58
Table 6A lists the top 25 closed-end reporting institutions by the total number of closed-end
originations and their lending characteristics
34
, limited to first-lien mortgages for site-built
single-family, principal-residence homes excluding reverse mortgages. Together the top 25
closed-end lenders originated 6.1 million loans in 2021, accounting for 43.9 percent of the
national market, the highest share of the national market in the last four years. Since 2018, the
top 25 closed-end lenders have increased their share of total origination volume each year, from
33.8 percent in 2018, to 37.2 percent in 2019, to 38.9 percent of all closed-end originations in
2020.
35
The top 25 lenders were particularly prominent in the refinance space. In 2021, they
originated 4.0 million refinance loans, accounting for 53.0 percent of refinance loans by all
reporting institutions. The top 25 lenders originated 1.5 million home purchase loans, or 34.4
percent of home purchase loans.
With about 1.2 million originated loans, Rocket Mortgage (formerly known as Quicken Loans)
continued to be the highest volume closed-end lender, with a market share of about 8.8
percent.
36
Nineteen of the 25 top financial institutions were independent mortgage companies, 5
were large banks, and 1 was a credit union. Two institutions , Better Mortgage Corporation and
Navy Federal Credit Union, were new to the list of top 25 closed-end reporting institutions in
2021. Both institutions had a market share of 1.0 percent or less. Two institutions, Finance of
America Mortgage and Primelending, A PlainsCapital Company fell off the list.
Table 6B lists the top 25 HELOC reporting institutions by origination volume in 2021. In total,
the top 25 HELOC reporters accounted for 423,607 HELOC originations or 44.0 percent, of all
34
Some institutions may be part of a larger organization; however, the data in Tables 6A and 6B are at the
reporter level. Because affiliate activity has declined markedly since the housing boom in the mid-2000s,
a top 25 list at the organization level is not likely to be significantly different from Tables 6A and 6B.
35
For the top 25 closed-end lenders over the past four years, see “2020 Mortgage Market Activity and
Trends,” available at
https://www.consumerfinance.gov/data-research/research-reports/2020-mortgage-
market-activity-and-trends/, “Data Point: 2019 Mortgage Market Activity and Trends,” available at
https://www.consumerfinance.gov/data-research/research-reports/data-p oint-2019-mortgage-market-
activity-and-trends/, and “Data Point: 2018 Mortgage Market Activity and Trends,” available at
https://www.consumerfinance.gov/data-research/research-reports/data-point-2018-mortgage-market-
activity-and-trends/.
36
Notably, loan counts and market shares derived from the HMDA data can differ from some other
industry sources, such as the market shares compiled by Inside Mortgage Finance
(https://www.insidemortgagefinance.com/
). For HMDA reporting purposes, institutions report only
mortgage applications for which they make the credit decision. Under HMDA, if an application was
approved by a third party (such as a correspondent) rather than the lending institution, then that third
party reports the loan as its own origination, and the lending institution reports the loan as a purchased
loan. Alternatively, if a third party forwards an application to the lending institution for approval, then the
lending institution reports the application under HMDA (and the third party does not report anything). In
contrast, Inside Mortgage Finance considers loans to have been originated by the acquiring institution
even if a third party makes the credit decision. Thus, many of the larger lending organizations that work
with sizable networks of correspondents report considerable volumes of purchased loans in the HMDA
data, while Inside Mortgage Finance considers many of these purchased loans to be originations.