Do you ever wonder if you’re reaching all of the potential buyers that you could be? Try comparing the demographics of your homeowners to the demographic profile of your target population and see if you’re meeting your goals. If you had a hunch before, now’s the time to confront the data.  If there’s a racial or ethnic group you’re underserving, why might that be and what can you do about it?

We recently shared how one community land trust used their Social Impact Report to learn that their outreach to the local Hispanic population were falling short of their expectations. They found that Hispanics made up a smaller share of their buyer population than the general population in their area so they took action to change.  They reworked their procedures for Spanish speaking applicants and hired more interpreters for the intake, legal document review, and signing processes.

Programs also need to pay attention to the income breakdown of their buyers. We work hard to bring subsidy to the table to help people who are likely to succeed but also need help buying a home. The chart titled: €˜Are buyers in the right income range?” provides a way to monitor this delicate balance.

The chart compares the affordability of your homes (What % of AMI they are affordable to) with the incomes of the actual buyers. Dots that fall on the diagonal line across the chart represent buyers who earn exactly the percent of median income that the homes are priced to be affordable to. Dots below the line represent people who are paying more than 33% of their income to buy their unit even at the reduced price. Dots above the line represent buyers who are paying less than 33% of their income. Ideally most dots would be close to the line.

How many dots can fall below the line before we start to worry? This is where peer benchmarking can help. Everyone has some share of buyers that, for one reason or another, can safely manage housing costs that are more than 33% of their income. The Dashboard compares the share of buyers who earn enough to afford the units at the level of your pricing (the green dots on this chart) with the same number for whatever peer group you have selected. There is no reason to expect 100%, but if you are below your peers on this measure, it might be cause for concern.

Shared equity homeownership programs promise to balance two competing public goals, preserving affordability for the community at large while offering economic opportunity to individual homebuyers. They do this through somewhat complex resale pricing formulas. No one formula balances these goals perfectly so it is important to monitor the outcomes of your formula over time and make changes if the outcomes don’t match your expectations. But in the past it has been extremely difficult to track the performance of your resale formula.

HomeKeeper was designed to make this kind of analysis a routine part of every program. First the Resale Performance dashboard shows the median affordability of your homes at the time of initial purchase and at the time of resale. Ideally homes stay the same or get slightly more affordable over time. But some programs are experiencing gradual loss of affordability which might be cause for concern.

While this change in the median affordability at resale is the clearest indicator of the success of the resale formula in protecting ongoing affordability, the dashboard allows a more detailed view which can help spot potentially worrisome trends that might not be apparent from looking at the median alone.

The €˜How often is affordability preserved?’ scatterplot shows each transaction. Red dots represent units that were less affordable at resale. These are not automatically cause for concern.     There is no reason to expect preservation of affordability in every single transaction – instead, we expect some losses and some gains and we hope that the general trend will be toward slight gains of affordability. How many losses are acceptable? This is where peer benchmarking helps. Nationally, 62% of resales in the HomeKeeper Hub dataset preserved or gained affordability. If your program’s results are much worse than that, you might want to explore further to be sure you understand why.

Note: The extreme housing market over the past few years has pushed some resale formulas to their limits. The numbers you see today may not be representative of your program’s longer-term results. Try using the dashboard filters to compare your performance before, during and after the crash. And if you don’t have many resales yet, it is important not to read too much into these charts.