Housing Counseling Process Evaluation and Design of ... - HUD User

Standardizing the Quality of Counseling Services
The growth in the housing counseling industry since the 1990s, coupled with the great diversity in the
types of organizations providing housing counseling and education, has created an important debate
within the industry about the need for greater standardization to ensure a high quality of services
nationwide. It is not a new issue, but it is one that continues to challenge the industry, particularly in
the current context of surging demand and funding for foreclosure prevention counseling. This report
has documented the great diversity in agency approaches to providing counseling services, including
significant variations in time spent per client, the mix of group and one-on-one sessions, the curricula
used, and the costs incurred. While some of this variation may reflect justifiable differences in the
approaches used due to differences in clients’ needs, the variation also likely reflects differences in
the quality of the services provided.
Thus far, support for standardizing the quality of counseling and education has been strongest for
homeownership-related counseling. In 1996, Fannie Mae initiated the American Homeowner
Education and Counseling Institute (AHECI), an organization with broad industry representation
whose goals included developing certification standards for homeownership counselors and
establishing a core curriculum for homeownership education. AHECI did adopt a standard
curriculum and standard set of definitions and requirements for homeownership education and
counseling in 1999, but ceased operations in 2004.
The NeighborWorks® Center for Homeownership Education and Counseling (NCHEC) picked up
where AHECI left off, leading a process to develop service standards and a code of ethics for
homeownership-related counseling and education. NCHEC convened a national Advisory Panel of
representatives from housing counseling organizations, national housing counseling intermediaries,
mortgage industry representatives, and HUD to develop the standards, which were published in the
summer of 2007. 51 As of May 2008, approximately 200 organizations have endorsed the NCHEC
standards, and 80 have adopted the standards for their organizations.
The work of AHECI and NCHEC reflects in part the national policy focus on increasing
homeownership through housing counseling. There have not been similar attempts to standardize
counseling for rental counseling or counseling for homeless people.
Intermediary and SHFA Views on National Standards
In the in-depth interviews, conducted over the summer of 2007, we asked intermediaries and SHFAs
for their opinions on the need for national counseling standards. 52 Overall, more than four-fifths of
51
52
There are four separate standards documents: National Industry Standards for Homeownership Education;
National Industry Standards for Homeownership Counseling; National Industry Foreclosure Counseling
Standards; and National Industry Code of Ethics and Conduct for Homeownership Professionals. The
standards can be found at www.homeownershipstandards.com.
The interviews took place during the summer of 2007, at about the time NCHEC’s standards for
homeownership education and counseling were published but before the publication of the standards on
foreclosure counseling. We included the topic of counseling standards in the interviews in part to gauge
support for the NCHEC standards but more importantly to explore whether these standards should be
mandatory and whether standards are needed for other types of counseling as well.
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Chapter 9. Policy Considerations