Mortgage Lending: Newly Enacted Restrictions May Help Curb Unwanted Solicitations While Preserving Comparison Shopping

What GAO Found When homebuyers apply for a mortgage, lenders request their credit reports from credit reporting agencies. These agencies may then sell the homebuyers’ contact and credit information to other lenders and brokers, which use it to send competing loan offers. Before recent legislation, credit reporting agencies could, without the homebuyer’s consent, provide this information to those that did not have an existing relationship with the homebuyer (see figure). Thus, homebuyers could receive dozens of mortgage solicitations by phone or text in a short period. Example of the Mortgage Trigger Lead Marketing Process According to industry stakeholders, the primary benefit of trigger leads is that they can encourage homebuyers to comparison shop for loans and potentially save money. But this benefit may be limited: Recent federal survey results suggest that no more than 3.5 percent of homebuyers may have obtained a loan through competing offers based on trigger leads. One lender said homebuyers have ways to compare lenders before applying for a mortgage, so offers based on trigger leads generated later in the homebuying process may be less useful. Trigger leads resulted in a hi

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