A new report by the Homeownership Preservation Foundation, Integrating Housing Counseling Into the Residential Marketplace, outlines how housing counseling can be used more effectively to expand opportunities for homeownership and funded more sustainably. It concludes that the solution is to improve current counseling practices and to integrate counseling into the mortgage delivery system. It recommends making counseling available for the life of a loan, instituting counseling performance tracking and working closely with lenders and servicers to develop infrastructure that facilitates communication with counselors. It recommends a broad based funding mechanism for counseling using consumer, mortgage origination and servicer fees and underwriting that provides incentives for homebuyers to engage in counseling.
