Sept. 19, 2012 – Mortgage loan and application data for 2011 has been compiled from registers submitted by 7,632 banks, savings institutions, credit unions and mortgage companies, all of which must post their 2011 HMDA disclosure statements at home offices, the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council said Tuesday.
The FFIEC reported a 4 percent decline in the number of institutions filing mortgage loan/application registers from 2010 to 2011, continuing a downward trend since 2006, when more than 8,900 lenders submitted the data. The 2011 data cover information from 11.7 million home loan applications and 2.9 million loan purchases. Also included is information from 186,000 requests for preapprovals that didn’t result in a loan.
The 2011 data reflect a continued heavy reliance on loans backed by the Federal Housing Administration that began with the onset of the housing finance crisis, the FFIEC says. Even so, FHA’s share of home purchase lending reflect in these data declined from 36 percent in 2010 to 31 percent in 2011. This share had been steadily increasing since 2007.
Also as in previous years, the 2011 data show that black and Hispanic white applicants experienced higher denial rates than non-Hispanic white applicants. The denial rate for Asian applicants was virtually the same as the corresponding denial rate for non-Hispanic white applicants.
The HMDA data can facilitate a fair lending and enforcement process, the FFIEC notes, but this data alone cannot be used to determine whether a lender is complying with fair lending laws. For example, the data do not reflect data regarding borrower credit history, debt-to-income ratio and loan-to-value ratio. The council says examiners review other data as well when conducting fair lending examinations.
The data was announced Tuesday by the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council, which includes representatives of all five federal financial institution prudential regulators as well as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and chairman of a state liaison committee. NCUA Chairman Debbie Matz is the current FFIEC chair. An article will appear in the Federal Reserve Bulletin.