Some people who’ve already owned homes may qualify for a new program that helps people buy houses. The South Dakota Housing Development Authority often helps first-time homebuyers. Now a repeat homebuyer loan program offers assistance with down payments and closing costs.
Financial assistance is now available for people who want to buy a house – again. Mark Lauseng leads the South Dakota Housing Development Authority. He says some people don’t meet the requirements for first-time homebuyers but need options.
“Some people who may not quite qualify for the first-time homebuyer program because of a maybe a divorce, maybe they recently had a job change and they hadn’t lived in the other home for very long. Sometimes their credit scores might not quite be high enough for a conventional loan; we have a little bit lower credit score rating that they can get and still get a loan,” Lauseng says. “To be a first-time homebuyer you have to have not lived in your home for the previous three years, so if somebody has rented for a year or two they wouldn’t qualify as a first-time homebuyer but could use the repeat homebuyer program."
The Repeat Homebuyer Loan Program requires households of one or two people to make $77,640 or less each year, and families of three or more must earn $90,580 or less annually.
The program caps a home’s purchase price at just under $305,800. Lauseng says the focus remains securing people affordable housing in the wake of the financial crisis.
“Some of the federal restrictions that came in have prevented more people from being able to get loans. We’re trying to address part of that problem through this program also,” Lauseng says. “You know there still is quite a bit of demand for housing across the state, so we’re doing what we can to try to address it. We hear it in a lot of the cities that we go into, small and large, that there just is a big need for affordable housing, so this is just another program that we’re trying to create to help address some of that need.
The repeat buyer program covers up to three percent of the loan for a down payment and helps with closing costs. It offers 30-year fixed-rate mortgages.