Publicly available HMDA data is collected and published by the year of the mortgage application activity it is reporting. The 2021 HMDA data was first published March 23, 2022. While lenders under Reg C are required to complete their previous year LAR (loan application register) by March 1 each year, they also continue to file corrections and/or late filings.
The March ("Spring") release is what the CFPB calls the Modified LAR, where data is released in individual files by lender, and includes certain modifications like more coarse-grain rounding of Loan Amount and Applicant Income.
Yesterday marked the "Summer" release - what the CFPB calls National Loan Level data. Now bundled in a single file, the enhanced rounding is dropped, and the CFPB adds in additional derived HMDA fields and related Census data.
How does Polygon Research navigate these releases relative to our best-in-class HMDA analysis tool HMDAVision?
Here are the highlights:
- We make sure our customers get the data right away. In the Spring, this means a 48-hours turnaround - we were live with the Modified LAR data March 25. In the Summer, it means a 24-hour turnaround - we are live today with the National Loan Level data.
- We keep ingesting the CFPB updates. They have closed the books on 2018, but we continue to ingest updates from 2019 and 2020, and will now continue the same with 2021.
- We flag big changes for our customers - yesterday's releases refactored the top-50 lender list, as one lender moved from a national rank of 177 up to 38 due to an updated/corrected filing.
- We also don't make our customers wait for the value-add Summer data fields. On the one hand, the CFPB publishes their algorithms for their derived fields, which we implement in the Spring, and on the other, the Census data points are available directly from a combination of the Census Bureau and the FFIEC.
We like to say that being in the mortgage/housing industry without HMDAVision is like flying without radar. Contact us for a demo to see what we mean.