The National Association of Hispanic Real Estate Professionals (NAHREP®️) congratulates Sandra L. Thompson on her confirmation by the U.S. Senate as the next director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA).
Many of you might have heard about the Biden Administration’s Housing Supply Action Plan by now. I thought I would break it down so that we all know what to be excited about and what to be cautiously optimistic about. According to the plan, if implemented, the housing shortage will be filled in 5 years. Given that we are short about 5.5 million homes and demand will only continue to increase, that is definitely ambitious.
SAN DIEGO—May 16, 2022— The National Association of Hispanic Real Estate Professionals (NAHREP®) welcomes the Biden-Harris administration’s ambitious plan for addressing our burgeoning housing supply shortage. The Housing Supply Action Plan sets a national strategy to close the housing supply gap in five years. Latinos are central to the long-term strength of the housing market.
The National Association of Hispanic Real Estate Professionals (NAHREP®️) congratulates Julia Gordon on her confirmation as Assistant Secretary for Housing of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and Commissioner of the Federal Housing Administration (FHA).
Over the next two months, NAHREP will be attending city council meetings all over the country to hold our local city officials accountable and put pressure on cities to build more entry-level housing for homeownership. The housing gap has reached crisis levels. We can no longer wait. Here’s the deal: no one is asking for more homes for first-time homebuyers. There are folks who are speaking up about affordable housing, which usually means rentals. While more rental housing is important, we can’t forget homes for homeownership!
For years, all conversations around increasing minority homeownership have been focused on access to credit. How do we secure enough lending programs out there to ensure that first-time homebuyers can get adequate and affordable financing to purchase their homes? This is why the most important conversations around minority homeownership have historically happened within the Department of Housing and Urban Development (FHA), Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA, who regulates Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac), and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB).
This week the NAHREP familia took Congress by storm, meeting with a total of 53 U.S. Representatives and U.S. Senators, 20 of which are member meetings. That means an actual Member of Congress joined almost half of our meetings! This is probably the most member meetings we’ve had since I joined NAHREP. This is a testament, I believe, to the work we’ve been doing at the National Advocacy Committee to increase our footprint and relationships in Congress. Your voices matter. I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again, we can complain all day long or we can use our voices and experiences to put pressure on the individuals who can actually do something about the problem.
Let’s talk about institutional investors. I’ve heard from many of you that this is increasingly becoming a problem in your markets. Investors are sweeping up the little housing stock there is for first-time homebuyers. In fact, in the third quarter of 2021, investors bought up a record number of properties nationwide: a total of 90,215 units worth $63.6 billion, the vast majority of which (74.4 percent) were single-family homes. This trend was highly pronounced in counties with high Latino populations.
The National Association of Hispanic Real Estate Professionals (NAHREP) and America’s Homeowner Alliance (AHA) announced today the formation of a strategic alliance where membership in NAHREP will now include a free lifetime membership in the AHA. All existing members of NAHREP will be offered enrollment in AHA through a chapter-by-chapter roll-out beginning immediately.
NAHREP is squarely focused on bridging the wealth gap, and we know homeownership is one of the most critical strategies for building generational wealth. According to the State of Hispanic Wealth Report, Latino homeowners have 28 times the wealth as Latino renters, with Latino homeowners having a median household wealth of over $170,000 versus over $6,000 for Latino renters. However, we also want to make sure that Latinos are reaping the same rewards from homeownership as other groups on our road toward wealth creation. This is why the issue of appraisal bias is so important. How much a home is appraised for determines how much equity an individual can derive from owning a home.