Cheryl Knowlton: Hi everybody. Cheryl Knowlton, Clay Johnson coming at you for the last in our series this week on down payment assistance and really cool programs.
Clay Johnson: Yeah, low down payment programs as well. Because last week we talked about the conventional 3% down and that is awesome but conventional is still stricter when it comes to what we call serious derogatory events and those are things …
Cheryl Knowlton: And FHA is kinder.
Clay Johnson: Kinder, so much kinder.
Cheryl Knowlton: Yes.
Clay Johnson: So if you’ve had that foreclosure, that short-sell, that bankruptcy, you’re going to be able to get into a home loan a lot quicker through FHA. In fact, this is the part that always shocks people. Just two years after a chapter-seven bankruptcy, keep things clean after the bankruptcy, you can get an FHA loan and with just three and a half percent down which is just incredible. And again that three and a half percent, 100% of it can be gifted.
Cheryl Knowlton: Which is unbelievably cool.
Clay Johnson: Yes.
Cheryl Knowlton: FHA is such an incredible program and so much of what Castle and Cooke do are FHA loans. What percentage of all of your loans in Utah do you think?
Clay Johnson: We’re almost two thirds that are FHA. We’re doing a significant amount of FHA loans and it’s making homeownership available and within reach. And it’s what we use, it’s the loan that we use on almost all of those down payment assistance programs we’ve talked about this week, the backbone loan is the FHA loan. And so it’s a great interest rate, it’s a great payment. And I love this, you can have a non-owner occupant co-borrower so if they don’t quite get there themselves mom and dad can step in and help them out and it doesn’t change their rate as it does on a lot of loans.
Cheryl Knowlton: And there’s so many. I love FHA but yeah we’ll talk more about that. We’re actually going to do an entire week-long series on all of the benefits of FHA. What a gift for you as a real estate professional to be able to offer the dream of homeownership to people who don’t believe it’s even within their reach.
Clay Johnson: No, and we found that coming out of the great recession people are harder on their credit than it actually is.
Cheryl Knowlton: They’re harder on themselves yes.
Clay Johnson: They say, “I can’t, I had this happen.” Well, it was five years ago, seven years ago, four years ago, and they’re well back within range of being able to buy a home once again through an FHA loan.
Cheryl Knowlton: It’s so beautiful. All right everybody. Thanks for joining us this week. We will enthusiastically see you next week with a whole new series.
Clay Johnson: Bye-bye.