WASHINGTON—The Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council (FFIEC) has announced the availability of data on mortgage lending transactions at 5,852 U.S. financial institutions covered by the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA).
Covered institutions include banks, savings associations, credit unions, and mortgage companies. Released are loan-level HMDA data that cover 2017 lending activity submitted by financial institutions on or before April 18, 2018.
The data include:
- Applications, originations, purchases of loans, sales of loans, denials, and other actions related to applications
- Loan amounts
- Loan types (conventional, Federal Housing Administration (FHA), Veterans Administration (VA), Rural Housing Service (RHS), or Farm Service Agency (FSA))
- Purposes (home purchase, home improvement, or refinancing)
- Property types (1–4 family, multifamily, or manufactured housing)
- Owner occupancy
- Preapprovals (home purchase loans only)
- Property locations (metropolitan statistical area (MSA), state, county, and census tract)
- Applicant and co-applicant characteristics (race, ethnicity, sex, and income)
- Pricing-related data
- Type of purchasers
- Whether a particular loan is subject to the Home Ownership and Equity Protection Act (HOEPA)
- Whether a particular loan is secured by a first or a subordinate lien, or is unsecured
Unlike in past years, the HMDA loan-level data made available to the public will not remain static, but will be updated, on an ongoing basis, to reflect late submissions and resubmissions. Accordingly, loan-level data downloaded from https://ffiec.cfpb.gov/ at a later date will include any such updated data. An April 18, 2018, static dataset used to develop the observations in this statement about the 2017 data is available here: https://www.consumerfinance.gov/data-research/research-reports/cfpb-data-point-mortgage-market-activity-and-trends/. In addition, beginning in late March 2018, Loan/Application Registers (LARs) for each HMDA filer of 2017 data, modified to protect borrower privacy, were made available at https://ffiec.cfpb.gov/data-publication/, the FFIEC said.
Understanding the Data
The 2017 HMDA data use the census tract delineations, population, and housing characteristic data from the 2011–2015 American Community Survey (ACS). In addition, the data reflect MSA definitions released by the Office of Management and Budget in 2015 that became effective for HMDA purposes in 2016, the agency said.
“Caution should be used when comparing HMDA data across multiple years for specific geographic areas due to the changes in MSA and census tract boundaries and updates to the population and housing characteristics of census tracts that followed the decennial census and five-year updates based on the ACS data,” the FFIEC said.
Observations from the 2017 Data
For 2017, the number of reporting institutions declined by about 13% from the previous year to 5,852. Contributing to the decline were Regulation C changes requiring HMDA collection and reporting from depository institutions only if, in each of the two preceding calendar years, they originated at least 25 home purchase loans, including refinancings of home purchase loans, that are not excluded under 12 CFR § 1003.4(d), the FFIEC explained.
The 2017 data include information on 12.1 million home loan applications, of which 7.3 million resulted in loan originations, and 2.1 million in purchased loans, for a total of more than 14.1 million actions. The data also include information on approximately 481,000 requests for preapprovals for home purchase loans.
The total number of originated loans of all types and purposes decreased by more than 1 million between 2016 and 2017, or 12.4%. Refinance originations decreased by more than 33%, and home purchase lending increased by more than 4%.
From 2016 to 2017, the share of first-lien home purchase loans for 1–4 family, site-built, owner-occupied properties made to low- and moderate-income borrowers (those with income of less than 80% of area median income) rose slightly from 26.2% to 26.3%, and the share of refinance loans to low- and moderate-income borrowers increased from 16.9% to 22.9%, the data show.
Borrower Data
In terms of borrower race and ethnicity, the share of home purchase loans for 1–4 family properties made to black borrowers rose from 6.0% in 2016 to 6.4% in 2017, the share made to Hispanic-white borrowers remained unchanged at 8.8%, and those made to Asian borrowers rose from 5.5% to 5.8%. From 2016 to 2017, the share of refinance loans made to black borrowers increased from 5.0% to 6.0%, the share made to Hispanic-white borrowers increased from 6.2% to 6.8%, and those made to Asian borrowers fell from 5.5% to 4.0%.
“In 2017, black and Hispanic-white applicants experienced higher denial rates for conventional home purchase loans than non-Hispanic white applicants. The denial rate for Asian applicants is more comparable to the denial rate for non-Hispanic white applicants. These relationships are similar to those found in earlier years and, due to the limitations of the HMDA data discussed above, cannot take into account potential differences in risk characteristics across demographic groups,” the FFIEC said.
The FHA-insured share of first-lien home purchase loans for 1–4 family, site-built owner-occupied properties declined from 25.0% in 2016 to 22.6% in 2017. The VA-guaranteed share of such loans remained at approximately 10% in 2017. The overall government-backed share of such purchase loans, including FHA, VA, RHS, and FSA loans, was 36.3% in 2017, down slightly from 38.7% in 2016.
Other Findings
The FHA-insured share of first-lien refinance mortgages for 1–4 family, site-built owner-occupied properties increased to 13.2% in 2017 from 12.0% in 2016, while the VA-guaranteed share of such refinance loans decreased from 12.2% in 2016 to 11.4% in 2017, the report shows.
“The share of mortgages originated by nondepository, independent mortgage companies has increased sharply in recent years. In 2017, this group of lenders accounted for 56.1% of first-lien owner-occupied home-purchase loans, up from 53.3% in 2016. Independent mortgage companies also originated 55.8% of first-lien owner-occupied refinance loans, an increase from 52.2% in 2016, which was the first year in which independent mortgage companies made the majority of such loans since at least 1995,” the FFIEC explained.