Originally published at washingtontimes.com on April 21, 2026.
Housing affordability has become a top priority in Washington. Policymakers across administrations now recognize that homeownership is slipping further out of reach for first-time buyers, younger households and working families whose incomes have failed to keep pace with housing costs.
Headline inflation has moderated to roughly 3% year over year, but the costs that matter most to households continue to rise faster than wages. Monthly mortgage payments now routinely exceed $2,000, while average rents nationwide approach $1,500.
Originally published at washingtontimes.com on April 21, 2026.
Home prices remain 80% above 2017 levels. Total U.S. household debt has reached a record $18.6 trillion. For many families, the path to ownership is constrained by arithmetic.
Urgency often produces the wrong kind of reform. The latest example is the growing push to replace the mortgage industry’s long-standing tri-merge credit reporting standard with single-file or reduced-report alternatives.
The proposed change is being framed as a necessary step to lower borrowing costs and introduce competition into credit reporting.
A tri-merge credit report is a comprehensive document that combines data from the three major national credit bureaus — Equifax, Experian and TransUnion — into a single profile. By “merging” these three distinct snapshots, mortgage lenders ensure they have a complete view of a borrower’s financial health, preventing hidden liabilities or reporting discrepancies from skewing the risk assessment.
The Mortgage Bankers Association, led by President and CEO Bob Broeksmit, wants to eliminate the tri-merge credit reporting requirement to introduce competition and reduce costs for borrowers. The organization characterizes the current framework as an unnecessary expense embedded in mortgage origination.
Yet tri-merge exists because mortgage lending is uniquely sensitive to information quality. A mortgage is the largest liability most households will ever assume, financed over decades and frequently backed by government-supported entities or securitized into global capital markets.
Small informational errors at origination compound through pricing, underwriting, pooling and investor risk models.
Reducing the amount of verified borrower data may lower a minuscule upfront fee, but it increases downstream risk.
Credit reporting in the modern economy is inherently fragmented. Trade lines do not appear uniformly across bureaus. Rental payments, utilities, fintech lending, buy-now-pay-later obligations and community bank relationships are often reported inconsistently. Traditional accounts vary because of reporting timing or methodology.
Tri-merge underwriting mitigates these gaps by providing lenders with the broadest available credit profile.
Moving to single-file or even bi-merge frameworks increases the likelihood that meaningful borrower information will be overlooked. Industry analyses suggest that credit scores can shift materially when a bureau is removed from the evaluation.
A swing large enough to move borrowers between pricing buckets means higher lifetime borrowing costs or unexpected denials. Neither outcome improves affordability.
Competition should occur at the model level, where predictive accuracy improves underwriting outcomes. Weakening the underlying data inputs risks the opposite, forcing models to operate on incomplete borrower files. Garbage in, garbage out.
Investors price uncertainty quickly. If underwriting reliability declines, then secondary market participants adjust assumptions about default probability and loss severity. Those adjustments ultimately flow back to borrowers through higher interest rates or tighter credit standards.
The supposed savings from fewer credit pulls can be overwhelmed easily by repricing across mortgage pools.
Because credit checks account for less than 1% of loan costs, it is evident that the Mortgage Bankers Association is lobbying for a “single-file” standard not to save consumers money but rather to enable “score shopping.”
Saving a borrower $50 on a credit report is a hollow victory if the resulting uncertainty premium adds 0.125% to their interest rate, costing them tens of thousands of dollars over the life of the loan.
Subprime borrowers can have score discrepancies of more than 80 points between bureaus. A single-file system allows lenders to cherry-pick the most “flattering” data, masking true risk and repeating the underwriting failures that led to the 2008 financial crisis.
Weaker data inputs increase the likelihood of eventual defaults.
There is also a distributional consequence. Borrowers with deep, well-established credit histories are least affected by reporting changes. Thin-file borrowers, younger households and first-time buyers are the most exposed to missing data.
The affordability of housing is in crisis. Mortgage finance depends on confidence, and confidence depends on data integrity. Tri-merge reporting remains one of the quiet mechanisms preserving both.
Accuracy is affordability. Sacrificing it would be an expensive mistake.