More than $1 million in loan applications pending at U.S. home loan agency

In the latest sign that lenders are trying to get their feet under them, U.N. loans agency Cenlar announced Tuesday that more than 1.2 million applications have been approved for loan guarantees under the Consumer Finance Protection Act (CFPA) in the past five months.

The agency said it received nearly 6.4 million applications in the first half of the year and expects to receive another 1.5 million applications over the next 12 months.

A total of 6.5 percent of those applications were for mortgages and 5.4 percent for credit cards.

“We’ve seen that the marketplace is getting more competitive, more accessible, and that we’ve seen some significant improvement in our ability to serve borrowers with a range of products and services,” said Dan O’Brien, Cenaler’s chief executive officer.

“These trends are a great opportunity for Cenelars customers and will help us expand and meet the demand for our products and service in the marketplace.”

While the number of loan approvals in the United States is up significantly from last year, the number is still far below the 10.5 billion loans that were approved in the U.K. in the same period.

O’Reilly Realty Holdings Inc., a leading U.k. real estate lender, said it was getting about 7.3 million applications for loan programs this year, compared to 8.7 million in the last year.

Overnight, another lender, Home Capital, announced that it had received almost 7.5 trillion dollars in loans this year and that it expects to get close to 8 trillion dollars this year.

A spokeswoman for the Federal Reserve Bank of New York said the Fed had begun to raise rates this year after cutting them last month.

But she noted that while rates are now at historically low levels, they are not expected to rise too much in the next year or so.

“It’s very likely that the Fed will not raise rates much in 2017,” said Jennifer Murguia, an economist at Credit Suisse.

She noted that rates are already at record lows.

“In a year that was characterized by record low rates, this rate hike is an obvious step in the right direction.”