Blog

List of articles

Rural America Gets Mortgages, Too

With LendingPatterns™ you can measure the volume of mortgages done in all of the country’s metropolitan statistical areas. But what if the rural parts of the country interest you as much as the urban parts? There is a good bit of information I’ve been able to glean...

read more

Four of five VA mortgages going into Ginnie Mae MBS

Nearly four out of five Department of Veterans Affairs mortgages originated in 2016 by early HMDA reporters are finding their way into Ginnie Mae securities, LendingPatterns™ data show. That’s an even higher percentage than Federal Housing Administration loans going...

read more

Private Label Securities Still Not Robust in 2016

The private label securitization market still hasn’t come back to full life, based on the evidence of an early look at 2016 Home Mortgage Disclosure Act data. LendingPatterns™ Early Look data, which contain more than a third of 2015’s HMDA volume, show that private...

read more

Early HMDA Reporters Like Jumbos, Refis

It’s here! The Early Look report gives HMDA heads like me a chance to preview 2016 Home Mortgage Disclosure Act data in advance of the official fall release. What happens is, ComplianceTech asks firms that have filed their HMDA reports for 2016 to share them in...

read more

A Tale of Two More Mortgage Cities

The nation’s third and fourth most populous cities, Chicago and Houston, are similar in population (both between two and three million) and in the dollar volume of mortgages made in them in 2015 (Chicago $17.8 billion, Houston $17.1 billion, purchased mortgages not...

read more

Mortgage Denials Tilted Toward Refis in 2015

Potential borrowers were more than twice as likely to see their applications for refinancing dollars denied in 2015 as apps for purchase finance. A look at LendingPatterns™ shows $280 billion of refi denials that year, with just $127 billion of requests for purchase...

read more

Big Mortgage Lenders Went for Jumbos in 2015

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...

read more

Nonprime Lenders Show Some Range

Nonprime lenders are an interesting group. They don’t always fund only nonprime loans. Their spreads on subordinate liens are actually a couple of basis points lower than those of prime lenders. And they fund a high percentage of manufactured housing. Nonprime lender...

read more

Illinois Is a Conforming State

Illinois in some respects is quite similar to the last state I profiled, New York. Like the Empire State, Illinois has a huge urban center (Chicago) similar to New York City and a lot of non-urban areas comparable to “upstate” New York. But there are significant...

read more

New York Is the Home of the Million Dollar Jumbo

New York state had quite a high dollar volume of jumbo mortgages in 2015, Home Mortgage Disclosure Act data show. Of $80 billion in mortgage finance done in the Empire State (this analysis excludes mortgages purchased) during 2015, more than half went to jumbos. The...

read more