The No. 1 consumer product in America isn't a soft drink, a car or even a refrigerator. It's a home, says the leader of the nation's largest supplier of mortgage funds.

Speaking to National Association of Home Builders' annual convention here over the weekend, Franklin Raines, chairman of Fannie Mae, noted that nobody has to be convinced to buy a home.

"Everybody wants one, and they're willing to stretch to get it," he said. "And their love affair doesn't end with obtaining a mortgage; it's just the beginning. Making a house a home is a true American pastime."

About 80,000 builders and allied professionals from throughout the country attended thehuge exposition, which featured enough building products to fill eight football fields from one end zone to the other.

Raines told the NAHB's board of directors that American families spend 25 percent of the their incomes on buying, furnishing, fixing and maintaining their homes, accounting for about 14% of the nation's gross domestic output in the process.

"About one of every $7 spent each year" goes for housing in one way or another, he said.

In total, home owners spent $1.7 trillion last year on housing related goods and services -- more than they spent on food, clothing and education combined, according to the Fannie Mae official.

Raines also called housing the top consumer investment in America and the country's No.1 economic driver.

"More people have more of their wealth invested in their homes than in the stock market, the money market or their retirement savings plans," he told the board, noting that 39 percent of the people polled in a recent study said they believed real estate is the best investment they can make while only 25 percent picked the stock market.

And they are right, according to Fannie Mae's calculations. People who invested $10,000 in house in 1997 instead of stocks would have beaten a basket of NASDAQ stocks by more than 50 percent and the S&P 500 by more than 100 percent, the company says.

"After the longest, strongest bull market in history," Mr. Raines said, "the average home owner in America earned twice as much equity wealth as the average stockholder earned in the market -- $44,000 vs. $23,000."

As an economic driver, housing has been second to no industry, especially during the recent recession, he also pointed out. While most industries were hit fairly hard, housing has actually prospered, with starts up 4 percent and sales up almost 6 percent.

"If housing had slipped as it usually does during a recession, the decline in the gross domestic product would have been five times worse, and 350,000 more people would have lost their jobs," the Fannie Mae chairman said.

"Without the boost from housing, it's clear that the recession would have started sooner, lasted longer, and been more severe."

It's for these reasons that Fannie Mae expects consumer investment in housing to more than double over the decade, from $11 trillion to perhaps as much as $25 trillion by 2010.

"It took the entire history of the country to get to $11 trillion, and we'll double that amount in less than 10 years," he said.