A Closer Look at Pittsburgh’s Mortgage Market, 2022–2024
A mortgage market can look healthy in aggregate while still working very differently for different borrowers, neighborhoods, and lenders. Looking closely at the most recent years helps reveal those differences: who is getting credit, who is being denied, which institutions are making the loans, what borrowers are paying, and whether the market is serving lower-income and minority households equitably.
This section focuses on mortgage lending in the Pittsburgh metropolitan area from 2022 through 2024, with particular attention to 2024 as the most recent year. Rather than tracing long-term change, the analysis examines the current structure of the mortgage market: recent shifts in lending volume and loan purpose, racial and income disparities, denial rates, lender type, loan costs, investor activity, and the geography of lending across all eight counties in the Pittsburgh MSA.
Mortgage lending has begun to stabilize, but the recovery has not meant a comparable recovery in homebuying
Pittsburgh's mortgage market showed modest signs of stabilization by 2024. Total originations increased from 46,073 in 2022 to 46,766 in 2024, reversing some of the decline that followed the pandemic-era mortgage boom. Most counties experienced an increase, although Washington County saw a slight decline from 2023 to 2024.
But the composition of that rebound matters. Refinancing increased across all eight counties, while home-purchase lending declined in Allegheny, Fayette, and Washington counties. Home purchase also lost roughly one percentage point of the regional mortgage market to refinancing.
The distinction is important because refinancing primarily serves people who already own homes, whereas home-purchase lending represents opportunities to enter or move within homeownership. The modest increase in total mortgage activity therefore does not necessarily represent a comparable improvement in access to homeownership.
The broader economic environment helps explain why. Mortgage rates rose from historic lows during the pandemic to nearly 8% in late 2023, while home prices remained elevated. CFPB estimates that the principal-and-interest payment on a $400,000 mortgage increased by more than $1,200 per month between the rate trough and peak. At the same time, homeowners with older low-rate mortgages became reluctant to sell and replace them with substantially more expensive loans. Federal Reserve research estimates that this mortgage-rate “lock-in” accounted for 44% of the decline in mortgage-borrower mobility from 2021 to 2022.
The Pittsburgh rebound should therefore be read cautiously: mortgage activity began to recover, but the conditions for purchasing a home remained difficult.
Greater racial diversity in lending has not eliminated unequal access to home-purchase credit
The number of loans made to Black, Asian, and Hispanic borrowers increased between 2022 and 2024, but their shares of the overall Pittsburgh mortgage market changed by less than one percentage point. In Allegheny County in 2024, Black borrowers received 1,293 mortgages, representing about 6.9% of originations, while Asian borrowers received 860 and Hispanic borrowers 655.
The picture becomes more concerning when the analysis is narrowed to home purchase. Black home-purchase originations in Allegheny County fell from 697 in 2023 to 634 in 2024. White home-purchase lending also declined, while Asian and Hispanic borrowers experienced modest increases.
Application outcomes reveal another important disparity. Among single-family, owner-occupied home-purchase applications on which lenders made a credit decision, the 2024 denial rate in Allegheny County was 13.2% for Black applicants compared with 6.1% for White applicants—more than twice as high.
Higher denial rates do not by themselves establish discrimination. Mortgage underwriting considers income, debts, credit history, loan-to-value ratios and other factors, and the public HMDA data do not capture every factor that can affect a decision. Rising mortgage rates can also increase debt-to-income ratios and make applicants near underwriting thresholds more likely to be denied.
Still, these results matter when considered together. An increase in total lending does not automatically mean that racial gaps in access to homeownership are closing. Black home-purchase lending declined in 2024 even as the overall market stabilized, and Black applicants continued to experience considerably higher denial rates.
The geographic distribution of lending also changed little over these three years: in Allegheny County in 2024, 83.2% of originations were in tracts with less than 30% minority population, 10.0% in 30–50% minority tracts, and 6.7% in majority-minority tracts. These percentages are useful descriptive indicators, but determining whether lending is proportionate requires comparison with the distribution of households, homeowners, home sales, and potential borrowers across those neighborhoods.
Mortgage companies now dominate home-purchase lending—and that changes both who serves LMI borrowers and how community reinvestment works
One of the clearest structural findings in the 2024 data is that the institution making a mortgage depends heavily on what the borrower is using the loan for.
Banks still originated the largest share of mortgages overall, at 48.6%, compared with 40.2% for mortgage companies and 9.8% for credit unions. But mortgage companies dominated the home-purchase market, originating 63.1% of purchase loans, compared with only 33.2% for banks. Banks, by contrast, originated 53.8% of refinancing loans and more than three-quarters of home-improvement loans.
This is part of a broader national restructuring of mortgage lending. Nonbank mortgage companies have become major players in home-purchase and government-backed lending, rather than simply supplementary lenders to the traditional banking system.
