We audited the HUD Office of Housing Counseling to assess its processes for achieving its goal to advance homeownership through prepurchase and postpurchase homeownership counseling, including its use of performance metrics and the collection and use of outcome data.  We selected this review because housing counseling plays a significant role in improving housing outcomes for home buyers, homeowners, and renters.

HUD’s Office of Housing Counseling collects data related to housing counseling activity from its approved housing counseling agencies.  It did not, however, use performance metrics or benchmarks for prepurchase and postpurchase homeownership counseling to measure whether this activity was contributing to its goal of advancing homeownership, nor did it conduct detailed analysis of the activity data to help identify trends.  The Office of Housing Counseling acknowledged there are limitations in the data it collects about housing counseling agency performance.  However, it believes that its periodic reviews of housing counseling agencies along with its existing data collection efforts are sufficient to measure performance in its programs.  With enhanced use of performance metrics and data, HUD can better assess how impactful prepurchase and postpurchase homeownership counseling is in advancing sustainable homeownership.  

We recommend that HUD’s Office of Housing Counseling (1) more clearly define successful prepurchase and postpurchase homeownership counseling outcomes and use these definitions to help establish performance metrics and benchmarks; (2) implement routine client outcome data analysis to identify trends, quantify performance metrics and benchmarks, and measure the impact of prepurchase and postpurchase counseling on advancing homeownership; and (3) enhance monitoring of HUD-approved housing counseling agencies’ performance against the established performance metrics.