mortgagetape^™

Response

Athene Annuity and Life Company’s whole-loan mortgage portfolio concentration at Dec-31 2025, top 10 states:

What stands out:

• California at 28% is the dominant exposure. No other single state is above 12%. The $11.8B in-state carrying value is itself larger than most insurers’ entire whole-loan book. California also has Athene’s highest per-loan carrying value in the top 10 (~$618K), consistent with higher property values rather than any coupon or product-mix shift.
• Sun Belt concentration is explicit. California + Florida + Texas + Arizona + Georgia + North Carolina = 56.2% of UPB. These are the metros where residential price appreciation and population growth have run hardest post-2020, so this is where a yield-seeking buyer with duration flexibility accumulated inventory.
• New Jersey at #3 is the Northeast exception. $3.27B / 3,834 loans at ~$854K average is higher-balance jumbo territory — probably correspondent flow from New York-metro originators, pricing richer than the Sun-Belt average.
• Average loan size by state illustrates the mix. California $618K, New Jersey $854K, and New York $507K read as near-jumbo / jumbo residential. Florida $375K, Texas $314K, Georgia $318K, North Carolina $309K are closer to agency-conforming balances. Athene is holding both buckets but weights toward the higher-coupon non-conforming piece in the Northeast and California.

Context: Athene is the Apollo-owned retirement-services carrier, and its $41.9B mortgage book sits inside a ~$320B general-account investment portfolio backing fixed and indexed annuity liabilities. Residential whole loans are an attractive asset because they match Athene’s long-dated liabilities and carry a yield pickup over agency MBS of equivalent duration (the trade-off being prepayment risk, which Athene actively hedges). The geographic footprint tracks where that trade is best-paid — namely, where price appreciation has made loan-to-value cushions comfortable.

Methodology note: rank uses carrying value (recorded investment net of amortization/OTTI), not original UPB. 624 loans in Athene’s 2025 filing have no state field populated (statutory filings do allow a blank state field for certain structured positions); those are excluded from this breakdown. Non-US holdings — if any — appear as ISO-3166 country codes rather than state codes.