The Housing Finance Policy Center’s new measure of the rate at which mortgage applications are denied – the real denial rate (RDR)– improves upon existing denial rate measures by considering only low-credit-profile applicants. The RDR better tracks trends in credit accessibility over time and reveals that the conventional channel has had a consistently tighter credit box over time than the government channel. The RDR also shows much smaller racial and ethnic distinctions in mortgage denial rates over time than are shown by the traditional measure.