WASHINGTON--Credit unions above $43 million in assets extended $83-billion in home loan finance during 2014, which was more than $20 billion less than in 2013, federal data show. The top five credit unions made some $17 billion of the total.
Last year saw a large drop in credit union mortgages. In 2013, the same group of credit unions made $108 billion in home loans (the number counts both first and second liens). The percentage of decline is somewhat less than for the national mortgage market, which fell from $1.75 trillion in 2013 to $1.1 trillion last year, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association.
Navy Federal Credit Union, Vienna, Va. was the top mortgage credit union lender last year, with $8.3 billion in loans. That’s down from the $11.2 billion in home finance it reported in 2013. State Employees Credit Union of Raleigh, N.C. came in second, at $2.8 billion. Pentagon Federal Credit Union of Alexandria, Va. took the bronze, with $2.4 billion. Kinecta Federal Credit Union, Manhattan Beach, Calif. was fourth at $2 billion, while First Tech Federal Credit Union, Mountain View, Calif. came fifth at $1.4 billion.
About 2,000 credit unions with assets of more than $43 million reported their volumes to the Federal Financial Institution Examinations Council under the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act in 2014. According to CUNA data, approximately 4,000 credit unions have assets below $50 million, so most of these did not report their mortgage volumes, and many made no mortgages. (The exempt limit rises to $44 million this year.)
The data was collected under the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act and analyzed by LendingPatterns.com, a software developed by the McLean, Va.-based ComplianceTech. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau now regulates HMDA compliance.
Four credit unions are counted in the list of CFPB lenders, which is made up of all financial institutions with assets above $10 billion. The rest are listed under the NCUA lenders category. CUToday.info combined these two lists to come up with the total mortgage origination amounts of credit unions with assets above $43 million.
NCUA lenders granted 57% of the $121 billion in mortgages their members applied for last year. The group denied 16.3% of this amount, while the rest of those unfunded are credited to categories like withdrawn, incomplete and pre-approval denied or rejected.
Navy Federal is Selective
The industry leader, Navy Federal, which serves all military personnel, was significantly more picky than that. According to the data it approved just 33% of the $25 billion in apps it received last year. But it also denied applicants at only about half the rate of the NCUA lenders, around 9%. The biggest category of apps not funded by Navy Federal came in the pre-approval denied (30%) and pre-approval rejected (18.4%) categories.
Congress approved HMDA in 1975 so it could make sure lenders did not discriminate in their patterns of mortgage lending. The data show NCUA lenders extended 70% of all mortgage finance to white borrowers and about 16% total to blacks, Asians, Hispanics, Native Americans, Native Hawaiian, and multi-race applicants. The rest are unknown.
Again, the world’s largest credit union, Navy Federal, is significantly different. It gave just 58% of loan dollars to whites in 2014, with minorities getting 26%. Interestingly, it extended $62 million to Native Hawaiians and only $35 million to Native Americans, who have a much larger population than Native Hawaiians.