Over the last few months, I’ve had the good fortune to celebrate a one-year Landedversary (our affectionate name for the anniversary of owning a home) with many of my favorite homebuyers, including Dy, Jen, and their two little ones.
You can read about Dy and Jen’s journey to homeownership in an Education Week article by Denisa R. Superville excerpted below. The couple explored various city and county programs available to teachers and first responders before deciding they were better off living long-term in their one-bedroom apartment – but then they found Landed, and they decided to give homebuying a shot. After a few months and about a dozen offers, they found their perfect place in the neighborhood that they already called home. I’m so happy and proud that our team at Landed could play a supporting role in their journey.
“Dy, a special education teacher in Sequoia Union High School District about 30 miles south of San Francisco, and her partner, Jen, 34, a police officer, used Landed to come up with the down payment to buy their $975,000 townhouse in San Francisco's Mission District. (Their surnames are being withheld to protect the home security of the police officer.)
(Jen, their littlest one, Jess, and Dy at their housewarming party)
With an annual income of about $200,000, the two still had trouble coming up with the down payment for a home in a city flush with Silicon Valley cash and where the median home price in March was $980,000.
‘We needed a down payment,’ Dy said. ‘We have great credit; we are super-responsible; we have secure jobs; we have secure incomes... We were great on paper for all of that. We almost have zero debt.’
The couple, who now has two children, had tried other affordable housing programs the city offered, but either fell out of the income brackets as their salaries increased or got stuck in red tape.
Until they heard about Landed, they had been resigned to staying in their $2,300 per-month one-bedroom rental – with two kids, a dog, and a cat – ‘until the walls [were] falling off,’ they said.
Even with the agreement that they must pay back the company 25 percent of the appreciation on the value of their home if they sell it, the couple said it's a worthy investment. The money will be used to help other civil servants live where they work, they said.
‘We just needed to get into the game,’ Dy said. ‘We had no access to this game that creates wealth in this country. The system is just very inequitable to people who don't come from money or have money to invest in real estate. We thought of this as investing in ourselves.’”
This story was originally published in Education Week on April 30, 2018. The author is Denisa R. Superville.
