The Mortgage Bankers Association recently made several changes to its mortgage credit availability index, and now looks to further explain why it made these changes.
After making the changes, the mortgage credit availability, which had been getting tighter in previous months, was corrected to show that credit availability is actually loosening.
“We always monitor the indexes that we publish and we are looking for ways to make them better and make them more relevant to the industry,” said Lynn Fisher, MBA vice president of research and economics.
The mortgage credit availability index is made up of four different sub-indices: jumbo, government, conventional and conforming.
“Last week we were really excited to updated the methodology of the index in order to better fit what’s happening in the market,” Fisher said. “We’ve seen some changes and we want to better account for that.”
Fisher outlines two major changes that will improve the accuracy of the index. The first was an updated methodology to account for a broader group of mortgages.
The second was a change in definitions for the conventional and jumbo-backed mortgages. These mortgage categories no longer include government programs such as FHA or VA.
Fisher talks about the changes here:
