Latest / Market Pulse / Clearing the Down Payment Hurdle: DPA’s Role in Unlocking Homeownership
Transcript
- Speaker 1 (00:02): Welcome to a special edition of Market Pulse from Equifax, where we break down what's shaping the mortgage industry today and what happens next. Joel Rickman (00:15): Hi, I want to welcome everybody today to a special edition of the Equifax Market Pulse podcast recorded here at the 2025 MBA in Las Vegas. My name is Joel Rickman. I'm the General manager and Senior Vice President of the US Mortgage and Verification Services business. And today I'm here to talk about how we overcome one of the challenges in the industry of how do we get more families into homes and overcome some of the burdens of affordability. And to help us answer that question, I'm joined by someone who's dedicated to this, his career to making this happen. Mr. Rob Chrane, founder and CEO of the Down Payment Resource Organization. This is an organization that helps lenders, helps borrowers find programs for their down payment. So Rob, welcome. It's great to have you here today. Rob Chrane (01:04): Well, thank you, Joel. It's great to be here. Appreciate this opportunity. And I love the jacket. Are you, are you, you sure you're not a Georgia Bulldog or anything? Oh, Joel Rickman (01:12): Oh, I am not. I am not. Even though we are from a, Rob Chrane (01:15): You'd fit right in. Yes. Joel Rickman (01:16): Even though we are from Atlanta, Equifax is, I am not, but but no, thank you for the jacket. I got to tell you why you're here. So one of the things I tend to do with my team every so often is bring them together and say, Hey, who's doing some neat things in the industry? What are, what are things that are going on? What should we be aware of? Are there things we should be doing? And a young lady on my team, Celeste mm-hmm . Said, Hey, I found this really cool company that helps people find all of the programs across the country that can help them with down payment assistance. And so Celeste came and, and she promoted your company and talked about it, and it was a learning experience for our team. But I've had her keep, keep in touch or, or keep an eye on your organization and, and keep me updated. And I just absolutely adore what your mission is for the industry. And so when we were thinking about podcasts, I said, can you get this Rob guy to come spend some time with me, ? So tell me and thank Rob Chrane (02:13): You with that, Joel Rickman (02:14): With that intro. Tell me about the program. Rob Chrane (02:15): Yeah. So where to begin one easy way to say it is we help our business partners connect home buyers with the down payment help they need. We're a B2B business. We license to, obviously mortgage lenders of all types, credit unions, banks, IBS of all sizes. We license multiple listing services. Our information is on some of the search portals, real estate search portals, like realtor.com. And it starts, the heart of it is, is a comprehensive database of a lot of programs. We'll get into program numbers probably as we get into this, but we, we put all of the programs in one place. because The, the first issue we were solving for is discovery. How's anybody supposed to find these programs when there's so many so, so fragmented, not standardized. So it was just something that seemed like seemed like needed to be done. Joel Rickman (03:10): Well, that's fantastic. What what got you started? It was it just trying to help that first one? Or did you have a personal experience that said, Hey, this needs to be easier, this needs to be better? Yeah, Rob Chrane (03:21): I had some personal experiences. because My background is mortgage lending. I was a mortgage banker for 20 years, and one of the organizations I worked for was a bank. They had strong, a strong CRA commitment. And no matter I was a producing branch manager, no matter what your, your sales territory was, you were expected to do outreach and turn in reports every month. And I took it seriously and I did it. And that became, that was in the early nineties. And that gave me an early appreciation for not only the benefits of the programs, the amount of money that's out there, but the difficulty in getting the word out about it. Mm-Hmm . So you could, you could almost say this, this we were, I was inspired by laziness. because I kept saying as a loan officer, there's got to be a better way. You know, there's just all these programs. Rob Chrane (04:11): Even, even if you're working a local market, a metropolitan area like Atlanta where I'm from, you know, there could be dozens of programs, dozens of providers. How's anybody supposed to keep up with that? And trust me, if you told me even six months before we started down payment resource and you told me this is what I'd be doing, I'd be like, what are you smoking man? . That was the last thing on my mind. I, but I just thought it was something that should be done. And so, you know, I