And fundamentally, as you know, from all the MBA data, there just aren’t that many Americans who would benefit from a refinance right now. So our assumptions are that refinance for all of 2023 is deminimis and that is why we are so focused on driving purchase. So how are we going to drive purchase? One of the things we’ve observed is that starting around the second quarter of 2020, our market share in purchase started to drop off and it started to drop off largely because of the behavior of our partners. They were focused on refinance because it converted and that was where they could make money. And so critically, we looked at ourselves last year and said, okay, we’ve got to regain share in purchase. That’s hard to do because purchase has a longer journey from when the consumer comes to our site to when they actually convert.
One of the things we’re trying to do is get better information as to where that consumer is in their process. If they are late in the funnel closer to buying a home, closing on a home, we want to know that and share that information with our partners that will make them convert better. So that is our — fundamentally that is our strategy and why we’re so focused on purchase, because we’re assuming that refi does not come back anytime soon. We have been thrilled with the performance of home equity. Two years ago, I don’t think anybody in our company thought that the home equity product could reach the scale that it has reached. And what we’re encouraged by is that many of our lender partners are adding that product. And so we’re getting to real Home Equity.
Historically, we talked about the fact that we had lenders who would buy volume from us of consumers interested in Home Equity and try and convince them to do a cash out refinance, that still goes on, it’s just a lesser percentage than it used to be. And so the health of the Home Equity product is quite good. We’re really happy with the progress that we’ve made there as a replacement. We obviously would love to see an environment where we’re not so dependent on it. Now, one thing we obviously focused on with Home Equity is it is — they are smaller loan sizes than typical purchase or refi. And so our unit economics there. That’s one of the things we’ve been watching closely. The flip side of that is, many of our lenders were recently having dialogue with lenders who think they can close more quickly on Home Equity, since automation is helping the growth in that market, which is great.
So as you think about our guide, we’ve been very conservative with respect to refi. We do think there’s just some pure market share and purchases, always weak in the beginning of the year. And it will start to lift in March and April, we want to be prepared for purchase season. And then we’ve assumed that we can hold the performance of Home Equity. And we’re just trying to navigate this home segment right now. I will say I had a lender say to me in early to mid-January, they said to us last week was our best week in seven . And we were thrilled. But obviously we’ve seen rates jumped even since then and we have to kind of navigate this cycle with our partners. So when you see a little bit of a give back in rates we are encouraged not because all of a sudden there’s some huge pool of refinance.
But we know that it does help our lenders with respect to lender health. And that’s why I think we’re going to be in for that for the remainder of 2023. And, our guide on Home, we’re very conservative there. We think that it’s going to be entirely mostly Home Equity throughout the year.
