Continue Reading Get buying tips about Mortgage Lenders delivered to your inbox. The median credit score for White applicants was nearly 60 points higher for all applications and 35 points higher for conforming conventional mortgages. Unsubscribe easily. In the HMDA data, properties are either site-built, meaning they were originally built from the ground up at the location of the property, or they are manufactured homes, like mobile homes. Get in touch with us here at Pulte Mortgage. Those in the nearing unmanageable category (between 43 and 49 percent) were 1.4 times as likely to be denied than those who have the best DTI ratios. That doesnt mean that there are no lending disparities for applicants of color in these areas; we would need more data to draw a more definitive conclusion. ARMs start with a comparatively low rate for a period of time before the rate starts changing at regular intervals. Contact Us Proud Source: 2019 HMDA data. We applied our regression equation to the nations biggest lendersthose that reported 5,000 or more conventional home loan applications in our dataset. Start your home buying journey. For this story, we are defining metro areas as having a statistically significant disparity if a group is at least 50 percent more likely to be denied than similar White applicants. A Loan Estimate outlines estimated loan costs, including closing costs. Revenue: $25 to $100 million (USD) Competitors: Unknown. Less stringent credit score requirements apply to FHA and VA loans. While its not uncommon for CLTVs to be above 100 percent, most lenders prefer them to be under. PulteMortgage does not publicly disclose its down payment or qualification requirements on its website. Pulte Homes We determined there was a co-applicant when at least one of the five columns provided clear information about the co-borrower and none of the rest were marked in the negative (no co-applicant). With more than 200 loan options available, we work hard to understand and meet the needs Investigations, Emmanuel Martinez You make me nervous. Only in the struggling category do lenders approve loans to higher earning Black applicants at the same rate as poorer White applicants. We re-aggregated these ethnicities to have a statistically significant sample size for each racial and ethnic group, with the full understanding that no racial or ethnic group is a monolith. The CFPB found people of color have higher denial rates even when it held credit scores constant. Our analysis showed these 26 lenders were between 30 to almost 260 percent more likely to deny applicants of color than similarly situated White borrowers. Your loan consultant will provide you with a Loan Estimate after you apply. Previous studies have shown borrowers in neighborhoods of color receive FHA loans at higher rates than conventional loans, raising concerns that lenders push applicants of color into government-backed loans. The regression didnt produce statistically significant results for Native American applicants. Source: 2019 HMDA data, Number of applications: 42,162;McFaddens pseudo r-squared: 0.26663
They were still approved at lower rates than their White counterparts. WebIn a hurry or can't find your mortgage statement? A minimum credit score of 500 is for FHA loans, and a 3.5% down payment (or 10% if the score is below 580). Property value data is closer to having a normal distribution when the ratios are considered. While those are valid results, they are not statistically significant disparities under our definition. Pulte Mortgage was trying to find any reason to deny our loan. Because lenders define ratios between 36 and 50 percent differently, we split the raw percentages into two buckets at 43 percent. Since its founding in 1972, Pulte Mortgage has financed loans for more than 700,000 homes. To see what rates and terms may be available to you, you have to begin the application process and be connected with a loan officer. These can be: We focused on the two most straightforward outcomes: where the lender approved the application and the loan was made (originated), or where the lender denied it. Investigative Reporter. Customers can apply online or in person, depending on location and preference. Because it turns out moving fast and breaking things broke some super importantthings. They were nearly three times as likely to be denied as similarly qualified White applicants there. One of the most significant additions to the data is the applicants debt-to-income ratio, which banks and federal regulators say is the most important of a handful of key factors lenders consider. Search open jobs at Pulte Mortgage in Denver and find out about the interview experience in Denver or explore more of the top rated companies in Its calculated by dividing a borrowers total monthly payments on all of their lines of credit by their monthly income. When analyzing metro areas and lenders, we combined the less than 25 and between 25 and 34 into one category, merged between 35 and 44 and between 45 and 54 into one bucket and used it as the reference variable, and consolidated the between 55 and 64 and 65 of older into one variable. Pulte Mortgage acknowledged receipt of The Markups findings and didnt dispute any of them. HMDA data includes various types of mortgages that are either conventional loans, where the lender assumes the risk if a borrower defaults, and government-backed loans, where one of several federal agencies would be