WASHINGTON -- Real estate may be showing signs of a turnaround in many local markets but the nation's largest mortgage players continue to ratchet up their underwriting rules, making home purchases more difficult for some buyers.

Mortgage giant Fannie Mae, for example, issued a laundry list of tougher policies June 8 that could directly affect thousands of buyers in the coming months, especially those involved in job-related transfers.

Reversing a long-standing policy, Fannie no longer will permit mortgage applicants to count the income of so-called "trailing spouses" toward the household income needed to qualify for a loan. A trailing spouse is one who joins his or her spouse or partner in a job-related move, but who has yet to obtain employment in the new location.

Say your company offers you a position hundreds of miles from your present home. Your spouse or partner, who earns a significant portion of the household income, agrees to quit his or her job so that you can accept the transfer. Your spouse will need to find employment in the new area but may not have done so when it's time to buy a house.

Traditionally, lenders have been willing to count at least some of the trailing spouse's income in the old location toward the qualifying income needed to finance the new house. But under Fannie's policy switch, no consideration will be given. If the main breadwinner's income isn't sufficient to handle the mortgage, the loan application will be rejected; only when the trailing spouse has documented income in the new location will it be counted.

Brian Faith, a spokesman for Fannie Mae, said "given the current economic and job market instability, the company has opted to discontinue consideration of trailing secondary wage-earner income in the interest of safer underwriting, since this income would only be anticipated and undocumented."

Jan Hatfield-Goldman, a vice president for Worldwide ERC, the international trade association representing the employee relocation industry, said Fannie's decision "makes the current challenging relocation environment even more so. Some transfers will either have to qualify on the basis of one income" -- forcing couples to "buy less house than they wanted" -- or "they may be required to rent for an extended period of time until the spouse or couple is re-employed. If a couple must wait to purchase a new home until the spouse can find a new job, it could well cause some to reconsider" whether they want to make the job shift at all.

Worldwide ERC estimates that about 800,000 households in the United States move in a typical year because of job transfers. In the most recent year in which the IRS has reported statistics -- for 2006 -- more than 1 million taxpayers filed for job transfer-related deductions.

Fannie Mae, a congressionally chartered investment firm, is now being run under a conservatorship arrangement by the federal government, as is its rival investor, Freddie Mac. The two corporations account for an estimated 70 percent-plus of all new mortgage volume.

However, Freddie Mac still counts trailing spouse or co-borrower income for loan applications, but under strict guidelines: Continued...