President Barack Obama used a housing Q-and-A live-streamed by real estate portal Zillow to amplify his call for housing finance reform, and said the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which has been working on simplified mortgage loan disclosure forms, will release them “as soon as the fall, so that you don’t have a lot of fine print, you know exactly what you’re getting.”
The more knowledge consumers have, Obama said, “the more empowered they’re going to be and the more likely they’re going to be to live out the American dream that I think all of us want to see not just for ourselves, but for our kids and our grandkids.”
Zillow CEO Spencer Rascoff said executives with the portal — which charges mortgage originators to offer loan quotes to consumers — have been “big fans of what the CFPB is trying to do with mortgages and we’ve actually been working with them and giving them comments on it. So Zillow is all about transparency of information, empowering consumers. And so, certainly if we can make it easier for people to understand the complexities of a mortgage, then that would be great for the country.”
The White House has posted a transcript of the session. Source: whitehouse.gov.
