The increased availability of low-barrier entry loans which are readily purchased by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac may be impacting the number of people who are buying homes beyond their suggested price range.

A new Wall Street Journal Online/Harris Interactive Personal Finance Poll finds that nearly one in five (19 percent) U.S. adults who purchased a home within the last three years for their primary residence say they spent above their suggested price range, while two-thirds (67 percent) stayed within their price range, and 12 percent were below their price range.

When obtaining a mortgage for their new home, recent homebuyers who used a mortgage broker, direct lender or another source were nearly three times more likely to obtain a fixed-rate mortgage (72 percent) than an adjustable-rate mortgage (26 percent), and an astounding one-third (34 percent) opted for a creative or option mortgage.

The study surveyed 2,300 adults between Aug. 19 and Aug. 23, 2005.

Regional differences were obvious. With less than 17 percent of homebuyers able to buy the median-priced home in California in 2005, it's not surprising to find that homebuyers on the west coast (29 percent) were much more likely to have bought beyond their suggested price range. The more conservative Northeast (8 percent) and Midwest (12 percent) homebuyers were less likely to incur such risk, but Southern homebuyers, driven by gains in Florida and the Gulf Coasts of Mississippi and Alabama were slightly less risk-averse (22 percent.)

Four out of five homebuyers in the Northeast and Midwest chose to stay in their comfort zone, while a little over half of Southern and Western homebuyers stayed in their suggested purchase ranges.

More online respondents suggested that they used mortgage brokers (39 percent) than direct lenders (32 percent), with a surprising 14 percent saying they didn't need a mortgage to purchase their home. Younger homebuyers (age 18 to 34) were most likely to have chosen a broker (55 percent) while homebuyers age 35 to 42 are most likely to have obtained their mortgage through a direct lender (42 percent).

Creative or option mortgages, particularly interest-only loans, were attractive to homebuyers.

A little more than one-third (34 percent) of recent homebuyers who obtained their mortgage through a broker, direct lender or someone else chose one of the following four creative or option mortgages:

• An interest-only mortgage -- where borrowers pay interest but no principal for a fixed period at the beginning of the loan (17 percent).

• A piggyback mortgage -- where the loan combines a standard first mortgage with a home-equity loan or line of credit to avoid private mortgage insurance or the higher interest rates on jumbo loans (10 percent).

• A payment option mortgage -- where borrowers have four payment options each month and those who elect to make the minimum payment could actually see their loan balance rise rather than fall (4 percent).

• A miss-a-payment mortgage -- where borrowers are allowed to skip up to two mortgage payments a year and up to 10 payments over the life of the loan without ruining their credit rating (2 percent).

As long as lenders don't require higher barriers to entry, borrowers are likely to continue to buy their homes using other people's money, in anticipation of capital gains when they sell.