Urban Institute’s Housing Finance Policy Center Research Report – March 2016 – Comparing Credit Profiles of American Renters and Owners: “This research report, the second in a series, reviews 2015 consumer credit data from a major credit bureau and 2015 public property record data, supplemented with 2014 American Community Survey’s (ACS) Public Use Microdata Sample (PUMS) data, to better understand the credit profiles of American consumers by their tenure status. This study focuses on the personal financial picture of individual consumers rather than that of the household or family. We divide all US adult consumers into two groups—owners and renters—and then divide each group into three subgroups: with mortgage now, with mortgage in the past 16 years but not now, and without mortgage in the past 16 years. We then comp are the credit profiles of these six groups of consumers by age, credit score, and type and amount of debt to get a sense of how age and credit profile relate to whether consumers own or rent homes (often called tenure status). By using a random sampling of all adult consumers with credit records and weighting with ACS PUMS data, we can size each group (by age, tenure, and geographic locations) and define its relative share of the population.”