Last summer, Bloomberg ran a piece documenting “the 2023 HELOC boom.” It was a human interest story more than anything else, but it drew attention to the interplay between soaring real estate values and rapidly rising rates for homeowners borrowing against their equity.

In one particularly amusing vignette, readers learned about a late twentysomething cop in Florida who opened a $50,000 line of credit on his recently-purchased condo with the intention of parlaying it into an investment property, only to end up trading options with the liquidity instead when the rate on the HELOC doubled to 8%.

Anyway, this story doesn’t get a lot of attention on a weekly basis, but given the renewed rise in home prices and what, according to Bankrate, are still some of the highest HELOC rates in more than two decades (around 9.3%), it’s worth noting that the Q4 vintage of the New York Fed’s household debt survey, released on Tuesday, showed HELOC limits increased $24 billion last quarter, and have grown by roughly 10% over the past two years after a decade of declines.

The figure above shows the breakdown. Americans’ HELOC balances (in blue) rose $11 billion in Q4 to $360 billion. It was the seventh consecutive quarterly increase.

Available credit (in red) was $570 billion, the most since Q4 of 2009. So, Americans collectively have well more than half a trillion dollars they can tap for home improvements, Prada bags and, of course, options trading. The good news is, rates on those loans are set to fall as the Fed begins to cut.

For what it’s worth, the latest Senior Loan Officer Opinion Survey, published earlier this week, suggested demand for HELOCs remains weak, even as it improved slightly.

On the supply side, the net share of banks tightening standards on home equity loans fell to 13.7% in the update, down from a net 28.8% in Q2 of 2023.

For context, the net percentage of banks tightening HELOC standards was 64.1% in the immediate aftermath of the pandemic lockdowns. It reached 80.4% after Lehman collapsed.