guess if you say something enough times, be careful what you wish for, because you'll end up doing it. And, and I joke about that because it's been an incredible journey and I'm, I'm glad we did it. Well, Joel Rickman (04:47): That's fantastic. I'm glad that you took that idea and turned it into something real. In today's world, we've got high interest rates. We've got, it's hard to find affordable housing to start with. You know, it's just really tough to, for those people to get off and get their, their first home purchase, first time home buying is, you know, probably as challenging now as maybe as it's ever been. How do you play into that? Kind of walk me through the process. Obviously you came from the industry, so I feel like you probably built your tools to make them really usable for the industry. Walk me through how a a loan originator would, would use you to help get some assistance. Rob Chrane (05:25): Yeah. So our our lender suite of tools, there are four basic components to it. There's a directory that's not used by loan officers. Our our customers, our prospects, whenever we demo that part of it, somebody usually says, oh, this is like AllRegs for down payment assistance. And so it's for product managers who have to go out and find the programs, keep them up to date, decide which ones to onboard, and we have the loan officer portal. So to your question, what, how does it help a loan officer? Well, it automates the process of matching a borrower, the property they want to buy with the programs that might be available, but only the programs that that lender has vetted and approved. because You don't want them, you know, coming back with 2000 programs. Then what do we do with that? So so somebody said that that part is like match.com for dpa. It just, you know we have some integrations into LOS. We can talk about that later. But you know, just to, just to have the information surface so, you know, you shouldn't have to hunt for it. It should appear, you know, when it's relevant, when it's, when it's appropriate for it to appear. And that's, that's part of what we try to do. Joel Rickman (06:34): Oh, that's excellent. So with, with the challenges in the industry right now, have, have you seen your people depending on you more or reaching out more, how's that played into your business the last few years? Rob Chrane (06:45): Yeah, definitely more. I, I'd say 2020 was a big turning point Yeah. For a number of reasons. And because we've been doing this since 2008, so been edit a while. I was a, I was a young man, believe it or not, but when this started, but it turned my hair white. But the experience, Joel Rickman (07:01): I had hair when I took this job. So maybe we can relate, please, still, still . Rob Chrane (07:06): But when the, when the mortgage market changed and the refinances went away and it became a purchase market, primarily lenders lenders, you know, they need to do every loan they can and every purchase loan they can. And so we really saw things accelerate, you know, after, after doing this for so long the appreciation for the need for these programs to solve affordability issues you know, that just, that just ratcheted up. And it's, it's, it's been interesting because it's just opening up really a whole new cohort of potential borrowers. Not just the ones that people typically think of that would be helped by these programs. And those people are still, you know, low, low to moderate income home buyers, underserved communities are still very important and they can, they can really benefit from this. But there's a, there's a, a bigger market that lenders a lot of lenders haven't realized yet that they should be tapping into. Joel Rickman (08:04): Is there something that the industry could be doing more to help educate on down payment assistance programs to those consumers when they're, they're coming to go ask for that first loan? Rob Chrane (08:14): Yeah, absolutely. There needs to be a lot more, you know, the problem, somebody said one time, the problem is not coming up with a down payment. The problem is people don't know about down payment assistance. They don't even know there's such a thing. So it definitely needs a lot more outreach, a lot of education, and there's some change, you know, change behavior that needs to happen within the industry to make a commitment to doing that. Joel Rickman (08:40): You know, it's, it's sad, unfortunately, to know the number of programs. And so how many you guys have brought together into one place to have access to. When Celeste was teaching me about your company she shared a lot of those, and I was, I was honestly overwhelmed that the amount of work you guys must do on a daily basis to keep all of those updated and, and available to folks. How does that kind of work behind the scenes? Rob Chrane (09:03): Yeah. Well, it's, it's mostly manual, very labor intensive you know, labor intensive effort because we, we just