OCC Mortgage Metrics Report

Overview

The OCC Mortgage Metrics Report presents key performance data on first residential mortgages serviced by national banks, focusing on delinquencies, loss mitigation actions, and foreclosures. The OCC collects this data from the nine national banks that have the largest mortgage servicing portfolios among all national banks, representing more than 90 percent of all mortgages serviced by national banks, and approximately 40 percent of all mortgages outstanding. Approximately 90 percent of the mortgages in the total servicing portfolio are held by third parties via securitization by government–sponsored enterprises and other financial institutions. These nine banks service more than 23 million first mortgage loans, totaling $3.8 trillion.

The OCC Mortgage Metrics Report is based on a data collection process covering 64 data elements for each of more than 23 million mortgages held or serviced by the nine participating national banks from October 2007 through March 2008. This is the first report to gather and analyze systematic information on this scale and in this detail about mortgage delinquencies, loss mitigation actions, and foreclosures. The OCC uses a data vendor to aggregate, validate, store, and generate reports, but retains ownership and control of the data. The OCC has shared its standard data elements and definitions with the Office of Thrift Supervision (OTS), the Federal Reserve Board (FRB), the Department of the Treasury, and the Hope Now Alliance to promote standard data collection and analysis industry wide.

In addition to providing important information to the public, the data gathering for the OCC Mortgage Metrics Report supports the OCC's supervision of national bank mortgage practices. It provides an additional tool to help examiners assess emerging trends, identify anomalies, compare national banks to the rest of the industry, evaluate asset quality and loan–loss reserve needs, and evaluate the effectiveness of loss mitigation actions. Over time, the OCC expects to use this information to assess performance by origination channel, state and geographic region, and key credit characteristics.

Despite its relatively comprehensive coverage, it would be inappropriate to extrapolate from the sample covered by the OCC Mortgage Metrics Report to draw conclusions about overall conditions in mortgage lending. The portfolio of loans serviced by these nine national banks does not represent a statistically random sample of all mortgage loans; its characteristics differ in notable ways from the overall population of mortgages. For example, the subprime mortgages serviced by these national banks comprise just 25 percent of all subprime mortgages, whereas these banks service about 40 percent of mortgages as a whole. Similarly, the prime mortgages serviced by national banks include a disproportionately high percentage of conforming loans sold to the GSEs — about 66 percent, compared to 43 percent for the industry overall.

The OCC and the nine participating banks devoted significant resources to validating the data to ensure that the information was reliable, accurate, and consistent with similar information presented elsewhere. Steps to ensure the validity of the data included comparisons to banks' quarterly Call Reports, and internal quality reviews conducted by the banks and by the external vendor that compiled the data for the OCC. However, data sets of this size and scope inevitably suffer from a degree of inconsistency, missing data, and other imperfections. For this report, the historical data for October 2007 through February 2008 was provided by the banks on a "best–efforts" basis, and some requested data elements were not readily available. The OCC is working with reporting banks to further refine the data collection process, and over time this will improve the accuracy and completeness of the reported data. The OCC expects future data submissions to be adjusted as errors and omissions are detected; the agency will identify any significant discrepancies that surface through these ongoing efforts in future reports.