The loan-by-loan file a mortgage lender keeps and reports each year under HMDA, with one row for every covered loan and loan request and what happened to it.
The register, known as the LAR, is the working file behind HMDA. Each row is one covered loan or one request for a loan. The row records, among other things, the amount, the action the lender took and its date, the property’s state, county and census tract, the interest rate, the number of dwelling units, and whether the loan was primarily for a business or commercial purpose. Each row’s identifier begins with the lender’s LEI.
A lender submits its register for a calendar year by March 1 of the next year. Lenders that reported at least 60,000 covered loans and requests in the prior year also file quarterly. The Bureau then publishes each register in a modified form that protects the privacy of the people in it, and a lender must tell anyone who asks where to find that file. Smaller banks and credit unions, those under 500 loans of a type in each of the two prior years, may leave optional fields blank.
When you seek an apartment or rental loan, the register answers a direct question: which lenders closed loans like yours, in your county, at what size.
How it shows up in the data here
The multifamily and 1-4 unit investor figures here are built from the public HMDA loan registers: rows where the action taken is a loan originated, grouped by lender, year, state and county. The public file carries no borrower name, and this site shows no count under 5. See loan comps for loans by size and place and sources for the HMDA files and years used.
Go further
- Loan comps, multifamily: Loans from the register, by size, county and lender.
- Loan comps, 1-4 unit investor: Small rental loans from the register.
- Sources: The HMDA files and years this site reads.
- How to read HMDA data for multifamily and investor loans: HMDA is the one public file that lists individual apartment and rental-house loans by lender, amount, county and year. It covers loans on dwellings only, and not every lender reports.
Related terms
- Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA): The federal law that makes mortgage lenders collect and publish loan-level data on loans secured by a dwelling, including apartment buildings and 1-4 unit rentals.
- Regulation C: The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau rule, 12 CFR part 1003, that carries out the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act and sets which lenders report and what they report.
- Legal Entity Identifier (LEI): A unique 20-character code, issued under the ISO 17442 standard, that identifies a legal entity anywhere in the world.
- Multifamily (5+ units): Residential rental property with five or more units. Banks, credit unions and HMDA all draw the line between four units and five.
- Investor 1-4 unit property: A house, duplex, triplex or fourplex held as a rental or for resale, not lived in by the borrower. It has fewer than five units, so it is not multifamily.
- Adverse action notice: The notice a lender must give under Regulation B when it refuses credit in substantially the amount or on the terms requested, with the reasons or the right to ask for them.
Sources
- 12 CFR 1003.4, Compilation of reportable data, retrieved .
- 12 CFR 1003.5, Disclosure and reporting, retrieved .
- 12 CFR 1003.3(d), Partially exempt transactions, retrieved .
Plain definitions for orientation, not legal, tax or credit advice. A lender's own policy decides what it will do.