Tag Archives: Urban Institute

Despite home price increases over the last three years, homes are still affordable by historical standards, according to the Urban Institute's Monthly Chartbook: Housing Finance At A Glance.

Housing policy affects income inequality and single-family housing in a number of ways, according to a recent report from the Urban Institute.

The Urban Institute addressed the looming questions surrounding the housing market health in a report released Monday, determining that no single indicator can gauge market health and the market is nowhere near 2001 levels.

After years of post-crisis credit tightening, the availability of mortgage credit has slowly edged up from Q3 2013 to Q1 2015. The Urban Institute’s Housing Finance Policy Center reported that 4.6 percent of purchase loans that are likely to default increased to 5.7 percent, according to the Housing Credit Availability Index.

Senior households have been rising slowly over the decades, but this is about to change in the coming years. Urban Institute’s recent analysis of housing trends determined that senior households are expected to grow dramatically by 2030.

Mortgage service regulations have not yet fully caught up with significant industry changes over the past five years, according to an Urban Wire blog post by the Urban Institute and author Karan Kaul.

As the MReport reported last week, credit is still tight for most borrowers, according to an April Urban Institute report. The report studied loan trends between 2009 and 2013, and found that mortgage credit is tighter than it was at the peak of the housing bubble in 2005 and 2006, as well as pre-housing crisis in 2011.

The effects of the contemporary lending environment are rather significant. According to the institute, if the “cautious” credit standards of 2001 were in place in 2013, rather than that year’s “severe” standards, an additional 1.25 million loans would have been made in 2013.

The Urban Institute has released a report discussing the impact of these changes and the likelihood Freddie Mac will need to take another draw from the Treasury. Accord to the report, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac made a combined profit of over $120 million in 2013. But by 2014 the net profit from both institutions fell by 80 percent, with Fannie Mae profit totaling to $14 billion and Freddie totaling $8 billion. More alarming were Freddie’s fourth quarter profits, which were down 90 percent from just the previous quarter.

More than one in three homeowners with mortgages backed by the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) could stand to save money by refinancing now that the agency has lowered its annual mortgage insurance premium, according to a study released by the Urban Institute (UI).