actually just published today our home ownership program index. It's a quarterly index of what's in our database at any given time, a snapshot. And so we talk about the number of programs, the type of programs, trends we're seeing. And so as of as of this snapshot for this third quarter, 2,624 programs, or in the database, wow. Joel Rickman (09:32): So you've got to have a lot of people that really believe in this mission to be hunting and clawing and looking for those every day. Rob Chrane (09:38): We have an amazing team. And that's, and that's what motivates them. They're, they, they're, they're locked into the mission and they feel good about what they're doing. And, and thank goodness, because it's not, it's not fun work, as you can imagine. You know, those, those 2,600 programs are administered by a little over 1300 program administrators, mostly governmental entities. They could be state housing, finance agencies, local housing, finance agencies, municipalities, non-profits. And so and again, they don't have APIs. You know, you can't just plug, you can't just, you can't just scrape their websites. You can't just plug into an API. So there's a lot of one-on-one contact. And over these almost 18 years, you know, part of what we had to do is build relationships because we needed their cooperation to be able to do our job as efficiently as we can. Rob Chrane (10:31): But just to give you an order of magnitude, and I, you may laugh because I, I, I laughed when they told me this number, but they proved it to me. So I'll, I'll repeat it. But in, in the first six months of this year alone, you made over 200,000 updates to the database. Wow. Now that could be, there's some simple things that are automated, like finding broken links. because We link to different places on the websites of the agency, but most of it's more consequential and most of it is, is, is found manually. So we have a team that does this. They're divided by territories, they're divided by types of program providers. So they're specialists and you know, that's, that's what they do. That we have, we have all kinds of metrics and quality control things going on in the background to, to make sure. because We can't, we can't, unfortunately, we cannot promise a hundred percent perfection. We're not creating content, we're aggregating content. So we're always at the mercy of, of a third party to, to help us. So if anything ever kept me awake at night, it was probably thinking about what if we get something wrong and somebody does a loan that they shouldn't have done. Yeah. Joel Rickman (11:41): Well, that, I think we all think about that at times. Or, or on the other side, we think about did we do something that prevented somebody to, from getting a loan? And, and how do we make sure that never happens? But what I'm really hearing you say is that, you know, if you, if this was left up to, to that underwriter or lo out in the field that have to go try to find some assistance for an individual, they would just spend hundreds of hours working on trying to find that and pull it up. You've, you've got the people that have the passion and the knowledge to go find those programs. And then you're using technology to make that readily available to any of the people subscribing to your network. Rob Chrane (12:17): Yeah. Yeah. That, that's, that's right. And you know, to that point, and, and, and talking about what I was touching on earlier about you know, change management and stuff, you know, the, the title of this podcast, what happens next? Joel Rickman (12:32): Absolutely. Rob Chrane (12:33): You know, I think from where I sit, I think it's more of a it it's less of a algorithm issue than it is an alignment issue. So I, I, I really think, because I was saying a minute ago, I feel like we've solved the discovery problem because we are able to put all this into one place. Mm-Hmm . Make it searchable, keep it up to date, and have matching algorithms to automate those, all those processes. But they're still getting it from the system to the people who could use it. Yeah. And, and there's still a big gap between how many people are even aware that that could be a possibility for them. And so it's, it's a, it's a, it's an amazing incredible leadership opportunity for our in industry to, to, and, and, and there, there are some, there are some great lenders that do a really good job with this. And they're, you know, they're some of our best customers. They've been doing a long time. We just help them do it more efficiently. But it's really it's, it's really a problem of, of getting alignment. So the tools are there, the money's there. Now, how do you get it delivered or distributed to the customer? And it ties into something I I've been talking about for a while now. And that's the last mile pro, the last Joel Rickman (13:50): Last mile for funding. There you go. Rob Chrane (13:51): Well, the last, yeah, exactly. So you, you