MIAMI _ A new study analyzing U.S. residential property loan originations in the first quarter of 2017 shows that unmarried co-borrowers accounted for 40.2 percent of single-family home sale loans in Miami _ more than any other city in the U.S.
Rounding out the top five cities in the study by ATTOM Data Solutions were Seattle (37.4 percent), San Diego (28.9 percent), Los Angeles (28.2 percent) and Portland, Ore. (27.7 percent).
But those numbers don't mean that Miami has more unmarried couples living together than any other city.
"The first thing that comes to mind when you hear co-borrowers is two people who are living together," said Ron Shuffield, president of EWM Realty International. "But co-borrowers could be anything from millennials buying a home with the help of their parents to investors buying a property together."
Overall, the ATTOM report shows 22 percent of all single-family purchases in the U.S. in the first quarter of 2017 had multiple, unmarried co-borrowers on the loan, up from 20 percent a year ago.
The number of loans originated on U.S. residential properties totaled 1,415,847, a drop of 30 percent from the previous quarter and down 21 percent from a year ago.
The total dollar volume of loan originations in the first quarter was also down 21 percent from a year ago to $347.9 billion, the lowest since the first quarter of 2014.
The loan origination report was derived from publicly recorded mortgages and deeds of trust collected in more than 950 counties accounting for more than 80 percent of the U.S. population.
