NAHREP Co-Founder and CEO Gary Acosta spoke about expanding opportunity at Breaking Ground: An Atlantic Forum on Innovative Communities on October 11. View his full talk on Youtube. One key factor currently limiting opportunity is outdated ways of qualifying people for loans. “The mortgage market is having to solve for the issue that people are earning money differently these days…people drive for Uber, and they have part-time jobs, and they have small businesses,” Gary said.
Currently, the mortgage industry uses credit reports or length of employment at current job as a tool to qualify clients for loans. However, Hispanics in particular tend to use credit to a lesser degree, and people who change their employment aren’t getting in the door. “Coming out of the crisis, we had changes in our regulatory apparatus to prohibit what happened in 2008 from repeating itself, and I think most of that was good, but that pendulum swung the other way so strongly that a lot of people who should be getting loans aren’t,” explained Gary.