Regional players are continuing to pull out and credit unions continually learn month-over-month that this is probably not their best target market. We are holding firm at $100 million a month until we see the fruits of our credit tightening and our portfolio performance, but nonetheless, we are planning to grow when the time requires it. Moving on to portfolio performance, certainly there’s macroeconomic headwinds that are weighing on some of our more recent vintages, particularly the 2022s and early 2023 vintages. Inflation and raising interest rates are the headwinds that make affordability an issue for our customers. That’s — but we must consider that that’s balanced out with the fact that there’s been no recession yet. Most talking heads believe that there’s not going to be a recession, and if there is one, it’s going to be very soft and short, and equally, if not more important, the unemployment rate still hovers in the mid-3s, which is well below the target 5s, which is one of the key economic metrics that we monitor for the success of our business.
So we’re looking good there. For the quarter, DQ delinquencies, including repossession inventory, ended at 13.31% of the total portfolio, as compared to 10.85% in the same quarter in 2022. Annualized net charge-offs for the quarter were 6.86% of the portfolio, as compared to 4.93% in the same quarter of 2022. Extensions were up slightly, but still at average over the course of the last five years and repossessions were actually down quarter-over-quarter. On the recovery front, we — which helps offset our losses, we’re happy to report that recoveries are stabilizing in the low 40s, which is up from the low 30s, which we experienced earlier this year. That’s something that we don’t control, that we’re seeing is coming our way to help our performance going forward.
So while our portfolio performance has ticked up overall in Q3, we are taking solace in the fact that, at least from what we’ve heard in the market from investors, from bankers, that we are outperforming our competitors in this space. In the quarter, we also continue to employ several unique strategic changes to improve performance, especially on collection tactics. We were successful in hiring 96 new collectors over the last 10 months to lower our accounts per collector by over 100. This allows more in-depth collection tactics, such as skip tracing and talk-offs, and we believe that this is improving our performance the last couple of months and going forward. We also built up our near-shore collection program to focus on potential DQ accounts, reduce the roll rate and increase the use of our power dialer.
So it’s all hands on deck on servicing to collect the 2022 and early 2023 vintages. One last thing, in the quarter we launched our Gen 8 Originations Model. This model is a complete refresh of our Gen 7 Model that launched in 2021. We try to refresh these models every 18 months to 24 months, so we hit our target on implementing the Gen 8 Model. This model utilizes machine learning AI on our most recent originations to better score applicants. It’s infused with updated alternative data, and importantly, some new fraud scores to reduce fraud. We believe that this is our best buy box yet and we also believe that it should improve performance going forward. So, with that, I’ll kick it back to Brad.
Charles Bradley: Thanks, Mike. So that’s a lot of information in terms of what the company’s been doing. In terms of where we sit in the industry, as both guys pointed out, it’s been somewhat turbulent times. Everyone got quite aggressive after the — during the pandemic with all the money flowing to the customers. People grew a lot and were aggressive. We’re now all, as an industry, beginning to pay the price for that, because the 2022 performance has not been as good as everybody expected. Again, as the guys pointed out, our performance has actually been way better than some and way better than most. So we’re kind of happy with where we sit. It kind of means our control is really hung in there. However, what that does leave us sitting in is a position where we’re not really ready to go full bore again.
