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Federal Housing Administration: Proposed Legislative Changes Would Affect Borrower Benefits and Risks to the Insurance Funds

GAO-07-1109T Published: Jul 18, 2007. Publicly Released: Jul 18, 2007.
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Highlights

Fewer borrowers are using the Federal Housing Administration's (FHA) single-family and manufactured housing insurance programs. To help counter this trend, proposed changes to the single-family program would raise loan limits, allow risk-based pricing of premiums, and reduce down payments. Changes such as higher loan limits also were proposed for the manufactured housing program. To assist Congress in considering the impact of these changes, this testimony provides information from recently issued GAO reports and preliminary views from ongoing work. Specifically, GAO discusses (1) trends in FHA's share of the mortgage market, (2) likely impacts of proposed changes to the single-family program, (3) practices important to implementing the changes to the single-family program, if passed, and (4) preliminary observations from our work on the manufactured housing program. To conduct this work, GAO analyzed agency, Home Mortgage Disclosure Act, and Census data and interviewed agency and lending industry officials and other stakeholders.

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Financial analysisHousing programsInsuranceLending institutionsMortgage interest ratesMortgage loansMortgage programsProgram evaluationMortgage marketMortgages