on the hook. We tossed out another 122 areas because they either lacked heterogeneity among the variables in our equation or the regression model produced a poor fit. Commercial and business property loan applications are also included in the HMDA data. Lenders typically extend the best rates to borrowers with high credit scores and larger down payments. Employees in Denver have rated Pulte Mortgage with 3.7 out of 5 stars in 87 anonymous Glassdoor reviews. Pulte Mortgages objective is to streamline the loan process for new construction and coordinate the loan and building timelines to achieve on-time closings. Is it simple? Source: 2019 HMDA data, Number of applications: 57,155; McFaddens pseudo r-squared: 0.2251. Sometimes lenders will manually overwrite that decision. We also filtered applications where age was not provided because they account for less than a 10th of one percent. Of the 17.5 million records in the 2019 HMDA dataset, there were only 20,000 instances (less than one percent) where those sets of columns contradict each other. We created a not applicable group for lenders we could not fit into the categories. We used the 2019 dataset, which was the most recent available when we began our investigation. Each of those columns includes an option that states theres no co-applicant. A high debt-to-income ratio means a person devotes most of his or her income to paying debts. The remaining 91 metro areas produced reliable findings. Although she had been preapproved by Pulte, the company ultimately denied her the loan. Nearly three-quarters of financial institutions reported fewer than 900 applications that year, a relatively small number for purposes of statistical analysis. Researchers said people of color are given lower credit scores because some of the factors that go into the algorithm have a disproportionate effect on people of color. How We Investigated Racial Disparities in Federal Mortgage Data, From the series Only 10 percent of them said that low credit scores were their biggest concern. We love to help. ), Desktop Underwriter was used as the primary system (reference variable), Desktop Underwriter was not used as the primary system, No information was provided on the underwriting system used, White Population Group 1: greater than 75 percent White (reference variable), White Population Group 2: less than or equal to 75 percent and greater than 50, White Population Group 3: less than or equal to 50 percent and greater than 25, White Population Group 4: less than or equal to 25 percent. It [the analysis] purposely excludes mortgages guaranteed by the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), designed to help borrowers with lower credit scores and small down payments, said Mike Fratantoni, chief economist at the MBA, in a written statement. Everything was blamed on the VA process yet the file sat in Pulte's hands. We included only applications for properties that had one-to-four units, which would capture single-family homes and duplexes, triplexes and quadplexes. Includes conventional, USDA, VA and FHA mortgages. For this analysis, we focused on mortgages that reflect everyday homeownership and where the government does not insure the loan. In two metro areasthe Fort Lauderdale/Pompano Beach/Sunrise area and the Las Vegas/Henderson/Paradise areathe only reliable results were for Black and Asian/Pacific Islander applicants, and those disparities were less than 50 percent. Seven lendersDHI Mortgage Company, Lennar Mortgage (formally known as Eagle Home Mortgage), Pulte Mortgage, Freedom Mortgage Corporation, Movement Mortgage, Fairway Independent Mortgage Corporation, and Navy Federal Credit Unionshowed wide disparities between the lending rates to people of color and similarly qualified White applicants. But they approved White applicants in those three categories about 90 percent of the time. Bank of America says the best debt-to-income ratio for a mortgage applicant to have is less than 36 percent. Pulte Mortgage does not reveal rates or offer pre-qualifications with a soft credit pull. This profile has not been claimed by the company. Chat with our team of Massachusetts home builders and arrange a visit! We will be in touch with you shortly. NMLS Entity #1791. www.PulteMortgage.com (www.nmlsconsumeraccess.org), I would like a sales consultant to contact me, Save design ideas and inspiration to your favorites, Create a design board with favorite items, Follow Pulte communities and get notified about openings, Do Not Sell/Share My Personal Information. By doing this, we created four categories for debt-to-income ratio. As mentioned earlier, the CFPB shares credit scores with other government regulators but not with the public, saying this data point could reveal too much about a prospective homebuyers identity. For the metro area and lender regression model, we filtered out applications where the co-applicant field was not applicable because they accounted for less than 0.5 percent of the total data and that variable would present issues when analyzing individual metro areas and lenders. Lenders there were 2.5times as likely to reject Black applicants than White ones with similar financial circumstances. When we sent our findings to the seven lenders with large lending disparities, all of them responded with written statements saying that they follow the law. This was great news which he had me write up so he could present to Pulte QA dept. Pulte Mortgage