The 1975 Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) requires financial
institutions to maintain and annually disclose data about home purchases
and other loan activities. The primary purpose of this disclosure is to
determine if financial institutions are serving the housing needs of
communities and in a non-discriminatory manner. HMDA data help provide an understanding of home purchase activity and allows us to
look at home loans by race and ethnicity.
Total loans by race and ethnicity
This dashboard shows the total number of loans originated for the purchase of a home as a primary residence, disaggregated by race and ethnicity.
Data is currently provided from 2018 to 2022 for all loans in
Virginia at the state, CBSA, and locality level.
Denial rate by race and ethnicity
The Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1974 prohibits lenders from discriminating on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, sex, marital status, or age in credit transactions. As part of this legislation, race and ethnicity are voluntary information in credit applications. While this can help protect applicants from discrimination, it can make it doubly hard to understand trends in credit applications by race and ethnicity.
In some instances, a person may list their race and not their ethnicity, or vice versa. This can cause under- or overcounting in the data. In other cases, a large number of applications where no race and ethnicity data was recorded can leave us with an incomplete story of mortgage applications.
This dashboard shows the total number of loans denied for the purchase of a home as a primary residence. There are multiple ways to determine denial rates, but for simplicity we focus on the share of denied loans versus the total number of loans for the same purpose.
Data is currently provided from 2018 to 2022 for all loans in
Virginia at the state, CBSA, and locality level.
Additional resources
Federal Reserve History
Pew Research Center
Blacks and Hispanics face extra challenges in getting home loans
Urban Institute
Mortgage Denial Rates and Household Finances among Older Americans
Data sources
Consumer Financial Protection Bureau mortgage data
Annual loan-level data released by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) in accordance with requirements of the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA).
