Are There More First-Time Buyers Than we Think?

By Jann Swanson

Posted To: MND NewsWire

Given how critical first-time homebuyers are to the housing system the Urban Institute says it is important to accurately measure how present they are in the market. The National Association of Realtors® (NAR) has consistently said that such homebuyers typically represent 40 percent of buyers in a healthy market and has reported the share as remaining below this mark since mid-2010. In a House Policy Research Center brief for the Institute, The Urban Institutes Housing Finance Policy Center Director Laurie Goodman and fellow researchers Bing Bai and Jun Zhu contend that the widely accepted measures of the percentage of first-time buyers such as those provided by NAR “are overbroad and sometimes misleading .” Until recently loan-level data was not available on most of the largest group of…(read more)

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