specializes in home loans for purchasers of Pulte Homes. In its analysis of the 2019 HMDA data, the CFPB found that for all applications, Black applicants had, on average, the lowest credit score of all racial and ethnic groupsa median credit score of 694. We used this variable as a continuous one. The options include: Across most racial and ethnic groups, with the exception of Native American applicants, lenders reported rejecting most applications because the debt would be too high relative to their income. Debt was also the most common reason lenders listed in denying White applicants33percent of their rejections. Pulte Mortgage specializes in loans for purchasers of properties built by Pulte Homes, so many of its 200 loan products are specific to new construction. Big corporations have already invested over $94 billion in AI technologies, with minimal oversight and no visibility. WebWe're honored to finance the new construction homes of our PulteGroup Family of Companies. Redlining has historically been based not only on the race and ethnicity of the applicant but also the demographic composition of the neighborhood. Lenders were more likely to deny Latino applicants in 39 metro areas (49percent), Asian/Pacific Islander applicants in 55 metro areas (62percent), and Native American applicants in one metro area. Between 2019 and 2021, Pulte Mortgage closed 55,000 loans for home purchaseout of 72,884 applications (about 75%). Unsubscribe easily. Help us keep up for a fraction of that cost. They promote incentives and charge the same amount as points or other loan costs where other lenders offer with no charges. WebWe're always looking to improve the mortgage experience for our customers from questions not found in our FAQs, to recommendations which could make our website more friendly for you. They all criticized our analysis, saying we didnt include credit scores and credit histories and that our scope was too narrow because we focused on conventional mortgages. These categories were based on another dataset, called HMDA panel, that comes from the Federal Housing Finance Agency. Please be sure to include Our categories for the metro areas are as follows: We thank Calvin Bradford (Calvin Bradford & Associates, Ltd.), Rebecca Goldin (Sense About Science USA and George Mason University), Jennifer LaFleur (Center for Public Integrity), and Jos Loya (UCLA) for reviewing an earlier draft of this methodology. Pulte Mortgage is licensed in 25 states: Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia and Washington. Despite the law, people of color continue to be denied mortgages at higher rates than their White counterparts. Pulte Mortgage has an overall rating of 3.7 out of 5, based on over 152 reviews left anonymously by employees. Applicants who marked their ethnicity as Latino regardless of race were grouped together to form a Latino group. Those groups were split at every 25th percentage point: The size of the metro area where the property is located. Minimum credit scores for VA loans vary by lender; you will likely need at least a 580 credit score. Pulte Mortgage employs 764 employees. Researchers and advocates also told us that lenders have tried to artificially reduce their rejection rates by purposefully sitting on applications for so long that the applicants have been forced to withdraw them. The two Vantage models are not widely used either, so we folded those two models with the other credit model option. Rates fluctuate with the economy as well. Whole incentives program is misleading the customers. Pulte Mortgage, LLC, CIVIL ACTION NO. Recent years have seen mortgage interest rates at historic lows, creating an advantageous market for prospective homebuyers. While interest rates arent the only deciding factor in making a home purchase, its important to understand how they can affect your buying power. See reviews below to learn more or submit your own review. It specializes in new-construction lending. * Denotes a required field. 8% of Pulte Mortgage employees are Black or African American. The CFPB says borrowers can end up with different loan products if they are above or below that ratio. Pulte Mortgage has serviced over 700,000 home loans since 1972, according to the company. We used this variable as a continuous one. 61% of Pulte Mortgage employees are women, while 39% are men. Includes conventional, USDA, VA and FHA mortgages. Unsubscribe at any time. First America Homes. ), Healthy: a debt-to-income ratio of 35 percent or less (reference variable), Manageable: a ratio between 36 and 42 percent, Nearing Manageable: a ratio between 43 and 49 percent, DTI Not Applicable (We filtered out records where no information was available for debt-to-income ratio and removed the variable from the model because of an issue with collinearity.). After 2 months and delays for extra research, Ms. James (Exec. We found that they did not. Minneapolis also showed a rare distinction: Of all the metro areas with statistically significant lending disparities, it was the only one where lenders were more likely to turn away applicants of all four racial and ethnic groups than their White counterparts. To see what rates and terms may be available to you, you have to begin the application That left 89 metro areas where we found at least one of the four racial and ethnic groups were more likely to be denied compared to similarly situated White applicants. Copyright 2023 PulteGroup, Inc.
