Small Income-Property Share
The share of home-purchase mortgages in a tract taken out on small multi-unit buildings rather than on single-unit homes.
The share of originated home-purchase mortgages in a tract secured by a small multi-unit building rather than by a single-unit home.
Every application in the mortgage register records the number of individual dwelling units on the property securing the loan. In the public file, unit counts of one through four are disclosed exactly while larger properties are binned into "5-24, 25-49, 50-99, 100-149,
149" (FFIEC). This measure covers the properties above a single unit and below the point where lending becomes commercial in character: duplexes, triplexes and fourplexes together with buildings in the smallest reported multi-unit band.
Small income properties occupy a particular position in the housing market. They are the buildings an owner can live in while renting the remaining units, and they are the format in which most small-scale rental supply is held. A tract with a high share of this lending is one where mortgage credit is flowing into buildings that produce rental units, whether or not the buyer intends to occupy one.
The measure is about the building, not the buyer. Occupancy intent is reported separately, so a small income-property purchase may be by an owner-occupant, a second-home buyer or an investor. The investor share family covers the buyer side of the same transactions.
Metrics in this family#
Considerations#
Unit counts above four are published in bands rather than exactly, so the upper edge of this measure follows the band the Bureau publishes rather than a precise unit threshold.
Most tracts sit near zero, and the distribution is heavily skewed toward older, denser neighborhoods where this building format exists at all. In a tract of detached single-family homes the share is structurally near zero.
Where purchase originations are few, a single multi-unit loan produces a large share.
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). Small multi-unit buildings are also bought with commercial financing that falls outside this reporting, and with cash, neither of which appears.
Later static releases of a given year incorporate resubmissions and late submissions (FFIEC).
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