know, we know the last mile in terms of parcel delivery, UPS prime or the last mile for connecting fiber optics. The last mile's always the most expensive, the most time consuming, the most difficult because it's going from the grid or the infrastructure to the house one by one by one. I mean, it's almost like a get out the vote campaign or something. Yeah. and, and, and so, you know, technology, yeah, they will, will enhance our product and other people will with technology, no doubt about that. But it's, it's, it's much more important getting people on board so that they're not afraid to talk about these programs, not afraid to work with them. You know, it's just the fear of the unknown. Joel Rickman (14:35): Well, I, I can understand that, but I know that there's a lot of people that need help. So anything we can do to help get that word out and first, you know, get that frontline broker or originator talking to, to the borrower about these options, then using your tools to find which ones apply to them. That last mile sounds tough though. How, how do we help in that area? How do we help simplify that? Is that a training issue? Is that a resource issue? Rob Chrane (15:01): Yeah, I, I think it, I think it's training and, and I think it's willingness. Mm-Hmm . I think it's willingness, starting with the top of an or, you know, the top the, the leadership of an organization has to say, this is a priority. You know, this is, this is something we're going to do and we're going to give you the tools to make it easy or easier, but it's got to come from there and filter down and get to the, to the los out on the street. And lot of training. But, you know, once, once they do a couple of these programs, they'll get over that fear. It's just like anything. I mean, I, I remember, you know, I was in, as an originator, I was in a market and, you know, it was a lot of conventional and, and jumbo. If I had to do a FHA loan and I hadn't done one for six months, it was like starting all over again. Rob Chrane (15:47): So it's not you know, it's not unlike that. But once you do it, you realize it's not, it's not as complicated or as hard. And, you know, you think about how you're helping a household or an individual. There's a lot of fulfillment and award in that. And, you know, you talk about building customers for life and helping your referral sources when you can, when you can help somebody, you know, use, use a program that they didn't even know existed, get into a home sooner. You know, that's, that's going a long way to to, to building solid relationships. Oh, Joel Rickman (16:22): Absolutely. So let's go off script a little bit here. Are there a couple of neat programs out there that you like to talk about? Or anything specific that's, that's really special in the, in the space from the, the program perspective? Rob Chrane (16:36): Yeah. There, there are a lot of neat programs out of, you know, out of 2000 and, you know, 75% are some type of down payment help down payment or closing costs help. So DPAs grants and so forth. I would say rather than specific programs, I would say types of programs or what programs cover. So, you know, for example, there are about a thousand programs for multifamily properties. Okay. Two, two to four unit. A lot of people don't realize that as long as you're going to own or occupy one of the units, you Joel Rickman (17:11): Can get some help. You can get some help and start a business at the same time. Rob Chrane (17:13): Exactly. Think about what, what, you know, everybody, you know, what big purpose for, besides lifestyle, for home ownership is wealth building. What a great way to start to have an, have an investment property and have, have other people help you pay your rent and grow your equity. So I think, you know, that's something that could be taken greater advantage of their programs for manufactured homes. Mm-Hmm . I think the number 909 programs allow manufactured properties, manufactured homes. And that's, you know, that's getting into an affordable area. Absolutely. and then their programs, 10% of the programs don't have no household income limits. So that's one thing that, you know, there's sort of this stigma. Let's Joel Rickman (17:59): Talk about that for just a second. Is that, do those tend to be more local programs, or is that certain type of home ownership or loan programs? I, I had not heard of those. Rob Chrane (18:09): Of the, Joel Rickman (18:09): With the unlimited income. Rob Chrane (18:12): Oh yeah, yeah. Those some of those are available nationally now when they say there's no income limit and sometimes no sales price limit, there is, there is a effective limit which would be that either the FHA maximum first mortgage amount or con conforming first mortgage amount. But that's, those are pretty high. So that's, that's still could be a pretty pricey home. So some of them are national, some of them are local. Sometimes it's, you