FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 25, 2007
Home Equity Lines of Credit - Who Uses This Source of Credit? - This report profiles single-family homeowners who used home equity lines of credit in 2001 and compares them to their counterparts from 10 years earlier, including age, home value, mortgage, age of home, number of loans for home improvements and proportion of people using home equity for debt consolidation. Data are from the 2001 Residential Finance Survey. (Tentatively scheduled for release in late September.) <
http://www.census.gov/prod/2007pubs/c2kbr-37.pdf
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Since the mid-1980s, homeowners have used home equity lines of credit (HELOCs) to access cash at relatively low interest rates with certain tax advantages. HELOCs are credit lines extended by a financial institution to a
homeowner based upon the equity in a home. They have become a source of credit for many homeowners who have experienced growth in their home’s equity in recent years. The credit line debt is secured by using the home as collateral.
Based on data collected in the 2001 Residential Finance Survey, this brief profiles the 7.7 million single-family hoeowners who had HELOCs in 2001 and compares them with the3.4 million who had HELOCs in 1991. We analyzed characteristics of homeowners with HELOCs and
compared them with the 29.8 million single-family homeowners who had other types of mortgages. (These data apply to single-unit property that these owners both owned and inhabited.) In addition, the 1.6 million owners whose HELOCs were their only mortgage are compared with the 6.2 million whose HELOCs were a junior mortgage (i.e., they also had at least one other
mortgage on their property).
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Home Equity Lines of Credit
