Insights
Market reports, forecast data, industry insights, and more from iEmergent.
Over the past three decades, Boston has seen an explosion in its minority population, driven in large part by immigration. This surge has fueled market expansion at a pace that outstrips the national average, a trend that shows no sign of slowing.
Despite this growth, the homeownership gap between non-Hispanic white households and households of color remains wide. High housing costs and a legacy of discriminatory housing practices continue to create barriers.
Looking ahead in Boston, where do the mortgage lending opportunities lie? And how can lenders leverage data not only to expand their businesses, but also to help close the homeownership gap? Our data analysis below offers some answers.
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Because the United States consists of more than 84,000 census tracts, 925 core-based statistical areas (CBSAs), and over 390 metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs), and each one is unique, we forecast mortgage opportunity at the census-tract level. That allows lenders to use local data to make localized decisions. Since 2010, iEmergent’s forecast has outperformed most models designed to predict U.S. mortgage originations, maintaining an accuracy rate of over 90%.
The Boston-Cambridge-Newton, MA-NH, MSA, is a major metro area in the northeast United States. It’s home to many prestigious universities that students try to work into every conversation, and it is becoming home for a blossoming population of immigrants from around the world.
With a population of 4.9 million people across 1.9 million households, the overall ownership rate of the Boston market is 61.8%. Minorities represent around 33% of the total population, and that percentage has grown steadily over the last 30 years. More than 90% of the region’s net population growth since 1990 has come from new immigrants.
In Boston, our 2026 projections show 83,646 combined purchase and refinance loans, amounting to $46.1 billion in total volume with an average loan size of $551,108.
By visualizing our forecast data for 2026 purchase and refinance loans in the Boston market by census tract, you can see that more loans originated away from the urban core.
From 2023 to 2026, total dollar volume for purchase and refinance originations in Boston are forecast to grow from $27.2 billion to $46.1 billion, a 69.8% increase. The increase can be attributed to higher home prices—and therefore higher loan amounts—as well as 30,000 more loans, many of which are forecast to be refinance loans.
This growth is expected to continue. From 2025 to 2030, the Boston market is expected to grow at a faster rate than the United States as a whole.
iEmergent’s Mortgage Velocity Index (MVI) compares a market’s rate of growth in loans over the next five years to the growth rate of the overall U.S. market. An MVI of 1 means a market is growing on pace with national market growth, and Boston has a 1.31 MVI.
In the Boston MSA, 33.4% of the population are people of color. (Note: As a majority-minority city, the minority population percentage is much higher within the Boston city limits, but for this analysis, we’re looking at the entire MSA.)
Yet, the homeownership gap remains high. The non-Hispanic white homeownership rate (69.4%) is more than double that of Hispanic households (32.8%).
Non-Hispanic white households make up 72% of households in the Boston market and accounted for 77.7% of loans in 2024. While the penetration rate for Asian, Black, and Hispanic borrowers has improved in the last few years, it still lags behind population percentages.
If nothing changes, our forecast shows that lending to borrowers of color will grow 35.7% between 2023 and 2026, compared to an overall market growth rate of 69.8%. This means that as things stand, most of the growth will be to non-Hispanic white borrowers.
Part of the struggle to get people of color into homeownership in Boston is a history of discriminatory housing policies. (To learn more on the history of Boston’s housing laws, regulations, and practices and how they still impact residents today, explore this detailed policy timeline from the Fair Housing Center of Greater Boston.)
The impact of those policies have resulted in highly concentrated pockets of Black and Asian residents in the market, which makes a strong case for place-based loan programs. We visualize these highly concentrated areas below:
Black Population Density
Asian Population Density
In the Boston MSA, 28.1% of census tracts are classified as low- to moderate-income (LMI), closely matching the national average of 28.8%.
Lending to LMI borrowers accounts for about 12% of loan dollars and 25% of loan count in the market, which is lower than other markets we’ve analyzed. This number is expected to stay flat in our 2026 forecast.
As in many markets, high home costs in Boston bar LMI borrowers from homeownership. Since 2012, home price appreciation in the Boston metro has soared by 147 percent, and the city faces an estimated shortage of more than 40,000 homes—roughly 13% of its total housing stock.
A visualization of our 2026 forecast shows that loan dollars to LMI borrowers are spread throughout the market, but are lower in volume in the center of Boston, where home values are higher:
Home values are almost exactly inverse to where LMI opportunity is in the Boston market. Areas with higher home values see fewer loans to LMI borrowers, and areas with lower home values see more loans to LMI borrowers, visualized below:
This makes sense intuitively, but it’s helpful to see it laid out on a map to understand how to help LMI borrowers become homeowners in an expensive market like Boston. By using property listing and geographic data in Mortgage MarketSmart, lenders can pinpoint opportunities to put LMI borrowers into more affordable homes listed in affluent areas.
Boston is a market defined by growth, diversity, and high housing costs as well as persistent homeownership gaps rooted in a long history of discriminatory policies.
Even with strong overall lending growth in the forecast, much of that growth is projected to flow to non-Hispanic white borrowers—unless lenders take intentional steps to reach LMI and minority households. That’s both a challenge and an opportunity.
In a market like Boston, success comes from strategies that:
Imagine having this level of detail, not just for Boston, but for every market you serve. What new strategies could you design? How much faster could you grow while helping close homeownership gaps?