Investor Lending Data: Methodology, Sources & Limitations

Source

HMDA loan-level data — the loan-by-loan originations every covered mortgage lender must report annually under the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act — retrieved through the CFPB/FFIEC Data Browser API (ffiec.cfpb.gov/v2/data-browser-api). The current edition uses the 2025 vintage, the most recent annual release, retrieved July 22, 2026. (The CFPB revises published vintages as lenders resubmit; our tables are refreshed to a single retrieval date so every figure reflects one consistent edition of the federal file.) Federal government data; public domain.

Filter definition

For each state we request originated loans (actions_taken=1) on 1–4 unit dwellings server-side, then filter locally to investment-property occupancy (occupancy_type=3), excluding open-end lines of credit and reverse mortgages. The result: closed-end loans on 1–4 unit investment properties — the rental-property loans an individual investor would actually get.

One implementation note we verified directly: the Data Browser API silently ignores an occupancy filter parameter in the request, so occupancy must be filtered locally from the full state extract. This is why the checked-in dataset files — not a live API query — are the source of truth for every table.

Lender names

HMDA identifies lenders by Legal Entity Identifier (LEI). We join each LEI to its institution name using the Data Browser's filers endpoint at the time the dataset is built. Where an LEI has no name on file, the table shows the raw LEI rather than a guess. Names appear as filed — a lender's HMDA filing name can differ from its consumer brand.

Known limitations — read these

1. HMDA exempts temporary financing, so fix-and-flip, bridge, and hard-money lending are largely absent from these tables. A lender's rank here reflects reportable closed-end activity, not its full investor-lending footprint.
2. Lenders below the HMDA reporting threshold (roughly 25 closed-end loans per year) do not file and are invisible in this data.
3. The data is annual. The 2025 vintage is the current release; figures do not reflect activity since.

State totals (2025 investor 1–4 unit closed-end originations)

Full per-state datasets (top 25 lenders, every underlying figure) are downloadable as CSV: NJ · FL · PA · NY · TX

Update cadence

HMDA data publishes annually. These tables update once per vintage: the 2026 data, expected in mid-2027, will be added alongside the current edition when it publishes.