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RE: Last Minute Call for AHS 2005 Suggestions

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Dav,
Don't know if you have these suggestion from me already, or not.
Thanks,
Jesse

Jesse Leary
Deputy Assistant Director
for Consumer Protection
Bureau of Economics
Federal Trade Commission
600 Pennsylvania Ave. NW
Washington, DC 20580
(202)326-3480
fax: (202)326-3443


Debt consolidation:

Added in 2001 were questions about the purposes of refinancings and
HELOCs.  Not among the possible responses was "to consolidate other
debts."  This is a common use of cash-out refinancings.  Adding this
choice would be a small change and would add to our understanding of the
use of home equity to manage household finances and to finance
non-housing consumption.

Additional loan price data:

Currently only the year a loan was originated is collected.  It would be
valuable to know the month, as well, to compare the interest rate with
the market at the time of origination.

Interest rate data are currently collected.  Not collected are data on
other loan costs, particularly points/origination fees.  For some
borrowers, especially subprime borrowers, origination fees can represent
an important part of the cost of the loan, and therefore an important
part of the cost of housing.  Data on origination fees would also be
helpful for identifying subprime loans.  (There may be a major recall
problem - people may not remember how many points they paid - especially
on older loans.)


Multiple refinancings:

Information is collected about the current mortgage, including whether
it is a refinancing of an earlier mortgage.  Because the dataset is a
panel, it is possible to identify multiple refinancings over time.
Because the survey is only every two years, however, multiple
refinancings in a two year period cannot be identified.  A question
could be added about the number of refinancings in the past two years.

Credit history questions:

An important housing policy question is: what are the barriers to home
ownership?  One important barrier might be a poor credit history, which
would raise the price of credit, or make credit inaccessible.  Ideally,
we would like to have independent and objective information about
people's credit histories, such as FICO scores.  This is probably not
feasible.  Alternatively, questions about people's experiences with
credit could be added to the survey, such as:

When last searching for mortgage (purchase of refi), were you
turned down by any lender?
Have you declared bankruptcy in the past X years?
Have you had problems paying bills on time in the past X years?
Have you had a foreclosure in past X years?

Non-housing asset and debt information:

Another important barrier to home-ownership may be requirements that
buyers make large down-payments and pay other closing costs.  To study
the importance of this barrier, data are need on non-housing assets and
debts.  These data would also make possible the study of the
relationship between housing and non-housing savings and borrowing.

Questions about search behavior:

The functioning of the residential mortgage market is obviously very
important to housing and home-ownership.  To better understand the
workings of the mortgage market, it would be valuable to have
information about the mortgage search behavior of borrowers.  Specific
questions could include:

Was this loan originated through a broker?
Did you contact more than one lender when searching for a
mortgage?
Did you or the lender initiate contact?
For home improvement loans, did the contractor arrange the
financing?

-----Original Message-----
From: AHSlistserv@huduser.gov [mailto:AHSlistserv@huduser.gov]
Sent: Monday, April 14, 2003 2:17 PM
To: Jesse Leary
Subject: Last Minute Call for AHS 2005 Suggestions


From: American Housing Survey (AHS) ListServ <ahs@huduser.gov>



We will soon be deciding on any new items to add to the 2005 national
American Housing Survey.  If you have any requests, please send them to
me in the next two weeks.  It wouldn't hurt to also post your
suggestions to the mailing list, so that other users could see them and
comment on them. Remember that if you just hit your "reply" button, your
message will go only to me.  In order to send a message to the entire
list, you have to put AHS@huduser.gov in the address field.

Two important changes in the 2005 sample will be a new sample of
manufactured housing and coverage of assisted living facilities (but not
nursing homes).  Any suggestions about those areas are particularly
needed. However, we will consider limited changes to other parts of the
instrument.

Remember that this is a housing unit survey.  We must ask questions that
the residents would reasonably be able to answer.  We do not ask
questions of managers or administrators.  Thus, we cannot collect
detailed information about mobile home parks or institutional details
about assisted living facilities, unless it is information that the
residents would know.

Please avoid open-ended questions.  Answers should be "yes or no," a
well-defined quantity (bedrooms, dollars, breakdowns in the past six
months, etc.), or a selection from a small number of choices.  If you
are an expert in a field and want to know the number of housing units
that have specific characteristics, please list them.  If you make a
general suggestion and let us work out the list of answers, you may find
that we missed something that you consider to be important.

Finally, please realize that we do have to keep a constant watch on the
length of the interview.  Thus, we are not going to add a large battery
of new questions.  If you can pare your items to those that are
especially important, you will have a much better chance of seeing them
implemented. Feel free to add an explantion to us of why your items are
important to collect.  Again, if you rely on us to cut things down, we
may not have the same priorities you have.

If you have already sent us suggestions, we still have what you sent us.
You don't need to repeat yourself.  Of course, if you have any additions
or refinements (especially the latter), please feel free to send them to
me.

Dav Vandenbroucke
Economist
U.S. Dept. HUD
david_a._vandenbroucke@hud.gov
202-708-1060 ext. 5890

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