There is a natural tendency to think about housing finance in a bifurcated manner: single- and multifamily. But this distinction is hardly clear. For a long time, we’ve had condos and coops, and more recently new esoteric property types like buy-to-rent. The mechanics are quite distinct but, in each case, we are talking about debt and equity, borrowers and lenders and servicers. But mostly we are talking about places to live.
​
In scaling the two types of residences, we normally look at dollar amounts. From the Federal Reserve Z1 data[1], we can see that Agency single-family debt outstanding stood at $9.038 trillion in Q4 2023 while multifamily just crossed the trillion-dollar threshold at $1.002 trillion, giving a ratio of 9.02. Single-family dominates. In terms of the agency share of these markets, we have:

On May 14, 2024, National Mortgage News published an article, "How mortgage investments may evolve as bank share shrinks”[1] citing Recursion Chief Research Officer Richard Koss as saying that “the share of government-related transfers to nonbanks have been trending upward and have been particularly high recently”. Moreover, “Bank to nonbank trades have made up nearly 12% to almost 20% of transfers based on loan count in the past three quarters as compared to a range of around 4% to 17% in the 18-month period just prior, Recursion found in analyzing data from Ginnie Mae, Fannie Mae, and Freddie Mac. "
 
Recursion is very pleased to be the leader in providing mortgage market data and analytics to the most influential industry professionals. Please reach out to find out how our team can help you grapple with today’s most pressing challenges in the mortgage space.