Most people have never heard of the Mortgage Industry Standards Maintenance Organization (MISMO) or thought much about data sets–but for the past eight years, David Young, Director of Capacity Building at Housing Action, has been working to show why both matter for housing counseling.
On October 1, MISMO released its new housing counseling dataset, concluding an eight-year effort by David and other housing counseling advocates to align the field’s data with the standards already used throughout the mortgage industry. Having these standards makes communication much easier among housing counseling client management systems, originations, and servicing systems.
In the past, limited availability and lack of standard data added hurdles to collaboration. Recognizing the need to fix this, the NHRC (National Housing Resource Center), a national housing counseling advocacy organization, spearheaded an effort to collect and standardize data. David and his partners undertook the long process of reaching out to over 1,000 housing counseling agencies across the country and combed through over 4,000 existing MISMO data points to find information relevant to housing counseling.
“We did not expect it to be an eight year journey when it first started in 2017,” said David. “But the publication of the data set on October 1 couldn’t have happened at a better time, since right now it’s also critical for us to show how important housing counseling is for our communities and to have specific data on how our programs help households. We will work with our client management system developers, HUD’s office of housing counseling, and financial institutions and servicers to socialize and implement this data set to benefit consumers.”
David Young (far left) facilitates a panel discussion on housing counseling data at the 2025 MISMO Spring Summit
David gave an example of how the data set could help in an individual situation. “If a mortgage holder were late on their mortgage, the servicer should be able to see which housing counseling agency they went to and refer them back so they get the assistance they need before their company goes into foreclosure.”The faster, simplified data sharing will also allow housing counseling agencies to get ahead of problems more quickly and better serve their clients. It will also make it easier to quantify and demonstrate the effectiveness of housing counseling, which can help to raise awareness of housing counseling services.
“Consumers that go through prepurchase education and counseling are more likely to be approved and less likely to default on their mortgage, but because we weren’t capturing the right data, we weren’t able to show that,” David explained. “Now, with consistent data, we will be able to.”
While a lot of work lies ahead to ensure the data set is used widely and efficiently, its release is a large step forward for growing the field of housing counseling and ensuring that programs can help as many people as possible.