With many homeowners locked into their properties by low mortgage rates, and listings for existing homes are generally low, the onus for property availability in desirable areas falls on the homebuilders with new homes. The newly released HMDA data shows the population is flowing towards areas of higher climate risk[1], with the understanding that our research covers new homes with a mortgage only. HMDA data does not come with client risk measurements. However, FHFA provides a list of census tracts as “Designated Disaster Areas (DDAs)”, which are located “in a county designated by the federal government as adversely affected by a declared major disaster under the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) administration, where housing assistance payments were authorized by FEMA”[2].We incorporate these into our HMDA Analyzer, which contains lender and borrower information. By so doing, we can perform complex analyses of mortgage origination in many dimensions.
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We first take a look at the heat map for 2023 DDAs provided by FHFA[3], noticing that DDAs are concentrated in coastal states, especially Florida and Texas:

On August 9, 2024, Commercial Mortgage Alert (CMA) published an article discussing the impact of a policy change instituted by Fannie Mae in late June that requires a 50-50 split on all yield spread premiums with originators, removing a threshold of $100,000 previously in place.

According to CMA, “In the five weeks through Aug. 2, the agency saw a 47.7% year-over-year decrease, to $157.2 million, in the issuance of multifamily loans with sub-$5 million balances. That compares to a 13.7% drop across all Fannie loans, according to data from Recursion Co.”​

We are proud to be an essential source of information to market participants on these important policy issues.

​Regular readers of Recursion blogs will recall that the final version of the HMDA data[1] is generally released about mid-year and contains data of interest to those looking into important issues related to the role of housing in social trends. In this post, we will focus on both borrower and geographic breakdowns by loan class as HMDA 2023 is out. To perform the socioeconomic analysis, it is often very useful to link HMDA data with outside databases from other publicly available data sources such as FHFA Duty-to-Server, or FEMA National Risk Index, that provides various characteristics at the census tract level.
 
Low-income households
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Ginnie Mae discloses low-to-moderate borrower exposure at the pool level.  Using its definition, Recursion constructed the flag in HMDA. We start by looking at the share that low-to-moderate income households obtained in purchase mortgage originations from 2014-2023[2].