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A new analysis of Home Mortgage Disclosure Act data shows the low interest rates homebuyers enjoyed in 2020 and 2021 had an outsized impact on efforts to close the racial home ownership gap in Massachusetts.

The analysis, prepared by the Chicago-based Woodstock Institute for the Boston-based Partnership for Financial Equity, found that 4,920 Black households and 8,694 Latino households were able to buy homes in the state in 2021, setting a new 30-year high and breaking the previous record, set in 2020.

“There’s a lot of good news in this report,” Tom Callahan, executive director of the Partnership for Financial Equity, said in an interview with Banker & Tradesman.

Still, despite the records broke in 2021, the state of overall housing affordability and the extremely limited amount of homes available for sale in Massachusetts put a damper on Black and Latino buyers’ ability to buy, he cautioned.

A large share of these Black and Latino homebuyers purchased homes in relatively affordable Gateway Cities like Lowell, Brockton and Springfield, the report noted, while in more-expensive Boston they were significantly underrepresented among homebuyers. Black buyers received just 7 percent of home purchase mortgages in Boston in 2021 despite making up 22.7 percent of the population; Latino buyers got 7.7 percent of home purchase loans, but made up 20 percent of the city. Only in Boston’s heavily Black Mattapan neighborhood did Black homebuyers land more than one-third of purchase mortgages, the report found, and in the city’s expensive Charlestown, South Boston and Seaport District neighborhoods, Black borrowers got less than 1 percent of mortgages issued there at a time when an increased number of wealthy buyers were using mortgages and not cash to buy properties.

“Obviously Boston is seeing a loss of buyers to those Gateway Cities,” Callahan said.

But aside from affordability, Black and Latino homebuyers’ strong tilt towards buying homes in Gateway Cities raises concerns that at least some of these buyers might have been “steered” towards these more minority-dominated communities, Callahan said. Research in other metro areas, like an explosive 2019 newspaper investigation into real estate agents on Long Island, shows that steering by real estate agents and lenders – illegal under fair housing laws and unethical according to industry groups’ standards – remains a problem in the real estate industry. But the Boston area lost its only nonprofit dedicated to researching housing discrimination several years ago, Callahan said, meaning there’s no hard data to estimate the size of the problem.

“The lack of testing of real estate agents and lenders is a real loss to the region and probably goes to some of the segregation you see,” he said.

Housing advocates have argued the Healey administration needs to establish a statewide Office of Fair Housing. The Massachusetts Association of Realtors is currently asking the state legislature to boost real estate agents’ fair housing training requirements. And the National Association of Realtors this spring voted to make two hours of fair housing training mandatory for members every three years starting in 2025 – although not without controversy as some have accused the new education mandate as being too little to address the scope of the problem.