Millions of Americans may have wanted to get into the housing market over the last several years, but have had difficulty doing so because of lenders' origination standards. That, in turn, seems to have created a situation over the last several years that could leave those financial institutions in a tough spot down the road.

The average age of a mortgage has been steadily rising since before the housing bubble burst nearly a decade ago, and this is largely attributable to the fact that lending has been kept extremely tight for most of that time, according to the latest data from Black Knight Financial Services. As a consequence, there may be significant issues for lenders going forward, but it's worth noting that their standards have likely also led to all-time low credit risk; among loans origination over the last three years, delinquencies are lower than for any other period, even when those loans were extended to subprime borrowers.

"In terms of the entire active mortgage population, average loan age has been rising steadily for at least the last nine years," said Kostya Gradushy, Black Knight's manager of research and analytics. "The high volume of originations in 2013 resulted in a temporary slowdown. However, the average loan age since then has hit its highest level ever at 54 months [4.5 years]. Reviewing the data at a more granular level, we see that the age of loans with credit scores of 750 and above has remained relatively constant for the last five years. However, lower credit score loans – particularly those with scores below 700 – have seen dramatic increases in average age."

Older borrowers drive up delinquency?
Because post-recession lending has generally been so safe, the recent uptick in delinquency – an increase of 4.68 percent from July to August, to an overall rate of 5.9 percent – could largely be the result of falling ability to keep up with bills among older borrowers who have had their mortgages for quite some time, the report said. Meanwhile, though, even as delinquency rose slightly, the amount of homes in the foreclosure inventory took another tumble, falling 2.8 percent to the national level of 1.8 percent.

Because of these potential issues in the market, it might be wise for lenders to start looking into new methods of helping to reach consumers who might want to get into the housing market but may have been deterred by high qualification standards for years.