Homeownership counseling performance: How can it be measured?

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Abstract
Homeownership counseling encompasses several educational activities. Early approaches focused on reducing the risk of default and foreclosure among participants in government‐assisted mortgage programs, but more recent approaches have focused on increasing homeownership opportunities among low‐income and minority households. Unfortunately, little is known about the effectiveness of these approaches in terms of the number of new homeowners and the mitigation of default risk. To address that gap, this article presents a theoretical and methodological framework to evaluate counseling efforts. A successful counseling program is defined as one that assists a household with a low long‐term probability of ownership in buying a home and reducing its default risk. We concede that the methodological requirements for evaluating counseling are somewhat restrictive. However, if we establish an evaluation procedure using these goals as a framework, we can more accurately determine the effects of counseling on the sustainability of low‐income homeownership.