Today we drew the curtain back on mortgage.homethinking.com. Mortgage.homethinking.com allows you to see top local lenders by market share and to assess the risk of the subprime mortgage crisis in your county. For Realtors and Mortgage Brokers who blog, they can also embed the charts in their own posts to support opinion or analysis.

Why would someone want to look through 33 million mortgage records? If you are refinancing your mortgage you can see the exact market share of lenders in your area and also find information on the conditions under which mortgages were obtained, like the average amount borrowed.

More topically today, you can see how many subprime mortgages were undertaken in a particular area in 2006. 2006 is important as many subprime loans reset in 2 years and will do this year. They can act as a forward predictor of more foreclosures (and hence more downward pressure on real estate prices in that area).

Or the data can show exactly the opposite. For instance here is Manhattan in New York:

As you can see it barely was touched by subprime loans in 2006.

This is just the start but in the near future we’ll be adding:

- 2004 and 2005 data (we actually had to order the data from an obscure library in DC)

- Better lender navigation so you can traverse the mortgage lending of a particular lender more easily

- An free API into all of this data to help support or disprove a hypothesis around mortgage lending

- More and in depth data around loan performance. The HMDA data is the total universe but unfortunately it’s released in September of the following year (so 2007 data will be released in 5 months or so and will hit Homethinking soon after).

What other ideas are we missing? How can we improve? Let us know your feedback in the comments or drop us a line at feedback at homethinking dot com