About Mortgage Metrics

The OCC and OTS Mortgage Metrics Report presents key data on first lien residential mortgages serviced by national banks and thrifts, focusing on credit performance, loan modifications, payment plans, foreclosures, short sales, and deed-in-lieu-of-foreclosure actions. The OCC and OTS collect these data from the nine national banks⁶ and four thrifts⁷ that have the largest mortgage servicing portfolios among all national banks and thrifts—although as the result of merger and acquisition transactions last year, these 13 depository institutions are now owned by nine holding companies.⁸ The data represent almost 66 percent of all mortgages outstanding. Approximately 91 percent of the mortgages in the portfolio are owned by third parties as a result of loan sales and securitization by government-sponsored enterprises, the originating banks, and other financial institutions. At the end of December 2008, the 13 reporting institutions serviced more than 34.7 million first lien mortgage loans, totaling more than $6.1 trillion in outstanding balances.

While the loans reflected in this report represent a very large percentage of the overall mortgage industry, they do not represent a statistically random sample of all mortgage loans. The characteristics of these loans differ in notable ways from the overall population of mortgages. Additionally, this report does not attempt to quantify or adjust for known seasonal effects that occur within the mortgage industry.

In addition to providing important information to the public, the data support the supervision of national bank and thrift mortgage practices. For example, the data provide an additional tool to help examiners assess emerging trends, identify anomalies, compare a servicer with peer institutions, evaluate asset quality and loan loss reserve needs, and evaluate loss mitigation actions.

The report continues to promote a common reporting framework using standardized reporting terms and elements, which allow better comparisons across the industry and over time. The report uses standardized definitions for prime, Alt-A, and subprime mortgages based on commonly used credit score ranges.

The OCC, OTS, and the participating institutions devoted significant resources to validating the data to ensure that the information is reliable, accurate, and consistent with information presented elsewhere. Steps to ensure the validity of the data include comparisons with institutions' quarterly call and thrift financial reports and internal quality reviews conducted by the banks and thrifts and by the external vendor that compiled the data. However, data sets of this size and scope inevitably suffer from a degree of inconsistency, missing data, and other imperfections. This report notes cases in which data anomalies may have affected the results shown. The OCC and OTS require prior data submissions to be adjusted as errors and omissions are detected. In some cases, data presented in this report reflect resubmissions from institutions that restate and correct earlier information.

New in this Report

The agencies work to continually improve the quality of mortgage data reporting and have expanded their data-collection efforts to include information on the affordability and sustainability of loan modifications. Following the report released in December 2008, the agencies expanded the number of loan-level elements collected from mortgage servicers from 68 to 99. Also new in this report is information on the amount payments changed as a result of loan modifications; how loan modifications vary on the basis of payment change; the performance of government guaranteed mortgages (Federal Housing Administration (FHA) and Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) loans); and first payment default. Going forward, the OCC and OTS will continue to work to improve the quality and availability of the mortgage performance data presented in this report.

The OCC and OTS use a data vendor to aggregate, validate, store, and generate reports, but the agencies retain ownership and control of the data.

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