The 107 lenders at the top of the mortgage leader board in 2015, the ones with more than $10 billion in assets, made more than half a trillion dollars in home loans during that year (excluding purchased loans). And more than half of that was in jumbo mortgages.
All told, these lenders extended $584 billion in mortgage finance during 2015, for an average of almost $550 million in loans apiece, according to Home Mortgage Disclose Act data analyzed by LendingPatterns™. The number of mortgages came to 1.8 million.
The biggest lenders showed a definite affinity for jumbo mortgages in 2015. In fact, they originated more jumbos than conforming loans ($324 billion, or 55 percent, in jumbos, versus $260 billion in conforming loans, about 44 percent).
A total of 60 percent of all production dollars stayed on lender balance sheets. Fannie Mae was the biggest investor, at 16 percent of volume, followed by Freddie Mac at 13 percent. Ginnie Mae and non-agency investors had about 12 percent of production between them.
Upper-income borrowers dominated this batch of lenders, with 63 percent of all loan dollars going to this cohort. Low-income borrowers, in contrast, got less than two percent of the funding.
First-lien loans averaged $340,000 apiece, and subordinate amounts averaging $115,000 are barely significant, as a full 99 percent of all liens were firsts.
Whites got more than 57 percent of all loans, with minorities taking 17 percent, with Asians being the minority group getting the highest percentage of dollars. Loans to Native Americans and Native Hawaiians, while still small in percentage, came to more than $2.3 billion.
Based on loan type conventional mortgages dominated this category, at 92 percent. Of the government mortgages, Department of Veterans Affairs loans had a slightly higher share than those insured by the Federal Housing Administration.
Not surprisingly, many of the national mortgage leaders appear in this list covering production by those with more than $10 billion in assets. Wells Fargo was first, at $140 billion, followed by JPMorgan Chase Bank at $83 billion and Bank of America taking the bronze with $56 billion. Add in Citibank at $29 billion and the top four account for more than half of all mortgage finance extended by this group.
At the bottom of the list was another Citi unit, CitiMortgage, which made just $1.7 million in loans. Ally Bank extended $2.1 million in mortgage money, the second-smallest amount..
A significant amount of this money went for multifamily mortgages. Multifamily took 14 percent of the money, with single family accounting for 86 percent.
With so much multifamily volume there was a good bit of lending to non-owner occupied borrowers. That came to nearly 10.5 percent of the total.
Loan purpose split fairly evenly: 49 percent was purchase mortgage money, 46 percent went for refis, and five percent of the finance went for home improvement loans.
(Mark Fogarty is a journalist and analyst who has been covering the mortgage industry for more than 30 years.)
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