A free expo and class may help first-time home buyers and those out of the market for a while. It could save them some money, too.
By JUDY STARK
Published June 12, 2004
Julie Ann Crabtree bought her house for $8.
No kidding. That's all she had to pay out-of-pocket for her two-bedroom, two-bath home in Largo, which she bought last summer for $86,000.
"It's better all around," said Crabtree, 25, who works at Leverock's Towing and Transport in St. Petersburg. "I pay less mortgagewise than if I had an apartment, and it's mine. It was a smart move."
Crabtree got $8,000 in down payment and closing cost assistance from Tampa Bay Community Development Corp. and from the Federal Housing Administration.
She already had picked out the house ("I drove around and looked all over and I spotted it") when she attended the annual Home Ownership for People Everywhere expo last June. Held annually during National Home Ownership Month, the expo includes an exhibit hall where information is provided by lenders, real estate agents, home inspectors, credit counselors, nonprofit programs and others. It also includes a six-hour class in which participants like Crabtree earn certificates to qualify for those assistance programs.
This year's HOPE Expo, the 13th annual, is from 8:15 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. June 19 at Harborview Center in downtown Clearwater.
"This year we'll have 45 housing-related vendors and exhibitors," up from 30 a year ago, said Jerry Spilatro, executive director of the Community Service Foundation, which puts on the expo along with many other nonprofits and community groups. They include real estate agents, lenders and nonprofit organizations that provide homeowner education and financial assistance programs.
As home prices have increased in the Tampa Bay area, Spilatro says he has noticed that people attending the classes "are a little bit more higher-income. It's not like it used to be, when you could buy a house for $70,000. Now, that's hard to do. Lower-income families have found that it's hard to find something affordable." But various programs still provide financial assistance, "so you can still get in for only 2 percent," Spilatro said.
For example, a potential buyer might put up 2 percent of the purchase price, and the city or county provides up to $10,000, which lowers the amount of the mortgage for which the buyer must qualify.
Concern about housing affordability is a national issue. Two out of three Americans are so concerned about the cost of housing in their communities that they would be more likely to vote for a candidate who works to make housing more affordable, according to the second National Housing Opportunity Pulse, a national survey released last month by the National Association of Realtors.
Affordable housing ranks third in the survey, behind the hot-button issues of health care and the economy, respondents said. Three out of four Americans are concerned about the availability of what is called "workforce housing" - homes that teachers, firefighters, police officers and health care workers can afford.
Adam and Danielle Jadus took last year's class to qualify for assistance in buying their home in Largo, for which they paid $86,500. "Most people go into it not knowing what to look for," said Adam, 26, a laser-optics coding technician. "You can easily get yourself into trouble if you don't know what to look for. They inform you: the quality of the house, the neighborhood in which you're buying, all that stuff. That was definitely helpful."
The class covers qualifying for a mortgage, down-payment assistance programs, the buying and closing process, what to look for in a house, home inspections, insurance and maintenance.
Over the years, the expo and the home buyers' class have been a good entree for minority and immigrant buyers - notably Hispanics and Asians - into the housing market. Now, "we're seeing more and more Eastern Europeans," said Carrie Vitale, a vice president of Tampa Bay Community Development Corp. and one of the organizers of the expo. Immigrant home buyers have had a huge impact on homeownership in recent years, accounting for a third of household growth from 1995 to 2002, the National Association of Realtors reports. They represented 12 percent of first-time buyers in 2001, the most recent year for which figures are available. Minorities accounted for two out of five new homeowners from 1994 to 2003, according to a new report from the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University.
From 2000 to 2005, U.S households will grow about 5 percent, an increase of about 5-million households, according to the Gonzales Group, a Texas-based real estate consulting firm. Hispanics will create 1.5-million of those new households, African-Americans will create 1-million and Asian-Americans 600,000.
"We encourage our vendors to have Spanish-speaking representatives" at the expo, Vitale said. Often immigrant buyers rely on bilingual real estate agents to walk them through the process.
Dragana Kolundzic-Grgic, a native of Bosnia, is a sales agent with Coldwell Banker on Gulf-to-Bay Boulevard in Clearwater. Many of her immigrant clients are referred to her through the local Bosnian community. "They've been here one, two, three years and they don't speak English well. They need help with financing and assistance and real estate, so I'm doing all three," she said. Sometimes she sits with clients as they watch a videotaped presentation of the home buyers' class, translating as the tape rolls, so her clients can learn about homeownership and qualify for assistance programs.
Not everyone who attends the expo is low-income or a first-time buyer. "You've got a roomful of lenders at your disposal," Vitale said, "and they do refinancing as well as home purchases." Owners interested in refinancing their mortgages can quickly learn what rates and terms and programs are offered.
It's also a good refresher course for those who haven't been in the housing market for a long time. The course covers how buyers and sellers are represented by realty agents, closing costs that sellers may be asked to pay and other topics that have changed in recent years.
Thirty-eight percent of Floridians 55 and older cited "lack of understanding/complexity of the real estate process" as an obstacle to homeownership, according to a study commissioned by the Attorneys' Title Insurance Fund. Fifteen percent of those ages 35 to 54 and 25 percent of those ages 18 to 34 also said this was a major obstacle. Here's one way to demystify the process.
What: Home Ownership for People Everywhere expo: exhibit hall with 45 vendors and home buyers' class
When: June 19. Expo runs from 8:15 a.m. to 3:30 p.m.; home buyers' class is 9 a.m. to 3 p.m.
Where: Harborview Center, 300 Cleveland St., Clearwater
Sponsors: Community Service Foundation of Clearwater; federal, state, local and community-based housing agencies; real estate agents; lenders; housing-industry businesses
The details: Admission is free to the exhibit hall and the home buyers' class. Advance registration is required for the class. Call 727 461-0618 or e-mail hope.expo@csfhome.org No children permitted in the class. Lunch available for purchase.
Homeownership, by the numbers
U.S. overall homeownership rate ........... 68.6 percent