know, because it's a higher cost real estate market, so they adjust for that. Joel Rickman (18:43): So you, you, you claim you've been doing this for a while, you've thrown out some dates. Do you have any idea how many, how many folks you've helped on that first biggest purchase of their life? Rob Chrane (18:52): You know, I, I wish I knew some days, some days I wish. I'm glad. I don't know. But no, you know, that's, if I, you know, if there's anything frustrating, I would say that's one of the things because, you know, our platform is connecting people with information to help them into home ownership. The transaction today, now tomorrow might be different, but today the transaction doesn't happen on our platform. Right. So there's no, we have no way to compel people to come back and tell us, Hey, you know, I got, so, so we know it more anecdotally. But I could tell you in terms of at least people being exposed to it Zillow, Zillow had our, had a down payment assistant widget on their website in the first three years. They had more than 5 million unique visitors to zillow.com, fill out that eligibility form. Rob Chrane (19:45): Wow. Over 5 million uniques. And, and they'll be the first ones to tell you. It wasn't easy to find that. But we're flagging the properties. We're saying, okay are there any homes for a buyer or any programs for a buyer of this particular home? And if there are, the module pops up and said, Hey, there may be 10 programs to help you buy this home. See if you're eligible. The consumer answers six questions, Hey, here's, here's some money. And you know, I'm, I'm you know, I i I can get this much money if I buy this home. Joel Rickman (20:11): So that one's interesting me. So I think if I understood, stood correctly there with what you're talking about, they're, you're connected through Zillow today, right? Is that what I Rob Chrane (20:20): Understand? Not, not today, but we were, for about three and a half years, for about Joel Rickman (20:23): Three and half years, you touched 5 million people coming through. That's, that's really powerful. That's also, I was going to ask if the frontline consumers had a way of interacting with you, and it sounds like, Rob Chrane (20:33): And that's one way Yeah, that's Joel Rickman (20:34): One way. So it's, some of the real estate sites might, yeah. Might be a way for them to learn more. Rob Chrane (20:39): And we're, and we're going we're still on realtor.com and we're going back on Redfin. Joel Rickman (20:43): Well, that's exciting. So that, that's one of the things I wanted to make sure we touched on. So you said realtor.com and, and soon to be Redfin will be away for not only the lenders to interact or, or know about you, but for consumers to start to have some of that direct assistance. Rob Chrane (20:58): Yeah, it's sort of a push pull strategy. If, if, if, you know, we're, we're, we're selling the product and selling lenders on the idea of participating in these programs, but then if consumers are empowered with the knowledge of it, they'll start demanding it. Absolutely. And, and, and so, but that, that number, that 5 million number, we just, that, that's just sort of evidence of when we're trying to explain to lenders why, you know, why should, why should I do down payment assistance programs? And, you know, there's all these myths and misperceptions about, well, it's only really low loan amounts. It's subprime borrowers, it's, you know, homes and distressed, whatever, whatever their misperception is. But it's, it's just a much bigger audience. And when you, even though consumers don't know there's such a thing as down payment help, they do understand the message. The message you put out there is really simple. Rob Chrane (21:50): It's just down payment help is available. See if you're eligible. So people, people that anybody can understand that message and they, that's why they click, that's why they fill out forms is how, you know, how do I get some of this money and how much can I get? So it's a, it's a just a huge opportunity for lenders. And and then as I said, there's some, you know, there's a, the, the number of households that can be helped with this is growing significantly and because as affordability has gotten worse, the, the, the affordability challenges working their way up the income ladder. Absolutely. Absolutely. And, and there's, and there, there are programs that that can serve households even into the six figure household income. Mosa Gatlin, the senior vice president of strategic growth and expansion at new American funding. She's a great she's become a good friend of ours. Rob Chrane (22:47): She's a great spokesperson for it. She had a, she had an origination team. They were doing a hundred million a year in these programs. But she talks about the missing middle. And the missing middle is this cohort of people. They, they're not asking, can I buy a home? They know they can, they know they can