The mortgage industry is banking heavily on a resurging purchase-mortgage market to help ease the pain of declining refinance volume in 2013 and beyond, and the slow start for the sector this year may be largely due to seasonal factors. Purchase-mortgage originations in the first three months of 2013 were down by 12.5 percent from the fourth quarter of 2012, according to a new Inside Mortgage Finance ranking and analysis. That was a considerably bigger decline than the 2.1 percent drop in refinance lending, which accounted for a hefty 76.2 percent of total mortgage originations in early 2013. But the estimated $119.0 billion in purchase-mortgage originations during the first quarter was...[Includes three data charts]