so much as a coincidence if it ever lands at the right moment.
Meanwhile, that locked-in homeowner with $80,000 in equity is thinking about their kitchen. Or their kid starting college next fall. Or the roof that is not going to last another winter. They are not thinking about their credit union. They are googling lenders. And if a local bank or a fintech shows up in that search with a clean experience and a competitive rate, the credit union does not lose the member—they just lose the loan. Which feels like the same thing.
The credit unions that are winning this category are not doing anything exotic. They are working from a simple premise: the existing loan book is a prospecting list.
They know which members have a first mortgage originated more than three years ago. They have a sense of when that mortgage was originated and at what rate. They know what else that member holds and what they do not hold. And they are using that information to have targeted conversations, not with everyone, but with the members for whom the timing actually makes sense.
They are also paying attention to signals that have nothing to do with the mortgage itself. A member who just paid off a vehicle loan has more monthly cash flow and possibly a new sense of what to do with it. A member whose savings balance has been climbing steadily for eight months may be building toward something. A member who contacts the call center about a home insurance question is thinking about their property. Each of those is a moment. The credit union that recognizes it and shows up with something relevant earns the next conversation. The one that doesn't forfeits it by default.
The frontline piece matters too. When a member calls in about something routine and the person they speak with can see their full relationship at a glance, that call can become something more than a service transaction. Not by being pushy, but by being informed. "I noticed you've had your mortgage with us since 2021—have you thought about what you might do with the equity you've built?" That is not a sales line. That is a credit union acting like it actually knows its member.
The housing market is not going to unlock anytime soon. Homeowners who locked in low rates are staying put, and the equity in those homes keeps growing. The members who will act on it are going to act on it somewhere.
The only real question is whether your institution finds them first, or finds out later that someone else did.
Do you know which of your members are locked in right now?
