Don’t expect Ralph Perrey to be a stranger to the area.
The Tennessee Housing Development Agency (THDA) Director visited the Elizabethton Star Monday spreading the message of home loan and down payment programs for citizens in the area.
Throughout the two-day tour, THDA has been busy in Northeast Tennessee, Perrey said.
“We started yesterday in Oak Ridge,” Perrey said. “We’ve been to Greeneville, Johnson City, Bristol, Jonesborough, Erwin, Kingsport, and Rogersville … that’s about as many as we could cram into two days. We didn’t want to be known as one of those agencies where we expect everyone just to know us,” he added. “I remember when I got the job, a couple of my neighbors said ‘congratulations, but what do you all do?’ … that’s when I figured we needed to stop assuming everyone knew what we do.”
Perrey, joined by THDA Communications Coordinator Wes Bunch, provided an update on how the agency has been working over the last three years.
“When I took this job, about three years ago, East Tennessee represented maybe 23 percent of THDA’s business,” Perrey said. “Right now, we’re at 35 percent coming from East Tennessee … during the month of May, we were at 43 percent. We’re real pleased with the way things are going in this part of the state.”
Information provided by the THDA noted that Carter County saw 2,903 houses served by the agency in 2015, while the THDA went through $5,201,916.83 in expenditures.
Success in the area has been credited to the support of the THDA staff, according to Perrey, along with helping provide information to the public with the tours.
“It’s not by good fortune or by accident,” he added. “We’ve been really aggressive over the past couple of years in telling our story in East Tennessee. Wes and Katie Moore, they’re based in the area. We’ve done local advertising … what happens is this raises awareness for folks who are close to home ownership and weren’t aware of what we could do.”
Throughout 2015, mortgage production by THDA was 40 percent higher compared to the previous year, Perrey added, with the national estimate across the state at eight percent higher compared to 2014.
“We think we’re on the right track,” he added. “We think there are a lot more Tennesseans, East Tennesseans, that earn within our earning perimeters, they fit within our credit perimeters, and they are starting to know that we can help them.”
Perrey added the typical customer(s) for THDA have an annual salary of $58,000 with a credit score within the mid-600 range and are aiming towards a house with a price tag near $125,000.
One of the key components for the success mentioned by Perrey was the greatchoicetn.com website, which allows customers to learn firsthand what they need to do before purchasing a house.
The home page of the website features three different pathways for users to look through: first-time buyers, repeat buyers, and military buyers.
“The site features all the lenders in Northeast Tennessee, which a lot of the people may already bank with,” Perrey said, while adding the site has information on what steps need to be taken.
“Over the past 15 to 20 years, people started to notice that we couldn’t keep passing out mortgages to everyone,” he said. “We’re not doing anyone any favors that have trouble making the payments. Then their house gets foreclosed on and it puts them in a mess, financially, for years. That’s not what anyone wants.”
Loan programs offered by THDA have shown to work, with Perrey adding that fewer than two tenths of one percent of individuals that have loans are in danger of losing their loan.
“We don’t make the loans,” Perrey said. “We rely on the private sector but it has to be a good business proposition. We want to make sure they know the changes to the program. We go around to some of these smaller institutions, and meet the guy that maybe signed up for three loans and didn’t know we changed the product, the interest rate, the down payment and didn’t know what the income limits were. Now they know … the guys that have signed up three loans before are signing up 15 to 20 people for loans. That’s how you grow the business.”
While based in Knoxville, Perrey said he likes what he sees from the area.
“I’m careful because I enjoyed traveling all over Tennessee, but I always enjoy coming to this area,” he added. “This is such a pretty part of the state and you see why people want to live here. The challenge here, like other places, is folks aren’t building a lot of new homes at entry-level price points. Some of that is the market, the land, so we’re hoping to encourage people to build more houses or to fix up older houses. We’ve got a lot of other programs to help with that.”
Visit thda.org or greantchoicetn.org for more information on the housing market and to see the different programs available to the public.