The company's earlier First Look report found rates fell enough to incentivize significant refinancing in August, but later analysis done in the subsequent Mortgage Monitor report found it didn't do much to improve overall affordability. The average mortgage payment for all outstanding borrowers was $2,070 during the month.

"That's the highest or the largest share of median household income that's required to make that average mortgage payment since 2015," Andy Walden, vice president for research and analysis at ICE Mortgage, said during a webcast discussion of the numbers.

A combination of higher home prices, corresponding increases in loan sizes, taxes, insurance and other factors have contributed to this.

"Increased property insurance costs stand out; the average monthly insurance payment is up 52% since the start of 2020, with increases in some higher-risk areas as high as 90% over that same period," ICE Mortgage researchers wrote in the report.

Rising home prices contributed to a rise in the average price of premiums from $4.65 per $1,000 of coverage between 2013 and 2022 to $5.38, but they don't account fully for that surge in insurance costs, the researchers said.

"In higher-risk areas such as New Orleans, the share of the mortgage payment earmarked for insurance can be as high as 25%," they noted.

Even in inland areas like Oklahoma City, Wichita and Tulsa considered less exposed to traditional flood concerns, the share of the mortgage payment devoted to insurance has risen to around 15%.

Increasingly, recent disasters like Hurricane Helene suggest that flood risk is becoming less predictable, leading to more uninsured losses, said Travis Hodge, a managing director at digital insurance brokerage Viu by Hub, in an interview.

"A lot of these people didn't live in the flood plain," he said, referring to those impacted by that storm who weren't in areas considered high risk and therefore hadn't been subject to associated insurance requirements.

"They're finding out the hard way that flood is not covered," Hodge added, referring to traditional homeowner policies which typically exclude this risk.

The storm's impact is adding to insurer withdrawals from the region, said Helge Jørgensen, co-founder and CEO of 7analytics, a firm based in Norway that utilizes artificial intelligence and machine learning to predict floods and landslides.

"Insurance companies are pulling out of the area because they don't have the ability to identify the different buildings at risk, that, of course, is a big, big problem; because if you are insuring buildings, and they're hitting over and over again, it's really costly," he said in an interview.

Stress from disasters and related complications for insurance has elevated foreclosures in certain areas to more normalized levels, even though on average distressed loan risk has remained historically low, the ICE Mortgage researchers said.

"New Orleans is one of the areas that's back to prepandemic levels of portfolio activity," Walden said, citing one example.

The larger Louisiana/Mississippi area has some of the highest delinquency rates in the country, in addition to one of the softest home price environments, he noted.

"I would be pretty confident in saying that the insurance component and the pressures that insurance is putting on homeowners down there is impacting that market," Walden said. "It's causing folks to be willing to list their homes for sale, that's adding inventory and softening prices."

While insurance is the main concern in some areas, property taxes are a predominant contributor to costs in other places like Rochester and Syracuse, New York.

"While those two markets have the highest overall share going to taxes and insurance, the insurance share is just 6 to 7%," Gunnar Blix, director of housing market research at ICE Mortgage, said in webcast commentary on the research.

Property taxes account for 35% of the average monthly payment in Rochester and Syracuse, according to ICE Mortgage.

The Northeast in general is seeing some pronounced growth in taxation rates due to rising home prices and there is speculation that it may be correlated with some higher levels of distressed mortgage activity in certain regions.

"One of the other areas of the country where you're seeing foreclosure activity get back to normal is up in Albany and this kind of Western New York area as well," Walden said. "Whether that's specifically due to property taxes alone, I can't say specifically, but you are seeing a connection there in some of those areas to delinquency and foreclosure activity."