McCLEAN, Va.–The U.S. credit union community increased its mortgage dollar volume by 16% in 2016, according to data credit unions supplied to the federal government under the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act.
That was even with the mortgage industry as a whole, which increased by about 15% last year.
HMDA data do not tally the entire credit union industry, as those institutions with assets less than $45 million are not required to report. But it does tabulate the home loan volume of some 2,000 credit unions.
Those CUs with $45 million or more originated $128.7 billion in home loans last year, according to an analysis through the LendingPatterns database of ComplianceTech, a fair lending and technology vendor in McLean, Va. That’s up from $111 billion in 2015.
Navy Federal Credit Union, Vienna, Va., led the industry with $13.1 billion, more than four times the volume of runner up State Employees Credit Union of Raleigh, N.C. Navy Federal’s volume was enough to rank in the top 25 mortgage lenders in the country (22nd).
Navy Federal’s volume was up by half a billion dollars from 2015’s $12.6 billion, an increase of 4%. Since its volume percentage went up by less than the whole credit union industry, its share of the total decreased from 2015. It still financed more than one in 10 credit union dollars (10.2%) but that was down from 11.4% in 2015, and matched its 2014 share of 10.2%.
State Employees made $3 billion in mortgages last year, up from $2.8 billion in 2015. That gave it a 2.3% share. It just missed cracking the top 100 mortgage lenders in the country, coming in 111th.
Five credit unions—Navy, State Employees, PenFed, BECU, and SchoolsFirst —were classified as “CFPB lenders,” having $10 billion or more in assets. These five made $21 billion in mortgages in 2016, about 16% of the total for all credit unions with more than $45 million in assets.
Alamo Federal of San Antonio, a smaller credit union, merged with PenFed last year, one of several mergers by the military credit union. Alamo was credited with $700 million in mortgage volume last year (pre- and post-merger), which, added to PenFed’s $2 billion, would give the combined credit union $2.7 billion in volume.
First Tech Federal Credit Union, Mountain View, Calif., was fourth in volume last year, at $2.6 billion, while Lake Michigan Credit Union, Grand Rapids, Mich., was fifth, at $2.5 billion.
As a whole, nearly 2,000 credit unions (1,946) between $45 million and $10 billion in assets made a total of $107 billion in mortgages last year through 643,000 loans. Twelve of them registered more than $1 billion in home loan finance (in addition to the five lenders over $10 billion in assets). An additional $5.4 billion were counted as “purchased” mortgages, meaning they were originated by one lender and then purchased by another through the correspondent lending channel.
Between originations and purchased mortgages, about 62% of those that applied for mortgages from these nearly 2,000 credit unions received them. About 17.2% was denied, with the balance in categories such as withdrawn, incomplete, or rejected by applicant.
—Mark Fogarty