MISMO creates API standard to find local conforming limits

The Mortgage Industry Standards Maintenance Organization has approved an application programming interface standard that allows users to search for conforming mortgage area loan limits based on a property's postal code and county name.

This standard is called the FIPS Code Lending Limit API Specification. FIPS is short for the Federal Information Processing Standard, a five digit code that identifies counties and county equivalents.

It has achieved "candidate recommendation" status, which means it has been thoroughly reviewed by a wide range of organizations and industry participants as part of the approval process.

While the Federal Housing Finance Agency annually publishes a nationwide loan limit along with a greater ceiling for loans made in high-cost areas, which are being sold to Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac, individual counties can have their own maximum between those amounts.

For example, Eagle County, Colorado is the only county in the nation with a one-unit loan limit of approximately $1.075 million for 2023, while Napa County, California is near $1.018 million. Those with the lowest limits for high-cost areas are two New York State counties, Dutchess and Orange, which have a $726,525 limit. In total for 2023, 60 counties fall between $726,200 and $1.09 million, according to an FHFA spreadsheet.

Currently, there's no standard mechanism for lenders to easily access this information, MISMO said.

"The FIPS Code Lending Limit API Specification is MISMO's latest effort to define industry-wide standard interfaces for common business functions," said Jan Davis, acting president of MISMO, in a press release. "This specification will guide the user through how to build lending limit API requirements, using the MISMO API Toolkit, for searching lending limits, and optionally the FIPS state and county codes, based on the postal code and county name of any property."

Other products created through the API Toolkit are the Mortgage Insurance Estimated Rate Quote API and the Mortgage Insurance Activation API, the organization's recently released 2022 annual report disclosed.

The FIPS Code Lending Limit API Specification package includes a comprehensive information guide; a sample business analyst template to serve as a guide; a fillable, customizable business analyst template; and the relevant YAML (a programming language) files.

MISMO does not have a similar API for Federal Housing Administration-insured mortgages. Loan limits for the FHA program also vary by county.