First-Time Homebuyer Counseling and the Mortgage Selection Experience in the United States: Evidence from the National Survey of Mortgage Originations

Robert Argento (), Lariece Brown, Sergei Koulayev (), Grace Li, Marina Myhre (), Forrest Pafenberg and Saty Patrabansh ()
Additional contact information
Robert Argento: Freddie Mac
Lariece Brown: Freddie Mac
Grace Li: Fannie Mae
Marina Myhre: U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development

No 18-02, NMDB Staff Working Papers from Federal Housing Finance Agency

Abstract: The existing literature on homebuyer education and counseling (HEC) consists almost exclusively of evaluations of specific programs, generally using mortgage loan performance as the metric of success. This paper contributes to the literature in two ways. First, it provides evidence on the benefits of HEC to mortgage borrowers in aspects other than mortgage performance. Second, the paper evaluates HEC in general, not just one specific program. It does so by drawing from a nationally representative sample of all first-time homebuyers in the United States who took out a mortgage in 2013 and 2014. The study data comes from the National Survey of Mortgage Originations (NSMO), a new survey co-sponsored by the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). We find that 14 percent of a nationally representative sample of first-time homebuyers reported receiving some form of HEC. Using two different matching estimation techniques (propensity score and coarsened exact matching) and ordinary least squares, we find that first-time homebuyers who reported receiving HEC also reported better mortgage knowledge, higher incidence of comparing final costs to the Good Faith Estimate (GFE), higher incidence of selecting a mortgage based on cost, and higher level of satisfaction with mortgage terms and the mortgage process.

Pages: 29 pages
Date: 2018-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.fhfa.gov/sites/default/files/2023-03/n ... king-paper_18-02.pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.fhfa.gov/research/papers/nmdb-wp1802 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hfa:nmdbwp:18-02

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NMDB Staff Working Papers from Federal Housing Finance Agency Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Saty Patrabansh ().