Data Source

The Home Mortgage Explorer provides lending estimates produced from publicly available Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) data. HMDA requires lending institutions that make above a certain number of mortgages a year and that have a banking or lending presence in a metropolitan area to submit loan-level information on the mortgage applications they receive, regardless of whether those applications are eventually originated. The Home Mortgage Explorer provides lending statistics for first-lien mortgages for 1- to 4-family, owner-occupied housing units in the 50 states and Washington, D.C., for the years 2010 to 2021.¹ Applications not included in the Home Mortgage Explorer include those withdrawn or closed for incompleteness, preapproval requests, and loans purchased by the respondent’s institution.

HMDA Coverage

The Home Mortgage Disclosure Act data are considered a near universe of all mortgage lending in the United States, however there are important caveats to keep in mind when using the data. The first caveat pertains to data coverage; HMDA coverage is high but greater in metropolitan areas than in nonmetropolitan areas. Research by the Minneapolis Fed using 2015 data shows that HMDA captures above 90 percent of mortgages in metropolitan counties. In part because of reporting exemptions, HMDA captures about 80 percent of mortgage activity in remote nonmetropolitan counties.² A separate analysis by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) using 2017 data finds that HMDA captures about 92 percent of originations nationally.³ The second caveat pertains to changes in reporting thresholds; users should use caution when analyzing trends across time, but reporting threshold changes have had minimal impact on the quantity of reported mortgage originations. Beginning in 2017 for depository institutions and in 2018 for nondepository institutions, lenders were exempt from reporting if they originated fewer than 25 eligible loans in either of the previous two years.⁴ The CFPB notes that while approximately 13 percent fewer institutions reported HMDA data in 2017 in part because of the rule change, institutions affected by the rule change originated less than 1 percent of mortgages reported in HMDA data in 2016.⁵

Beginning in 2020, the reporting threshold was increased to 100 closed-end mortgages for all institutions. However, the results of a court case in 2022 have reverted the policy to the previous lower threshold, which will take effect in 2023.⁶