A Mission Local member and realtor, Jennifer Rosedail, got caught up with clients trying to buy property with the assistance of the city and has written a two-parter about their experience.
Part 1, Affordable Homeownership Success Story, begins:
Back in February 2015, Patrick called me. He was a renter in a building on 5th Avenue in the Richmond that was about to go on the market. He thought just maybe he, his wife and his downstairs neighbors could buy the building from the landlady and pre-empt their evictions. There was just one problem. All four of them were educators, three of them for San Francisco Unified School District (“SFUSD”) with limited resources.
There are affordable home ownership programs offered by the Mayor’s Office of Housing (“MOH”), but none of them apply to the purchase of a multi-unit building, so they were going to have to piece it together and see if they could buy the building without outside assistance. (Also, the MOH income limits were also so low in 2015 that even two SFUSD educators were over-qualified for the assistance.)
I went to the building and met with both couples. Bridget and Kai were expecting their 2nd child. Patrick and Meghan already had two. Between them they could come up with about 15% down. They talked to a lender and found that if they received some gift funds from a friend (another teacher couple if you can believe it), they could make a decent offer on the building. They did so, but it was rejected by the owner who had decided to move in to Bridget and Kai’s unit and sell Patrick and Meghan’s on the open market…read more here
Part II – Where There’s a Will, There’s a Way, begins:
Meanwhile, back in the Inner Sunset, Bridget asked me to meet with her in late May. She asked if her friend Harini could join us. Bridget had learned that the Mayor’s Office of Housing (“MOH”) was expanding the Down Payment Assistance Program (“DALP”) both in terms of the income limit and the amount of money available to a borrower. In addition, the Teacher Next Door (“TND”) program was clarified to include more kinds of educators – charter schools, non-classroom teachers, school social workers, (Bridget, Meghan and Harini are all school social workers and Josh works for a SFUSD Charter School), etc., which was going to make it easier to use those funds as well. She asked if her friend Harini could come along to them meeting. The changed program was going to be available in early July, and Bridget and Harini wanted to be ready to spend their summer getting their families homes and moving in.
After several weeks of looking and a couple of offers, each couple was able to get into contract to buy a home in the Sunset District. In each case there was competition, but also, in each case, the sellers were happy to see SFUSD teachers buy a home. And It’s not true you have to have all cash and waive all contingencies: both couples were able to do inspections and negotiate small credits subsequent to their offers being accepted.
With the usual work out of the way, now came the fun part – getting the Mayor’s Office of Housing loans closed…read more here
