Credit Scores Were Never Meant to Decide Homeownership
What FICO Was Built For — and What It Wasn’t
Credit scores feel like an immutable law of homeownership. Too low, and the door is closed. High enough, and you’re allowed in.
But credit scores were never designed to decide who deserves to own a home. They were built for a far narrower purpose — and using them as the primary gatekeeper for homeownership has created one of the most persistent mismatches in modern finance.
What Credit Scores Were Actually Built to Do
The modern credit score was developed to solve a specific, operational problem: how to evaluate short-term lending risk at scale. As consumer credit expanded in the mid-20th century, lenders needed a consistent way to predict whether a borrower might miss a payment in the near future.
That’s what FICO was optimized for — probability of delinquency over relatively short horizons. It helped lenders compare borrowers across large populations and automate decisions for products like credit cards, auto loans, and personal loans.
What it was not built to do was assess long-term financial resilience, household sustainability, or the ability to support a single, fixed obligation for three decades. The problem isn’t that credit scores fail at their job. It’s that they’re now being asked to do a job they were never designed for.
How a Risk Signal Became a Gatekeeper
Over time, credit scores quietly evolved from an input into a shortcut.
As mortgage lending scaled and loans were increasingly packaged and sold, lenders gravitated toward tools that made decisions faster and more uniform. A single numeric threshold was easier to operationalize than a holistic financial review. It reduced costs, simplified underwriting, and aligned neatly with secondary-market expectations.
In that environment, credit scores became less about understanding borrowers and more about fitting loans into standardized boxes. The system rewarded predictability — even when that predictability came at the expense of accuracy.
Why Homeownership Is Fundamentally Different
A mortgage is not just another loan.
It is the largest financial commitment most people will ever make, backed by a tangible asset and supported by one of the strongest payment behaviors households exhibit. People prioritize housing payments. They adjust spending, seek income, and make sacrifices to stay housed.
Yet eligibility for this long-term, asset-backed obligation is often decided using a metric designed to assess short-term credit behavior — one that can be distorted by temporary setbacks, thin credit files, or income structures that don’t conform to legacy employment models.
Two households can share the same credit score and have radically different capacity to sustain homeownership. That disconnect isn’t a borrower failure. It’s a tool-choice failure.
The Cost of Treating Credit Scores as Destiny
When a single number becomes the primary gate to ownership, the system systematically excludes people who are financially capable but structurally invisible.
Self-employed earners with fluctuating income, renters with years of on-time housing payments, buyers who recovered from past disruptions — these households often demonstrate exactly the behaviors that predict sustainable ownership. They just don’t fit neatly into a model built for something else.
The result is a housing system that optimizes for administrative convenience rather than long-term outcomes, leaving significant ownership potential on the table.
Where Credit Scores Still Add Value
None of this suggests credit scores should disappear.
They can provide useful signals when placed in proper context. They can highlight recent financial stress, surface patterns worth investigating, and contribute to a broader risk picture. The problem arises when they’re elevated from signal to verdict.
When credit scores override income reality, cash-flow behavior, reserves, and housing payment history, underwriting stops being about people and starts being about proxies.
What Homeownership Decisions Should Actually Measure
A more accurate approach begins with a simpler, more honest question: Can this household afford this home over time?
Answering that requires a holistic view — one that looks at earning power across income sources, monthly cash flow, reserves, and demonstrated housing stability. This concept is often described as “ability to repay,” but in practice it’s frequently reduced back to the same numeric shortcuts that credit scores were never meant to replace.
True ability-to-repay analysis is contextual, not mechanical. It evaluates sustainability, not perfection.
Why the System Hasn’t Evolved
If credit scores are such an imperfect fit, why do they still dominate mortgage decisions?
Because they make the system easier — not better.
Scores lower underwriting costs, simplify automation, and support standardized loan markets. Changing that requires rethinking incentives, capital structures, and risk frameworks — not just lowering minimums or adding new labels.
That kind of change is harder than adjusting a threshold. So the system persists.
Toward a More Honest Model of Homeownership
Credit scores will likely always play a role in lending. But they should inform decisions, not decide them.
As income becomes more dynamic and work becomes less linear, homeownership models must evolve to reflect how people actually earn and pay — not how spreadsheets prefer they would.
Because the goal of housing finance isn’t to reward flawless credit histories. It’s to enable sustainable ownership.
And that requires tools designed for the decision they’re actually being used to make.
Why Jesse Coody and Hannah Coody Started Doorly
Doorly was founded by Jesse Coody and Hannah Coody after experiencing firsthand how disconnected modern mortgage underwriting has become from real financial life.
Both had seen capable, responsible people excluded from homeownership not because they couldn’t afford a home, but because their income, credit history, or financial path didn’t fit rigid, outdated models. Credit scores were treated as destiny. Context was ignored. Judgment was replaced by thresholds.
For Jesse, the frustration came from repeatedly encountering financial systems that worked exactly as designed—and still produced outcomes that made little sense for real people. Credit scores were being used far beyond their original purpose, standing in for deeper questions about sustainability, earning power, and long-term stability. For Hannah, the problem showed up in operations and execution. Even when intent was good, systems optimized for speed and standardization left no room for nuance.
Doorly was built as a response to that gap.
Instead of asking whether someone fit a predefined box, the company starts by asking whether homeownership is financially sustainable for that household. Instead of letting a single score determine access, Doorly evaluates the full picture—income reality, cash flow, and long-term ability to repay.
The goal was never to eliminate standards. It was to apply them honestly.
That philosophy—designing systems around outcomes instead of shortcuts—is what connects Doorly to the broader work Jesse and Hannah Coody have pursued across housing and finance. It’s also why credit scores, while still informative, are no longer treated as the final word on who gets to own a home.
A Better Way Forward for Homeownership
Credit scores were never meant to carry the weight we’ve placed on them. They can provide context, but they shouldn’t determine access to one of the most important financial decisions a household will ever make.
Homeownership works best when decisions are grounded in reality—how people actually earn, pay, and sustain their financial lives over time. That requires looking beyond shortcuts and designing systems that evaluate long-term ability, not just past signals.
Doorly was built around that belief. Instead of treating a credit score as a verdict, the company focuses on real earning power, cash flow, and sustainability—bringing judgment back into a process that has become overly mechanical.
If you believe homeownership should reflect financial reality, not outdated proxies, you can learn more about how Doorly approaches ability to repay and responsible ownership below.