All right. Hi, everyone. My name is Karen OxiClean. I am a project manager that works with whoever. I'm finally I'm here today just to make you aware of course. Detroit land contract buyer guide. We've got physical copies of the buyer guide there in the back so everyone can take one if you'd like. They're also available at www dot Detroit land contract help.com. So all the digital versions are there as well. But this is a guide that was created in partnership with the city of Detroit Mayor's office and Enterprise Community Partners. I'm sure many of you are aware of what a land contract is. But for those of you who are not a land contract, sometimes called the contract for deed is a way to purchase a home it's a legally real estate transaction. It's legally binding, where a buyer pays for the for a seller for a home and monthly payments over time. But they don't get the deed until they've made all of those payments, which could be years of time. But while they're paying off the home, and while they still don't own the home, they often have all of the responsibilities that a regular homeowner would have which are typically paying property taxes and doing the home repairs, which puts them in a kind of risky position. Because at any time they could lose the home and lose all of the investment that they've put into the home. If they for example, Miss one payment or violate the contract at any time. And unfortunately, land contracts have a long and Ongoing History of exploitation in the city of Detroit and across the country, particularly in black neighborhoods, where predatory sellers have intentionally structured the deals to fail. So that they can take that home back and just do it again to someone else. And so that's why we created this guide was because there's been a resurgence of the use of land contracts. They became extremely popular earlier. 1900s With the advent of explicit explicitly racist when lending practices but then again, there was a wave of time after the subprime mortgage crisis when people were not able to qualify for mortgages as much and now we may see it again with home prices jumping so high and interest rates rising and people losing income because of the pandemic. So we're trying to get ahead of that by just educating people more about what land contracts are and what are the right questions to ask. Because while they are, too often extremely predatory, they are one of the only only pathways to homeownership while there's still a serious lack of mortgage financing in Detroit, and if you can't pay for a house in cash, which most people can't, if you can't get a mortgage, one of your only options is to go through a land contract unfortunately, and so a lot of people are using them. We've also seen them being used in positive ways by a lot of community based organizations throughout Detroit. Some examples of organizations that offer what we call supportive land contracts that are not predatory, that tend to result in homeownership, but bridging communities has done a lot of them. And so it's not impossible to become a homeowner with a land contract. You just have to really be on the defense and ask the right questions. And make sure that you're entering into a fair deal. There's really a lack of regulation around their contracts, which is another issue that we're working toward. But while you're working toward legislation, we can all be prepared to ask the right questions. And make sure that we're able to spot a predatory deal before we actually sign the paper. And if you've found yourself in a predatory deal, you can still make your Trent your contract safer for yourself. So this is a pretty long guide it's split into two parts. The first part is really detailed explanation of all the stages of buying a land contract we talk about what what happens before you buy what do you need to ask what are the potential risks and pitfalls? What are the predatory scans to look out for? And then we can talk about signing. What happens at signing
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we're just voting on the contract. The funding source is up to the department essentially, where they have the funds available. Initially there was a request to use ARPA funding, but there were several council members who asked them to find a different source of funds.