It is now possible to get a four month jump on seeing what is in the 2015 Home Mortgage Disclosure Act data.
That’s because 175 lenders who generated more than 40 percent of last year’s application numbers, have reported their numbers early, with the results now collected in LendingPatterns™. It can be accessed at “Early Look” through the LP “select a year” pulldown bar.
Lenders are not obliged to report their numbers in advance of the Federal Financial Institutions Examinations Council HMDA release, generally each September. So why do they do it? I think it is because these numbers are inevitably coming out anyway, so coming out a few months early won’t hurt them.
ComplianceTech, which runs LendingPatterns™, each year requests HMDA data from the top 500 lenders. As of early May 175 of them have shared data in forms compatible with LendingPatterns™, and since these are among the biggest mortgage lenders in the country, it is a pretty sizable sample. (They continue to be added in as they report their data, so EarlyLook gets updated as they do.)
These 175 lenders took in 5.8 million apps last year, probably similar to 2014 when EarlyLook reporters comprised more than 40 percent of the total.
Looking at the income and tract income distributions, last year’s EarlyLook numbers were highly correlated with the total numbers and percentages for the year of 2014, and should track similarly for 2015.
Looking at income, say, 38.44 percent of borrowers were upper income in the 2014 EarlyLook, while that number was 39.18 percent in the final release.
A first look at those applications indicates that lenders maintained their tight credit posture in 2015. Of those 5.8 million apps, 2.7 million were originated, or less than half (46.2 percent to be precise). More than half (55 percent) of apps came from whites. A hair above 20 percent came from minorities, with Hispanics submitting the most minority apps, 8.6 percent of the total. About one quarter was in the “unknown” or “NA” categories.
On the originations side, just above half of dollars requested were granted, $725 million of $1.4 trillion applied for. The racial splits were similar to the app numbers, except that Asians climbed above Hispanics, receiving seven percent of the total.
Focusing in on originations only, whites received 60 percent of origination dollars, while minorities were granted a touch below 20 percent of the money. Asians were the best-funded minority, at $61 billion or 8.4 percent.
Factoring in originations only, that allows us to get true secondary market numbers. Nearly two thirds of all origination dollars were sold into the secondary market, with Fannie Mae leading the GSE pack at 22 percent and Freddie following at 14 percent. About 15 percent went into the non-agency market.
First liens averaged $276,000, while subordinate liens averaged $84,000.
I plan to take another look at the EarlyLook numbers in my next blog.
(Mark Fogarty is a journalist and analyst who has been covering the mortgage industry for more than 30 years.)
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