Mortgage Lending: Newly Enacted Restrictions May Help Curb Unwanted Solicitations While Preserving Comparison Shopping

Filed 2h ago · Via GAO · The Buffoon Desk

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Merry Go Slower

Kevin MacLeod · incompetech.com · CC BY 4.0

Photo: Wolfmann · CC BY-SA 4.0 · via Wikimedia Commons

GAO reports that before the Homebuyers Privacy Protection Act, credit reporting agencies could sell mortgage applicants' contact and credit information to competing lenders without consent, generating a flood of unwanted calls and texts known as trigger leads.

Federal survey data cited in the report suggests no more than 3.5 percent of homebuyers actually ended up getting a loan through one of these competing offers, a modest return for the volume of solicitations the practice produced.

New restrictions took effect in March 2026 limiting sales to parties with an existing relationship or consent, though GAO says not enough time has passed to measure the actual effect on homebuyers.

The full dispatch is available from the source below.

✒ FROM THE EDITORIAL DESK

Somebody sold your phone number the moment you applied for a mortgage, and it turns out that whole arrangement helped maybe three or four people out of a hundred. The rest just got their evenings interrupted. It took an act of Congress to arrive at the obvious conclusion that nobody likes being sold to without being asked first.

Source: Read the original at GAO → Scored: Merry Go Slower · Kevin MacLeod · CC BY 4.0

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