Housing affordability and the battle over credit scores

In the hunt for cheaper housing, politicians and analysts are digging everywhere they can to strike gold. One critical aspect is also increasingly getting its turn in the spotlight: credit pricing.

The traditional standard, the tri-merge, utilizes information from all three major credit bureaus. It gives lenders a fuller picture to make decisions, and it helps borrowers by making sure one bad report doesn’t tank their chances. If you’ve been paying your bills and managing your money responsibly, it gives you the best shot at getting credit.

But not everyone wants to keep it this way. The Mortgage Bankers’ Association, in a recent letter to the Federal Housing Finance Agency, demanded that the latter dump the tri-merge and instead move to just utilizing one credit report for those who have a credit score over 700.

Read more in the Washington Examiner.