Lastly, HMDAs volume of applications also allowed us to look at lending patterns of various financial institutions. We tossed out another 12 lenders because of collinearity issues and an additional four lenders because none of the race and ethnicity variables were statistically significant. Most financial institutions lend in specific markets and tend to stay within those geographic boundaries. Fixed-rate mortgages translate to predictable monthly mortgage payments. HMDAs latest expansion came from the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act, which was in response to the 2008 housing crisis. Their estimated finishing date is We downloaded the 2019 dataset multiple times (as it is updated from time to time), most recently on Aug. 10, 2021. Theres no down payment requirement for VA loans. But we found a stronger fit in our model when we used the raw percentages. We used 2019 American Community Survey data for median property values for each county in the country. Applicants with the worst debt-to-income ratio in 2019 (struggling category) were nearly 46 times as likely to be denied compared to those with healthy ratios, when we controlled for other factors. Number of applications: 2,433,071; McFadden's pseudo r-squared: 0.2256. For example, if you locked in an interest rate of 3.9% on a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage for a $500k home with 20% down, your monthly payment would be $1,887 (before taxes and insurance). Your contributions help us investigate how technology influences oursociety. Because of the Dodd-Frank Act, debt-to-income and combined loan-to-value ratios are now included in the latest data. Analyses of lending disparities have traditionally relied on data released through the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act of 1975, known as HMDA data. Action Taken refers to the outcome of the application. We are committed to seeing the homeownership dreams of our customers become reality. Pulte Mortgage was unprofessional, rude and lacked communication. Those who want to refinance already own a home. First America Homes is a real estate company. Pulte Mortgage has 888 employees. This is general information about financing the purchase of a home. Our content is intended to be used for general information purposes only. Our national model for conventional applications contained 17 variables: When we analyzed metro areas, we created more than 950 subsets based on the metro area location of the property (metropolitan statistical areas, metropolitan divisions, micropolitan statistical areas). I feel my recourse options vary; legal is almost unaffordable, restarting at Pulte futile, consumer-protection usually is without authority.
Racial and ethnic identities are rarely straightforward, and the data reflects that complexity. Any meaningful review of mortgage lending practices for possible discrimination, as regulators and the courts have made clear, must also consider individual factors such as a borrowers credit score and credit history, which lenders are required by law to take into account, said Blair Bernstein, director of public relations for the ABA, in a written statement. An applicant can get a mortgage, buy a new home, or refinance an existing mortgage to get better terms or take out a bigger loan. Lenders can deny mortgage applications for multiple reasons. Its currently kept and maintained by the CFPB, and its purpose is to ensure that lenders are meeting the housing needs of the communities they serve and to help identify potential discriminatory lending patterns. Difficult? The average total origination fees for 30 year fixed rate mortgages across all lenders (for all loan values, including both points & up-front fees in addition to origination fees) were $4,750 . The average employee at Pulte Mortgage Thank you for contacting Pulte. Then, an area VP did the same. We turned this variable into categorical data with four buckets: When looking at metro areas and individual lenders, we combined the less than 30 years and more than 30 years variables into one category and filtered out the records where the data was missing. For this analysis, we focused on first-lien mortgages. It lists information about the property thats being purchased, like the number of units and its general location (census tract). The trend persists today, more than 50 years after the passage of The Fair Housing Act. Were proud to partner with industry-leading brands that stand for the same quality and innovation as our homes. The most common reason listed for denials was that applicants had too much debt relative to their income, which is in line with previous findings by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) and a survey of mortgage bankers that found they were most concerned about applicants high debt ratios. That score is a snapshot in time; a persons credit score can fluctuate from one day to the next based on outstanding bills and balances on lines of credit. We then created two derivative models from that main one: one to analyze major metropolitan areas and another to analyze individual lenders. Based