The Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council today released the 2019 Home Mortgage Disclosure Act data on mortgage lending transactions at 5,508 financial institutions. The data encompasses 15.1 million mortgage applications, 9.3 million of which resulted in loan originations. Of these, 7.9 million were the closed-end loans and 1.1 million were open-end loans, such as home equity lines of credit. There were also 335,000 records that did not indicate loan type, pursuant to an exemption granted by the S. 2155 regulatory reform law.
The total number of originated closed-end loans rose 26% from 2018 to 2019. Refinances increased 78%, and home purchase loan originations rose by 4%. The HMDA data showed that low-to-moderate-income borrowers accounted for 28.6% of single-family, owner-occupied home purchases—up from 28.1% in 2018. LMI borrowers also accounted for 23.8% of single-family refis, down from 39% in 2018.
Overall, loans backed by the Federal Housing Administration, Department of Veterans Affairs or federal farm programs accounted for 33.4% percent of all new mortgages in 2019, up slightly from 33% the year before. FHA and VA market share both increased. The FHA market share for refinances fell slightly, while VA shares of refinances increased. Meanwhile, nondepository lenders held 56.4% market share in 2019, down slightly from 57.2% the year before.
Black borrowers accounted for 7% of single-family home purchase loans in 2019, up from 6.7% the year before. Home purchase loan shares also increased from 8.9% to 9.2% for Hispanic-White borrowers, but fell from 5.9% to 5.7% for Asian-American borrowers. The data also noted that Black and Hispanic-White applicants experienced higher denial rates for conventional home mortgages than non-Hispanic-White applicants, but the agencies noted that “these relationships are similar to those found in earlier years,” and that due to the limitations of HMDA data “cannot take into account all legitimate credit risk considerations for loan approval and loan pricing.”
