Study shows it's more difficult for black Americans to get a mortgage loan than other groups

SEATTLE, Feb. 9 (UPI) -- A new study from Zillow, the online real estate database, finds it's harder for black people to get mortgage loans than it is for other groups.

The study looked at data from the 2013 1-year American Community Survey and found 27.6 percent of applications for conventional mortgage loans from black people were denied, compared to only 10.4 percent of applications from white people. Hispanic applicants were turned down 21.9 percent of the time.

The study also looks at median household incomes. Asian people earned the most in 2013, at an income average of $72,000 a year. White people earned $58,000 per year, followed by Hispanic people at $42,000 and black people at $35,000.

"So many things go into whether or not you're going to have access to that mortgage," says Skylar Olsen, a senior economist at Zillow. "We're not saying causality here; we're saying a lot of different factors are correlated with each other. There's a lot of metrics and economic variables that we can look at to highlight inequality and they all reinforce each other. And I think that's one of the things that makes this problem so hard to fix."