With a strong summer homebuying season underway, it’s time to start planning first-time homebuyer seminars for when the weather turns cooler. This may sound counter-intuitive, but if you look at the natural world, animals prepare for the next season before it arrives.
Getting an early start gives you more time to book your location and create and send invitations to maximize activity in the September–November period, when home sales often take a seasonal dip.
The more homebuyers know — even before they start shopping for a home — the more likely they are to find a house that suits their lifestyle and their budget, and the more likely they’ll come to you for their mortgage because of the value you provided.
Arch MI can help with our Roadmap to Home Ownership, a complete toolkit for setting up and hosting homebuyer seminars to explain the homebuying process, the benefits and the financial impacts. At a time when so much communication happens via social networks and instant messages, there’s tremendous value in face-to-face meetings where you can answer potential buyers’ questions and correct false beliefs that are preventing too many young families from buying.
According to Bank of America’s 2018 Homebuyer Insights Report, 49% of millennial renters (23–38) believe that buying a home requires a down payment of 20% or more. In actuality, nearly 60% of millennial homebuyers purchased their homes with down payments of 10% or less, according to a recently analysis by Porch.com.
Our Roadmap to Home Ownership toolkit provides an in-depth PowerPoint® presentation on the homebuying process that you can brand with your company logo. It also includes lists of key resources to assist homebuyers with common concerns, a glossary of terms, worksheets for calculating budgets and checklists for home shopping.
The more homebuyers know — even before they start shopping for a home — the more likely they are to find a house that suits their lifestyle and their budget, and the more likely they’ll come to you for their mortgage because of the value you provided.
In addition, our AMGC Community Program, available through Arch Mortgage Guaranty Company (AMGC), promotes affordable homebuying by insuring loans for essential workers — police officers, firefighters, paramedics — and degreed professionals who may have only small down payments but steady jobs and good credit. It’s a unique MI solution for portfolio lending that enables you to approve down payments for eligible borrowers that are even lower than the 3% required for a conventional loan.
By leveraging the Roadmap to Home Ownership together with the AMGC Community Program, you can host homebuying seminars targeted to specific professions, whether they’re first-responders (firefighters, police and EMTs), teachers, medical professionals or individuals with advanced degrees ranging from accounting to architecture. Many people in these jobs have the income to support monthly mortgage payments, but the challenge of accumulating enough savings for a large down payment in high-priced housing markets is a barrier to the transition from renting to home ownership.
Start planning now by viewing our Roadmap to Home Ownership toolkit. With mortgage rates near historically low levels, it’s a great time to put plans in place to continue summer’s momentum into the last quarter of the year. In nature, those who are prepared for the next season will not only survive, they’ll thrive.
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