Foreclosure Counseling Outcome Study: Final Report. Housing Counseling Outcome Evaluation.

摘要

The Foreclosure Counseling Outcome Study enrolled 824 homeowners seeking foreclosure mitigation services in the fall of 2009 from 24 HUD-funded counseling agencies across the country. The study collected information on counselees personal and financial characteristics, the circumstances that led them to seek housing counseling services, the services they received over a 6-month period, and select housing outcomes approximately 18 months later. This report describes in detail the characteristics of homeowners struggling to keep their homes and the counseling services that they received. The study does not include a control group or causal design and therefore cannot say what would have happened to this group of homeowners had they not received foreclosure counseling through a HUD-funded agency. Instead, the objective of the study is to document the extent and nature of the counseling services, mortgage remedies, and housing outcomes among a broad sample of foreclosure counseling clientsas well as the characteristics of those clients. The results of the study are consistent with counseling helping distressed homeowners who want to stay in their homes. In particular, the study finds that home retention was much more common among homeowners in the study who were able to secure some type of mortgage remedy and that a large share of counseled homeowners were able to obtain such a remedy within the 18-month follow-up period.