qualify for a mortgage. What they're asking is, you know, we've got very expensive childcare, or we've got kids in college, we've, all our expenses are going up. And they're still with the mindset of 20% down, you need 20% down based on the median price home today, that could be, you know, 80, $90,000 or more. So what they're asking themselves is, do we want to take this much of our nest egg and invest it in a home? Is that a smart thing? So a lot of, again, that's, that's where there's a bigger opportunity where lenders loan officers should be talking about these programs with more people than, than they know, than they realize because it's a financial strategy. You know, it's not just, it's, it's not just, you know, a charity or handout or whatever. It's a, it's a wealth part of the wealth building strategy of, of buying a home. Joel Rickman (23:54): Well, as, as we start to wrap up here, just a couple of other quick questions. I mean, what I'm hearing you say is your resources and, and what you offer, every lender should have this on their website, helping out getting that attractive , it sounds like the right thing to do. So quick question about government shutdown and change in administration. Have you seen any drastic changes in program availability or No. Any of those? There, Rob Chrane (24:20): There, there may, there may be some that have gone away. But net net again, in this home ownership program index we just released we're up to the highest number of programs we've ever tracked. This, it, it's gone from 2,500 to over 2,600. And it's been growing quar, it's been growing every quarter of every year for, I dunno, four or five years now. So there's more money out there than ever. The federal government can only control some of the funding for some of the programs. So even if they shut down all the HUD funding that comes from community development, block grants and home funds, there would still be plenty of programs out there. Joel Rickman (25:01): That is good to know. No, I think a lot of people are, are concerned about if, if those are changing. So it's exciting to know that they're continuing to grow, maybe changing a little bit, but growing. Rob Chrane (25:10): Yeah. Yeah. Joel Rickman (25:11): So last question. If there's, you know, if there's something that you could change in the industry or, or a message you could get out to the industry to really help people into that first home what would that be, Rob? Rob Chrane (25:23): I would say, you don't have to boil the ocean, so come on in the water's fine. Just, just take one down payment assistance program and learn it and do it and see, see what it's like and experience it, and then do another one and another one and build your repertoire. But, but talk to people, the number, you know, because we license not only the lenders, but to multiple listing services. So we train thousands of real estate agents every year, and the number one question we get from realtors is, tell me loan officers in my market that participate in these programs, what, what better opportunity is that? I mean, do you want to take donuts and a rate sheet or do you want to talk about how you can help your referral partner close more sales? Well, Joel Rickman (26:08): I think you just wrapped us up with the whole fear of fomo. People are going to be afraid if they're not being involved as a realtor or a loan officer, they may be missing out on the ecosystem. Rob Chrane (26:18): Yeah. I, I think you're right. Joel Rickman (26:20): All right. Well Rob, I really want to thank you for your time today. I really want to praise you for the mission you came up with back when you were an a loan officer and came to the conclusion that there was a better way or an opportunity to help people get more houses. I feel like you're doing, you know, the, the work of the industry every single day to help people find a way to get that first house. And just really thank you for what you and your company are doing at down payment resources. Rob Chrane (26:45): Well, thank, thank you very much. And it's been a great journey and we have some incredible customers. I mean, that's part of what's made this so much fun is so many great lenders and, and realtors that we've worked with. And, and we see, we just see phenomenal success stories and, and heartwarming stories every day. So that, that's that, that drives us a lot. So thank you. Well Joel Rickman (27:06): Delighted to hear it. Thank you so much. Rob Chrane (27:08): Alright. Thank you. Speaker 4 (27:09): The information and opinions provided in this podcast are intended as general guidance only, and are subject to change without notice. The views presented during the podcast are those of the presenter as of the date. This podcast was recorded and do not necessarily reflect official positions of Equifax. Investor analysts should direct inquiries using the contact desk box on the investor relations section@equifax.com.