Texas first-time buyers
Texas has more than sixty homebuyer programs. Nobody showed you the list.
Not because anyone hid it. Because most of them pay nobody to sell them, only a handful of lenders can actually file them, and several are decided by where the house sits rather than by what you earn.
The most common thing Bradley Pounds hears from a buyer is not a question. It is a calculation, done too late, out loud.
“If somebody would have just put this on my radar and educated me five years ago, I wouldn't have paid my landlord the last five years of rent.”
For a household renting at the level a lot of Texas families rent at, five years is somewhere around a hundred thousand dollars. That money is gone, and the person who paid it was not reckless or unqualified. They simply did not know that a list existed.
There are more than sixty of them
Texas runs an unusual number of first-time buyer programmes. State ones, city ones, county ones, a few that exist because of a federal rule almost nobody has heard of. Brad runs a free class on the subject and has never once got through the whole list inside it.
“Now the reality is that we don't have time to get all sixty in there.”
That is the shape of the problem in one sentence. Not that help is scarce, but that there is more of it than one sitting can cover, and almost nobody ever sits down and covers it.
60+
first-time buyer programmes operating in Texas — state, city, county and federal
1
the number most buyers are offered, in Brad's words: “a one size fits all program”
Programme count: Bradley Pounds, first-time homebuyer class, stated as sixty-five and sixty-six in one session. The single-offer figure is his own phrasing in the same session; no survey underlies it and none is claimed.
Why you were shown one thing
Three reasons, and none of them is a conspiracy. The first is money. Assistance programmes are administrative work with thin or no margin attached, and an organisation that is not paid to sell something does not build a process for selling it.
“Most banks never talk about these because they don't make any money on them.”
The second is plumbing. Access is not universal, and this is the part that surprises people who assume their own lender would have mentioned it if it mattered.
“Not all lenders can access all of them.”
For the larger city and county programmes in particular, the administering body publishes a list of approved lenders, and in Brad's experience of those programmes it is a short one. His words: “You have to use an approved lender who's on the shortlist who actually knows how to navigate these programs. And usually there's only like four or five or six on the list.” If your loan officer is not on it, they are not withholding anything. They cannot file it.
The third reason is the most interesting, because it explains how a programme can exist for decades while nobody sells it. A federal law passed in 1977 required banks above a certain size to lend in the communities they take deposits from. Brad describes the consequence: the banks “were cracked down pretty hard upon in nineteen seventy seven where the government said, hey. If you're a bank and you get to this size, you have to make these certain types of loans in your communities, including first time home buyer programs.” The obligation created the products. Nothing created a salesforce for them.
Nobody is paid to sell it
Assistance is administrative work with thin or no margin. An organisation that is not paid to sell something does not build a process for selling it.
Not every lender can file it
Access runs through approved lists. For the larger city and county programmes Brad puts that list at four to six lenders.
Which is why your own loan officer may never have mentioned it.
The obligation created products, not a salesforce
A 1977 federal law required banks above a certain size to lend in the communities they take deposits from. That produced the programmes. Nothing produced anyone to market them.
All three from Bradley Pounds, first-time homebuyer class. The 1977 reference is the Community Reinvestment Act; the lender-count figure is his experience of city and county block-grant programmes specifically, not of all sixty.
And then the part that is genuinely strange
A lot of eligibility in Texas has nothing to do with your income. It is decided by a map, and the maps are old.
“They use ten year old maps.”
Which produces results that feel like a mistake and are not. As Brad puts it, “there are a lot of places where you and I would never dream of calling them rural anymore, but USDA does, and so we can take advantage of that loophole.” Suburbs that were fields a decade ago are still fields as far as the eligibility map is concerned.
The census data does something similar, in the opposite direction.
“There are parts of town right by SMU. There are parts of town right by the University of Texas at Austin. It's a rich neighborhood, but because there's so many student apartments, the census data makes it look like it's a low income area.”
This is the single most useful thing to understand about assistance in Texas. Eligibility is frequently a fact about the property before it is a fact about the person. Two houses on opposite sides of one street can sit in different tracts, and a buyer who was told they earn too much for help may simply have been looking at the wrong side of the road.
What changes when somebody actually shows you the list
Not approval. Nobody here is an underwriter and a lender decides what a lender decides. What changes is that you stop having one option and start having several, which is a different way to make the decision.
“Imagine that you and I are at your dining table, and we've got, like, eight stacks of paper. We've eliminated the other fifty four programs. And we've settled on the eight that would be good for you to explore.”
Eight stacks instead of sixty, and instead of a single shot: “I want you to view it as you have all of these different options, plan a, plan b, plan c, plan d.” That is the whole difference between being told no once and knowing what your actual field of play is.
- 87% eliminated as not applicable to you
- 13% worth actually exploring
Bradley Pounds' own illustration from the class: fifty-four programmes eliminated, eight left to explore. An illustration of the method, not a prediction about any individual — the eight are different for every address.
The honest limit on all of this
Brad is not a lender and says so before anybody asks: “we're not lenders. We are real estate brokers who have been in this business for many, many, many years and worked with many, many first time home buyers.” He has been doing first-time buyer programmes since 2002. That means what is on offer here is a map, not an approval, and a map is the thing that was missing.
“There are a lot of you who can do this right now, and nobody's just really taken the time to show you and giving you the confidence.”
Where to start
You do not have to learn sixty programmes. In Brad's words, “You do not have to learn this all in one night. It is not your job. That is our job.” The quiz below takes about two minutes and narrows the list to the ones worth a look for your situation and your county. There is nothing to buy at the end of it.
“Do you want to know exactly what you should do next? Like exactly what foot you should put in front of the other?” That is what this is for, and knowing it is what puts you, in his phrase, “in the driver's seat, in control of this.”
Want the detail rather than the argument? How down payment assistance actually works, the programmes compared side by side, and what TDHCA is and how its money is reached.