Landed was founded around the idea of upholding those who uphold us – our educators, healthcare workers and first responders – by providing a tool to help them build financial security. Though many essential professionals can afford monthly loan payments, saving for a 20% down payment – the threshold to avoid additional costs that come with getting a low down payment loan – can be nearly impossible.
Without down payment assistance, homebuyers often require gifts from relatives to put down the necessary 20 percent down payment to avoid costly private mortgage insurance. Because many families – disproportionately families of color and immigrant families – do not have access to the “bank of mom and dad” to achieve this down payment savings goal, the status quo perpetuates social inequities and racial wealth gaps.
With over 850 customers served, here’s a look at our impact so far.
Building Wealth: We’ve worked with customers to purchase over $490 million worth of homes and helped essential professionals amass an estimated $54M of wealth – compared to just $15M a year ago. While essential professionals unequivocally deserve increased compensation, there are additional ways to increase financial security and wealth on top of solely making changes to income.
Helping the Middle-Class: Landed continues to serve mainly first-time homebuyers. More than two-thirds (68%) of our transacted customers were first-time homebuyers. An even larger majority – 80% – of those buying a home without a co-buyer were doing so for the first time. We continue to see that private down payment programs like ours do increase access to homeownership for middle-income families without requiring government funding. In 2021, over half (54%) of our customers are middle-income¹ families, versus 40% the previous year.
Addressing the Racial Homeownership Gap: We continue to make steady progress on improving the racial homeownership gap. In 2020, HMDA reported that 12% of loan origination applicants, from all lenders, identified as Black, Other Race, and Multiracial, and 17% as Hispanic or Latino in the communities Landed serves.² By comparison, 21% of Landed down payment customers this year self-identified as Black, Other Race, and Multiracial and 24% as Hispanic or Latino.³ As we continue to expand in regions such as Charlotte, Atlanta, and Washington D.C., we expect this number to accelerate in 2022.
Reaching more essential professionals: Today we’re actively helping our essential professionals buy homes in over 300 cities and over 500 zip codes. This means roughly 10.5 million essential professionals, who are upholding population centers that house 70 million Americans, have access to work with Landed’s product offerings. And that number will continue to grow significantly over the coming months as we extend our support to more customers in new states and cities.
For us, it’s not just about the numbers, but the people we’ve impacted that make this work worthwhile. It’s Erin and Adam who were able to buy a home in San Diego for their family of six humans and two dogs in southern California, Cliff and James settling down in Hawaii in their new home, and Kenrry who was able to put down roots in his childhood neighborhood in Washington DC.
While we’ve made strides toward realizing Landed’s mission of helping essential professionals build financial security in the communities they serve, this data further proves we have a lot more work to do and are only just getting started. We’ll continue expanding to new markets to serve more educators, healthcare workers and city employees. To maximize our impact, we’re embedding technology at every turn to finally scale the financial and wealth building tools and support that help get things like shared equity into the hands of those who could use it the most.
As our team continues to grow and apply lessons learned, reflecting on our collective impact motivates us for the work ahead. Let’s roll up our sleeves. Join us by sharing Landed with friends, colleagues or family members that could benefit from our program.
¹Landed defines 80%-120% Area Median Income as middle income.
² Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) demographic figures are computed based on the demographic data in 2020 mortgage dataset (see: https://cfpb.github.io/hmda-platform/#hmda-api-documentation) for Single Family (1-4 Units), first lien loan origination (Home Purchase) in MSAs with Landed active investments. Race and Ethnicity percentages are aggregated with equal weights across all MSAs for simplicity. “Race Not Available”, “Free Form Text Only”, “Other” Ethnicity are excluded in the calculation. “Joint” and “2 or more minority races” are combined as “Multiracial”.
³ Landed demographic figures are computed based on self identified race and ethnicity information disclosed on Uniform Residential Loan Application (Form 1003) at loan origination, and 2021 data on Landed down payment customers is good through Q3 2021. HDMA Race and Ethnicity percentages are aggregated with equal weights across all MSAs for simplicity. “Decline to state”, and other nondeterministic race and ethnicity identifications are excluded from the calculation. Households with only one deterministic race and ethnicity data will be identified as such for the entire household. Households with two or more races identified amongst buyers are considered “Multiracial”.
