On March 31, 2025, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) released the latest data on mortgage lending in the United States covering activity from 2024. This annual dataset is essential for advocates, regulators, policymakers at all levels and lenders who seek to understand lending trends and disparities.
Despite political efforts to weaken the CFPB and remove its staff, the agency successfully collected and released this data by the end of March as statutorily required. Although we’re just beginning to analyze what the numbers show, this article will focus on what the data shows in relation to loan volumes and race. A more detailed report analyzing CFPB’s data findings—similar to what we published last year—will follow in the coming weeks.
The Return of Refinancing
The 2024 mortgage market was marked by continued uncertainty. Interest rates and home prices remained high and investor activity raised new concerns. For first-time buyers, the post-pandemic housing landscape remained difficult to navigate. Nonetheless, we continue to see signs of expanded access to mortgage credit for Black, Hispanic and Asian groups – communities that have long been excluded from homeownership.
The overall number of home loans increased in 2024, reversing the marked decrease in lending seen in 2023. However, this growth is uneven, with home purchases remaining essentially unchanged while the number of refinances went from 341,000 in 2023 to almost 600,000 in 2024.
More homeowners are using cash-out refinances as well, while home improvement and home equity lending remained essentially unchanged. Home equity lending is different from home purchase and refinance markets, with credit unions playing a much larger role in this space in addition to the loans being much smaller. However, access to equity is still a key mechanism through which housing wealth can be transformed into other kinds of wealth, such as investing in increasing home equity, small business creation or additional career training opportunities.
Interest rates also played a key role: As rates shifted slightly down, homebuyers that bought at the high rates of 2023 had incentive to lower that rate and save on interest in the long run. After peaking above 7% in late 2023, average 30-year fixed mortgage rates began to decline steadily starting in November of last year. By January of this year, rates had fallen to the mid-6% range, significantly lower than their 2023 highs. This drop renewed borrower interest in refinancing, especially for those who had previously been locked into higher rates and those seeking to consolidate debt or access equity through cash-out refinancing.
Race and Ethnicity in Lending: 2024 Trends for Asian, Black and Hispanic Borrowers
In 2024, almost 57,000 more home purchase loans were made compared to 2023. The share of home purchase loans going to borrowers of color continued to grow in several key areas, with particularly notable gains for Asian and Hispanic borrowers.
The most interesting finding was that Hispanic borrowers increased their share of home purchase loans to 17.72% in 2024, up from 16.57% in 2023. This makes 2024 the first time in the history of HMDA data collection that Hispanic families’ share of home purchase loans exceeded their overall population in the US. This continues an unbroken upward trajectory seen in the data for some time and showcases the growing presence of Hispanic households in the mortgage market. Over a quarter of the people in the US under 18 years of age are Hispanic, thus their continued participation in the homebuying market is critical to support the wealth now held by homeowners. If the fastest growing demographic in the country can’t afford to buy your home, your home will be worth less when it’s time for you to sell or downsize.
Asian borrowers received 9.37% of all home purchase loans in 2024, up from 9.12% in 2023. This continues a steady upward trend that began in 2021 of 11,659 additional loans going to Asian borrowers for 2023, the largest gain since their height in 2021 when 337,000 Asian borrowers bought homes during a period of the lowest rates we had seen in a generation. A previous analysis from NCRC found that Asian lending is dominated mostly by Chinese and Asian Indian borrowers who tend to be in the middle or upper income groups. More study is needed to look at underserved Asian populations.
Black borrowers accounted for 8.92% of home purchase loans in 2024, slightly down from 9.31% in 2023. While this marks a small decrease, the 2024 figure is lower that any year since 2018. There were only 234,443 Black homebuyers, accounting for a decrease of more than 4,800 since 2023. This discouraging news may signal that homeownership gains are not equal and that more work is needed to spread helpful tools towards creating more equitable lending practices across all ethnic groups, such as Special Purpose Credit Products (SPCPs), that can target specific communities for mortgage lending support. Often, all that is needed is an infusion of a small amount of cash to get over the financial hump of home closing costs for those from communities traditionally boxed out of the housing market. Buying down interest rates also makes a lot of sense for borrowers, with those that choose this pathway being able to build more wealth at a faster pace.
In 2024, lending to Asian, Black and Hispanic borrowers was uneven, with Hispanic and Asian borrowers increasing their share while Black lending stumbled. Housing is the key builder of wealth in America and the gap in Black and White ownership rates is the biggest factor driving the vast disparity in wealth. Solving the underrepresentation of non-White demographic groups in home lending is just the first step in reducing the racial wealth gap and securing a strong middle class for the next generation.
Jason Richardson is NCRC’s Senior Director of Research.
Photo credit: Kindel Media via Pexels
