The Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council today released the 2016 Home Mortgage Disclosure Act data on mortgage lending transactions at 6,762 financial institutions. The data encompasses 13.1 million mortgage applications, 8.4 million of which resulted in loan originations — a 13 percent increase from 2015; refinance originations rose by 16 percent.
Overall, loans backed by the Federal Housing Administration, Veterans Administration or federal farm programs accounted for 39 percent of all new mortgages in 2016, the same as the year before but still down from the peak of 54 percent in 2009. FHA market share held steady. The FHA share of refinances dipped two points.
The HMDA data showed that black and Hispanic borrowers continued increasing their share of originations in 2015, growing to a combined 14 percent, while the share of loans originated by Asian Americans rose slightly to 5.6 percent. The share of home purchase loans going to low- and moderate-income borrowers fell two points to 25 percent, and the share of refinances by LMI borrowers dipped three points to 19 percent.
“Higher-priced” loans — those with APRs that exceed prime offer rates by 1.5 points for first-lien loans — accounted for 5.5 percent of all first-lien loans in 2016, down half a point from the year before.
