Average Financed Property Value
The average value of properties securing home-purchase mortgages originated in a tract.
Not shown in the tool. The data behind this family is held and kept current, but it is not one of the measures the tool offers.
The average value of the properties behind home-purchase mortgages originated in a tract.
Property value in the mortgage register is the value of the property securing the loan that the lender relied on in making its credit decision. It is one of the fields the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau alters before release: in the public file, property value and loan amount are "rounded to the midpoint of the nearest $10,000 interval" (FFIEC).
This is a transaction-based measure, and that is what distinguishes it from survey estimates of home value. It describes the homes that actually changed hands with a mortgage in recent years, not the housing stock as a whole. In a neighborhood where only the larger or newer homes are trading, the two will disagree, and neither is wrong.
The value relied on in the credit decision is normally an appraised or sale value, so it tracks price closely but is not identical to a recorded sale price.
Metrics in this family#
Average financed property value
levelThe average value of properties securing originated home-purchase loans in the tract, combined across the three most recent years of reported activity. Pooling several years is what makes the figure usable at tract level, where annual transaction counts are small.
Tracts with too few reported purchase loans to support a stable average are left without a value rather than shown an average resting on one or two sales.
Considerations#
Cash purchases are absent. No mortgage application is filed, so a market with a high cash share is represented only by its financed transactions, which may sit at a different price point than the market overall.
The register covers institutions meeting the Regulation C reporting thresholds, currently 25 closed-end mortgage loans in each of the two preceding calendar years, or 200 open-end lines of credit (CFPB).
Values are nominal dollars for each activity year and are not inflation-adjusted, so a multi-year average spans years of differing price levels and lags a fast-moving market.
Later static releases of a given year incorporate resubmissions and late submissions (FFIEC), so the most recent year is the least settled.
The property is located by census tract, so a value is attributed to where the home is, not to where the buyer came from.
References#
- 1FFIEChttps://ffiec.cfpb.gov/documentation/publications/modified-lar/resources/using-mlar-data
- 2CFPBhttps://www.consumerfinance.gov/about-us/blog/changes-to-hmda-closed-end-loan-reporting-threshold/
- 3FFIEChttps://ffiec.cfpb.gov/documentation/faq/static-dataset-faq