All that said, our local CU does in fact keep their own mortgage portfolio. This may be rare, I don't know. They're a large CU associated with a government contractor.

When I bought my house they had the best deal (rate + closing costs) hands down. When I refinanced they were no longer offering 30yr loans on their portfolio (and I wasn't interested in 10/15), but still were originating them to sell. Unfortunately the 30yr rates were not as quite good as I could get elsewhere and closing costs were close to a wash so I went another direction.