THE PRESIDENT: Thank you all for having us. We're here at the Family Service Agency here in Little Rock to discuss ways to help people either buy a home for the first time or stay in a home.

Before I say a few words about how the government can help people stay in their home, I do want to thank Charles and your team of counselors who are here. Thank you for your briefing; I thought it was very thorough and understandable. I do want to thank the Secretary of HUD for joining us, as well as Congressman Boozman. I really appreciate your time.

And I want to thank Caroline, first time homebuyer -- or, she went to the first time home-buyers program in Jacksonville, Arkansas -- and Patty, from Conway, Arkansas.

One of the problems we have when it comes to buying a home is that there's a lot of fine print and people get worried about it. So these counselors have helped simplify the process. And one of the great challenges now is how to help creditworthy people stay in their homes. Because we got some people who are -- just with some little help, some advice and some counseling will be able to figure out a way to stay in the home. It's in our national interest we do so. That's what Patty bought -- she had a home and was very worried about being able to stay in it; got some good advice from Sue and [is] now in the home. And this has happened all across America, by the way. There's some good programs coming out of Washington, all aimed at saying to the American citizen, if you are worried about staying in your home, contact a counseling service, we'll help you -- "we" being the collective group of people there in this business, after all, this is a HUD-funded counseling program; you receive some money from HUD for your counseling.

Congress can help, when they come back, to pass a good piece of housing legislation that modernizes the FHA and reforms these GSEs. And I think we ca

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