on old redlining maps, the federal government and lenders viewed White neighborhoods as the most favorable ones to invest in, and the risk they associated with financing a neighborhood increased as its residents became less White. When asked to comment on the lending disparities identified by The Information pulled from public Home Mortgage Disclosure Act Data. Within this step, you will: Among the largest metropolitan areas, disparities for Black applicants were highest in Chicago. It is very important to do your own analysis before making any investment based on your own personal circumstances and consult with your own investment, financial, tax and legal advisers. If you choose to submit a paper application at one of its branch locations, you can contact your loan officer at any time for a status update. We're honored to finance the new construction homes of our PulteGroup Family of Companies. Our mortgage information specialists walk you through financing options and get you into the home you love. These lending disparities appeared in every region of the country, from the Southincluding Nashville and Birminghamto the Northeast (Boston), the Midwest (Minneapolis), and the West (Riverside, Calif.). These banks, among other lenders, also say that ratios above 50 percent need the most work. Additionally, we included those records where information in various columns contradicted each other: for example, records where race, ethnicity, and sex said no co-applicant, but age and credit score said there was a co-applicant. Property values differ depending on their location: An $800,000 home in San Francisco is different from a home of the same value in Fresno, Calif. To normalize the data, we decided to calculate a ratio between the property value and median property value of the county. A change in the interest rate doesnt necessarily translate to fluctuation in home prices, but they can affect the housing market. To standardize this column, we created buckets using the most consistent definitions among lenders. Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, and Wells Fargo agree that DTI ratios below 36 percent are the best. It contained more than 17million applications, nearly 90 percent of all loans made in the country from more than 5,500 financial institutions. Despite the importance of credit scores in lending decisions, we could not control for this variable in any of our models. Its important to note that on a national level, Pacific Islander applicants have higher denial rates than Asian applicants. White borrowers receive both conventional and FHA loans about 75 percent of the time.
The normal distribution becomes more apparent when removing ratios that are greater than 10. Even if you start with Pulte Mortgage, always work with another lender to compare. The population range in the 90th percentile was wide, so we separated those areas in the 99th percentile from the rest. We're here to help! That number may be an underestimate because of the diversity within the Latino population. Pulte is a homebuilder, not a mortgage lender. Pulte Mortgage does not post its starting mortgage rates on its website. We were given a close date of March 11, 2016. 2. Wed Jun 28 2023 07:23:53 GMT-0700 (Pacific Daylight Time) Lenders say an applicants credit score is an essential variable they use to evaluate mortgage applications. (We filtered out records where no information was available for tract/metro area income ratio and removed the variable from the model because of an issue with collinearity. Sign up to get the Hello World newsletter in your inbox everySaturday. The majority of those metro areas, 709 of them, did not produce meaningful results because theyre too small (most of these had fewer than 500 applications). Pulte Mortgage specializes in construction loans for purchasers of Pulte Homes. Therefore, we limited our data to so-called first-lien conventional mortgages for home purchase on one- to four-unit properties, where the borrower intends to live in the property. Our regression analysis takes into account only loans and denials, excluding the other outcomes, which are more ambiguous. Lending rates are also much lower for Latino, Native American, Asian/Pacific Islander applicants than White ones in the struggling category. It offers more than 200 types of loans, including both conventional loans and government-backed loans. Other applicants of colorAsian/Pacific Islander, Latino, and Native Americanhave the same or slightly higher approval rates compared to poorer White applicants. Through its loan dashboard, you can start and complete your loan application, upload documents as needed and stay up to date with your loan status. However, the total number of applications strongly correlates with a lenders assets, so we used the number of applications as a proxy for size. Box 736703 Dallas, TX 75373-6703 Attention: Cashiering Express or Overnight Mail: 7390 S. Iola Street Limiting our analysis to these specific loans and removing other records for statistical reasons reduces our universe of data to about 2.4 million mortgage applications nationwide in 2019.