The Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council today released the 2020 Home Mortgage Disclosure Act data on mortgage lending transactions at 4,475 financial institutions. (FFIEC noted that the number of reporting institutions was down by about 18.8% due in part to a change in the reporting threshold for closed-end mortgage loans under Regulation C.) The data encompasses 22.7 million mortgage applications, 14.5 million of which resulted in loan originations. Of these, 13.2 million were closed-end loans and 906,000 were open-end loans, such as home equity lines of credit. There were also 432,000 records that did not indicate loan type.
The total number of originated closed-end loans rose 67.1% from 2019 to 2020. Refinances increased 150%, and home purchase loan originations 6.7%. The HMDA data showed that low-to-moderate income borrowers accounted for 30.4% of single-family, owner-occupied home purchases—up from 28.6% in 2019. LMI borrowers also accounted for 19.3% of single-family refis, down from 23.8% in 2019.
Overall, loans backed by the Federal Housing Administration, Department of Veterans Affairs or federal farm programs accounted for 32.9% of all new mortgages in 2020, down slightly from 33.4% in 2019. FHA and VA market share both decreased slightly. The FHA market share for refinances fell to 6.6% from 12% in 2019, while shares of VA refinances decreased from 13.5% to 11.9%. Meanwhile, non-depository lenders held 60.7% market share in 2020, up from 56.4% in 2019.
Black borrowers accounted for 7.3% of single-family home purchase loans in 2020, up slightly from 7% the year before. Home purchase loan shares for Hispanic-White borrowers edged down from 9.2% in 2019 to 9.1% in 2020, and were down from 5.7% to 5.5% among 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.”
