Rural Home Ownership

Rural Home Ownership. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Line On Agriculture.

I’ve lost track of the times I’ve looked at my wife and told her I wanted to buy a home out in the country. Not that I want to farm or ranch, just to get away from the city a bit. So I was intrigued by USDA’s National Home Ownership Month theme... “Bringing Rural America Home.” Rural Development's Administrator for Housing and Community Facilities Tammye Trevino says there are various programs available to assist those wishing to own their own home in rural America.

TREVINO: One of them is a direct loan program and we make those loans to people who are low to very low income. And then the second program is very much like the FHA program that’s been popular for so many years and it is a 502 guarantee program where we work with our lenders and we will finance anyone who’s income is at 115% of the median income.

They looked at a lot of the troubled mortgages out there.

TREVINO: What we did was we came up with a way that folks could maybe have lost a little bit of their income that were still paying on their loans every month; we came up with a rural refi pilot where we didn’t require a credit report to be run and if you were upside down in your loan we didn’t require an appraisal to be done either and so we provided an avenue for folks who currently have USDA loans to refinance their current loans at lower interest rates and thereby being able to put more money in their pockets.

That’s today’s Line On Agriculture. I’m Greg Martin on the Ag Information Network.