All Forum Posts by: Carley M.

Tim Trumble is the NACA Online Operations person who posts on BP. I can't tag him here because we aren't connected.

I'm not by any means a lawyer or a housing law expert, but I found this:

The Fair Housing Act (Title VIII of the Civil Rights Act of 1968) introduced meaningful federal enforcement mechanisms. It outlawed:

• Refusal to sell or rent a dwelling to any person because of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.
• Discrimination based on race, color, religion or national origin in the terms, conditions or privilege of the sale or rental of a dwelling.
• Advertising the sale or rental of a dwelling indicating preference of discrimination based on race, color, religion or national origin.
• Coercing, threatening, intimidating, or interfering with a person's enjoyment or exercise of housing rights based on discriminatory reasons or retaliating against a person or organization that aids or encourages the exercise or enjoyment of fair housing rights.

I'm wondering if NACA borrowers are protected because the discrimination by realtors/sellers is towards NACA not the actual borrower.

@Charlie MacPherson - You may be correct. NY has discrimination laws that include source of income. There used to be a NACA executive that posted on BP messages, I'm trying to remember who that was. I'd like to get their input because this is a pretty serious issue. I agree with @Phil G. that the NACA approval letter only raises more questions and encourages discrimination.

Phil G. - I have also seen seller hesitancy toward accepting a bid from a NACA buyer. There definitely needs to be some education among the realtors. Discriminating based on source of funds (NACA vs traditional lending) is a felony.

Alan Dominijanni - NACA can assign you an already approved realtor, or you can find a realtor you like and ask them to sit through the webinar to learn about the program. There really ISN'T that much additional stuff for a realtor to do - i did my purchase without a realtor and had the NACA attorney draw up the sales contract. If your property needs rehab, you need to request a second appraisal (subject to repairs/improvements) and you're allowed to borrow up to 110% of the SUBJECT TO appraisal value. While you can use a non-NACA contractor, I don't recommend it. My contractor does a lot of work for NACA so their office took care of all the paperwork and they used their own money to pay for the repairs - NACA doesn't pay until everything is done. The downside is that they were pricier than I could have gotten, but it wouldn't have been worth the headache to ME to act as the GC for my job. My contractor assigned a project manager and everything went smoothly. I had a hard time finding someone in my area to do the work because of the City's licensing requirements. I spoke with my HAND coordinator and he helped me get the contractor to come give me a bid. I had unsuccessfully scheduled 7 (!!!) contractors to bid (on 3 separate attempts) and my sellers were antsy and unwilling to keep making the property available for estimates. Any additional contractor cost was more than offset by my closing cost savings and not being aggravated by ONE MORE thing. Just a word of caution: your mortgage consultant at NACA is probably about ready to check out (mentally) on your file. His/her part is pretty much done even though you're still a ways from closing. Now is the time to start paying more attention to those Lender Conditions on your NACA web access so that you know what is holding up your loan and who is responsible for providing what information. Good luck to you! It's worth the struggle. I promise.

Charlie MacPherson - Section 8 can only be used to purchase a single family home or single unit within a co-op or similar multi family building.

Mindy Jensen My understanding is that NACA pays for title and survey for the seller if the seller agrees to use NACA (or its vendor) for the title company.

Jay Hinrichs the seller doesn't HAVE to buy down the interest rate. Without any buydown, mine was only 3%. They do not "shame" is the banks into funding the mortgages, they are an activist organization that won lawsuits for predatory lending practices against these banks, which are now required to lend in neighborhoods where they have banking branches. Sounds reasonable to me. The NACA staff are ill-trained and disorganized, which makes the process harder to navigate but not impossible. There are a lot of hoops to jump through but the cost savings for me was about $40k and worth the additional task burden (as compared to traditional financing where the bank handles all of paperwork processing. This is the best program out there and makes home buying possible for many people who otherwise couldn't. I am hoping that these issues with the staff are growing pains and that NACA management gets a handle on the issues soon, but I'm not holding my breath.

Charlie MacPherson tell your section 8 people that they need to tell the PHA that issued their voucher that they are interested in the Family Self-Sustainability (FSS) program and the Homeownership program. They have to go through additional financial counseling to ensure they will be successful as homeowners. Section 8 funds also provide a cash allowance for regular maintenance (Buffalo's program offers .5% of the purchase price per year, paid over 12 months) and up to 2.5% of purchase price per year paid in monthly amounts for larger repairs. Each jurisdiction has flexibility with this so your area may be different as to what allowances are provide.

Charlie MacPherson i am a newly appointed section 8 monitor and am currently researching NACA involvement with the Section 8 program. I know that section 8 funds CAN be used to pay the mortgage through the NACA program, but the question I am currently researching with the PHAs is whether or not the participant can purchase a multifamily or if they can only purchase single family homes with the funds. This question literally came up during my monitoring this past week and it's on my calendar to look into tomorrow. I will update this post with the guidance I find.

Karen Kingston call the office manager for the local NACA office and she can give you the basics to help your client until you can get to the webinar. We brought in a new realtor in the middle of a house search and they got her up to speed very quickly.