By Jann Swanson | Mortgage News Daily
To understand the top-line story in the Urban Institute’s (UI’s) latest Chartbook released on Monday one has to go back to another UI paper published more than a year ago. In the article the UI’s Housing Policy Center’s director, Laurie Goodman, and fellow researchers claimed that the share of first-time homebuyers was in reality much higher than other research, notably that of the National Association of Realtors® (NAR) had asserted.
NAR has consistently said that these homebuyers typically represent 40 percent of buyers in a healthy market and has reported the share as remaining below this mark since mid-2010. Indeed, for several years NAR has put the share at 30-32 percent and continued to do so in its latest existing home sales report released last week. Goodman and her team contended that the widely accepted measures of the percentage of first-time buyers such as those provided by NAR “are overbroad and sometimes misleading.”