Their role is particularly consequential for low- and moderate-income borrowers. In Pittsburgh, mortgage companies account for an even larger share of LMI home-purchase lending than they do among upper-income borrowers. Banks show the opposite tendency, with comparatively greater representation among middle- and upper-income borrowers. Greater use of FHA and other government-backed products by nonbank lenders is one plausible reason for this difference.
This creates an important policy tension. The lender category playing the largest role in LMI home-purchase lending is generally outside the federal Community Reinvestment Act framework. CRA evaluates how insured depository institutions meet community credit needs, particularly those of LMI borrowers and neighborhoods; independent mortgage companies are not generally covered by federal CRA, even though they remain subject to HMDA and fair-lending laws.
The lenders serving more LMI homebuyers also tend to have higher reported loan costs
The rise of mortgage companies becomes more consequential when lender type is compared with loan costs.
Across all three major loan purposes in 2024, median reported total loan costs were:
Mortgage companies: $6,441
Banks and affiliates: $4,160
Credit unions: $248
Mortgage companies had the highest median reported costs for home purchase, refinancing, and home improvement. The differences were especially large in refinancing and home improvement; the gap was smaller in home-purchase lending, where mortgage companies have their largest market share.
The finding becomes particularly important when combined with the previous one: mortgage companies have a disproportionately important role in serving LMI homebuyers, but their loans also carry higher median reported costs.
That does not establish that mortgage companies charge more because they are mortgage companies. HMDA total loan costs can reflect differences in loan size, borrower credit characteristics, discount points, loan type, lender credits, interest-rate structure and product mix. High interest rates also led more borrowers nationally to pay discount points upfront in an effort to lower their mortgage rates; CFPB reports that the share of homebuyers paying points roughly doubled between 2021 and 2023.
Credit unions occupy a distinctive part of this market. They have the lowest median loan amounts for several categories and particularly low reported costs, suggesting that they may serve a smaller-balance segment of the mortgage market. For LMI home purchases, median loan amounts were $125,000 for credit unions, $135,000 for banks, and $155,000 for mortgage companies.
The 2024 home-purchase market shifted toward higher-income households
Perhaps the most important short-term change in the study is who was able to remain in the home-purchase market as affordability deteriorated.
LMI owner-occupied home-purchase originations across the Pittsburgh MSA fell from 8,489 in 2023 to 5,014 in 2024. Overall home-purchase activity also declined, but the contraction was not distributed evenly: lending to upper-income borrowers increased, middle-income lending remained roughly stable, and LMI lending fell sharply. Similar movement toward upper-income borrowers appears in refinancing and home-improvement lending.
The shift is visible across most counties. Upper-income borrower shares increased in Allegheny, Beaver, Butler, Fayette, and Washington counties; Butler's upper-income borrowers accounted for 48.4% of home-purchase originations in 2024. Lawrence County stands out as the major exception: its LMI share increased from 39.4% in 2023 to 52.8% in 2024, while its upper-income share fell sharply.
The broader interest-rate environment provides a plausible explanation. The Federal Reserve found that rising mortgage rates and house prices sharply increased monthly mortgage payments and that home purchases by low-income households fell disproportionately, in part because lender debt-to-income limits constrain how much additional payment lower-income borrowers can absorb.
So the 2024 Pittsburgh story is not simply that fewer homes were purchased with mortgages. It is that the affordability shock changed who could successfully remain in the market.
Higher-income households generally have greater capacity to absorb higher monthly payments and larger down payments. LMI households have less financial room to accommodate the same increase in borrowing costs. A market can therefore become more income-selective even without any formal change in lending standards.
That distinction is important for policy. Affordability pressures can restrict access to homeownership before a household ever reaches the point of being denied a mortgage. Some households may reduce what they seek to buy, postpone purchasing altogether, or never submit an application.
INVESTOR-residence purchases are another source of housing demand worth watching
The 2024 recovery also included an increase in financed purchases of properties that would not be used as the borrower's principal residence. Within HMDA’s investment-property categories, the Pittsburgh MSA recorded 1,882 investor home-purchase originations in 2024. Activity had declined from 2022 to 2023 before rebounding in most counties in 2024; Armstrong and Washington were exceptions, where the decline continued.
These purchases were most commonly located in middle-income census tracts, followed by moderate-income, upper-income, and low-income tracts.
That makes this more than a niche lending statistic. Investor residence buyers represent a source of housing demand that can compete with households seeking homes for their own occupancy, particularly if investment purchases are concentrated in lower-priced portions of the housing stock.
But this category needs to be interpreted cautiously. HMDA cannot tell us whether an investment property will become a long-term rental, short-term rental, or something else.