By Pete Schroeder and Douglas Gillison<\/p>\n
WASHINGTON, April 22 (Reuters) – Housing finance giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are now accepting \u200cadditional credit scores that take into account rent and utility \u200cpayments, a U.S. government official overseeing the agencies announced on Wednesday.<\/p>\n
The move is aimed \u200bat boosting access to affordable mortgages, a goal of President Donald Trump’s administration.<\/p>\n
Federal Housing Finance Agency Director William Pulte said the pair, which guarantee most U.S. mortgages, will now accept mortgages assessed using the VantageScore 4.0 \u200cmodel, which uses advanced \u2060data and analytics to generate scores. He said they are also working to implement a similar modified score \u2060system from FICO.<\/p>\n
Wednesday’s announcement is that Fannie and Freddie are now incorporating the scores into their guarantee process. FHFA approved those models in 2022.<\/p>\n
Similarly, Housing \u200band \u200bUrban Development Secretary Scott Turner announced \u200bhis department would consider those \u200cscores for mortgages underwritten by the Federal Housing Administration.<\/p>\n
The officials said the expanded use of other credit score models should boost competition and potentially lower mortgage costs, allowing opportunities for potential homebuyers who otherwise would have struggled to gain an affordable mortgage.<\/p>\n
“We are modernizing credit scoring \u200cwith more predictive models, helping millions of \u200bAmericans who responsibly pay rent qualify for \u200bmortgages. That\u2019s fair, it\u2019s commonsense, \u200band it\u2019s finally delivering the benefits of competition \u200cto homebuyers nationwide,” said Pulte in \u200ba statement.<\/p>\n
The Trump \u200badministration has increased focus on housing affordability in recent months, as part of an effort to address general concern with rising prices \u200bahead of midterm \u200celections in November where Trump’s Republican Party will defend slim \u200bmajorities in both chambers of Congress.<\/p>\n
(Reporting by Pete Schroeder and \u200bDouglas Gillison; Editing by David Gregorio)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By Pete Schroeder and Douglas Gillison WASHINGTON, April 22 (Reuters) – Housing finance giants Fannie Mae and Freddie…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":746291,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[12],"tags":[307318,64,162129,69,79,217880,225329,83090,307319,67,132,68,307320,101289],"class_list":["post-746290","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-economy","tag-affordable-mortgage","tag-business","tag-credit-scores","tag-donald-trump","tag-economy","tag-fannie-mae-and-freddie-mac","tag-federal-housing-administration","tag-federal-housing-finance-agency","tag-housing-finance","tag-united-states","tag-unitedstates","tag-us","tag-utility-payments","tag-william-pulte"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/116450742096232694","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/746290","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=746290"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/746290\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/746291"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=746290"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=746290"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=746290"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}