Research report
Mapping Access and Exclusion: Latino Home Purchase Lending Across California’s Major Metropolitan Markets, 2018–2024
Written by
Orson Aguilar
Founding President and CEO LatinoProsperity
Chris Vaeth
Advisor, LatinoProsperity
46 minute read
Published October 2025
Key Findings
- For Latino families, homeownership remains the most effective pathway to building wealth, but a large wealth divide and high housing prices have caused California Latinos to lag well behind White households in homeownership. To assess the role of home-purchase lending in this context, we examined Home Mortgage Disclosure Act data for 2018-2024, focusing on loans to purchase owner-occupied residences.
- During 2018-2024, a period of extreme market swings, the Latino share of home-purchase lending increased from 25.2% to 31.0%, but it still lagged well behind the 37% Latino share of California’s population. Over the seven-year period, the Latino share of loans was 26.5%.
- The data revealed a stark divide between traditional banks and nonbank lenders. Only six of the top 25 home purchase lenders were traditional banks. Banks provided just 10.3% of home purchase loans, and Latino borrowers received only 11.4% of these loans, less than half of the overall 26.5% Latino share.
- Nonbank lenders accounted for a larger share of loans overall, with 30.5% of loans going to Latinos, substantially higher than traditional banks.
- These data suggest that nonbanks are doing far more to reach the Latino market than banks and are more willing to meet Latino homebuyers where they are.
- Efforts must be made to encourage banks to reenter the mortgage market to meet Latino homebuyer demand.
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