 So I'm pleased to introduce Craig Richardson, who is the director of the Center for the Study of Economic Mobility at Winston-Salem State University. And Tracy Muguse, an officer in home financing for the Pew Charitable Trusts. Craig and Tracy, welcome. Thank you. Thank you, Julia. Yeah, so thank you, Julia, for this opportunity to talk about some of the things that we are seeing at Pew in the small mortgage market. And good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for taking time out and being here with us today. As Julia mentioned, I'm Tracy Muguse, and I'm a research officer at Pew. In 2020, we launched our home financing project where we're studying the dearth of small mortgages relative to the availability of low cost site built and manufactured homes, and the non mortgage alternative arrangements that Americans use to purchase homes when mortgages are not accessible. Now, as you know, a mortgage is the primary pathway to purchasing homes for many Americans, because few buyers really have the funds to purchase a home using cash. However, as Julia stated, many credit worthy first time buyers and low to moderate income families are failing to access the financial benefits of ownership because of a lack of small mortgages. Even in those communities, which have a significant stock of low cost homes priced at $200,000 and below. Others, including Ben Eisen, who's on our panel today, have noted this decline in the number of small mortgage mortgages that lenders have been originating over the last 20 years. Now, for instance, between 2009 and 2015, small mortgage production nationally decreased by 38%. In contrast, there was a 65% increase in origination of mortgages above 150,000. And this is even after controlling for things like rising home prices. So the number of small mortgages being used to purchase homes is disproportionately lower than the number of low cost homes that are being sold. An obvious problem with a lack of small mortgages is that it hinders affordable home ownership and wealth building opportunities for many low to moderate income families who are the ones who are most likely to use these mortgages. An additional problem that we've noted at Pew is that some of those home buyers who cannot get a mortgage often end up turning to alternative financing arrangements like your lease purchase agreements, land contracts, seller financed mortgages and personal property or chattel loans, as some call them. Now, while some have successfully converted to home ownership using these arrangements, many others have not been so likely. These arrangements often cost more and have fewer protections and mortgages, and they can strip wealth from families and communities. Pending Pew research actually shows that millions of families have used something other than a mortgage to finance the purchase of their homes with black, Hispanic and indigenous homeowners, more likely than others to use these alternative arrangements that I mentioned. So, like our colleagues at New America, at Pew, we're also trying to understand the challenges lenders and borrowers face in the small mortgage market only at the national level. For our national analysis, we've paid small mortgages at $150,000 and below. We've used on in-depth interviews with lenders in different regions and observed decline in loans at this point in the administrative data and usage of non-mortgage alternative financing that's well above $150,000. But through our research, we've identified a number of issues that impact the supply of small mortgages. These issues basically fall into two packets. They're either structural or regulatory. But when combined, they affect the incentives to originate more small mortgages. So of the structural issues, the top three highlighted in our work and echoed by those we've spoken to are fixed origination costs, loan officer compensation, and the habitability of low price properties. The cost of originating especially has been a recurring theme in our research. The fixed costs to originate a small mortgage are in some cases similar to or only slightly less than the costs to originate a higher balance mortgage. Some of the big ticket items highlighted include people, technology, compliance and appraisal fees. Origination costs are significantly higher as a share of the loan amount for small mortgages. So it becomes economically challenging for both the lender and the borrower. As I mentioned, loan office compensation is another issue that's often cited. A cap on compensation combined with commission based remuneration makes it more viable to focus on higher balance loans. But even if lenders could overcome challenges with costs and compensation, they're also having to contend with an aging inventory of low priced homes in need of repairs. So while the Urban Institutes Research has shown that there's a stock of low price properties, the available inventory is often aging and dilapidated and home repair programs are just struggling to keep up with the demand. On the other hand are the regulatory barriers. And we found these to be a little more complex. So on one hand, existing mortgage rules have been cited as sometimes feeding some of the structural issues. However, I think we'll all agree there's still an important component of managing risk and ensuring consumer safety. The real issue it appears here is the need to balance both interests in a way that promotes small mortgage production. So over the course of our project at Pew, we'll explore each of these issues to better identify which ones restrict small mortgage lending and to what extent. So that policymakers have the information that they need when they're examining the challenges to borrowers and lenders in the market and in crafting solutions at the national level. We already see opportunities to streamline regulations and business practices to improve small mortgage production by lenders while continuing to ensure proper consumer protections. Some of these changes have already been introduced, such as Fannie Mae's decision to include positive rent payment history and risk assessment and FHFA's decision to expand the use of desktop appraisals. Both of which may expand credit access and reduce the overall cost of originating small loans. In summary, I'd just like to say that the issues I've highlighted paint just part of the picture, which is made up of different experiences across the country. And of course today we're going to hear more about the Winston Salem small mortgage market and how it's affecting borrowers and lenders. So again, the folks at New America. Thank you again for having me and looking forward to hearing more on your findings. Thank you so much, Tracy for giving that nationwide sweep of this problem and thank you, Julia. It's been a real pleasure for us to work with New America as a research team together such a group of talented individuals and it's taken months and months and months to conduct this research with interviews with county officials real estate lenders. We have other experts and we certainly have a long list of people we thank in our report. Well, first of all, why Winston Salem and Forsyth County, first of all, well for those of you who are tuning in today. We don't live here our Center for the study of economic mobility was established at Winston Salem State four years ago to study a perplexing problem, which is why is the country's one of the most desirable medium sized cities Winston Salem in the US News and World Report, also near the bottom in terms of economic mobility, according to a landmark study by Ross Chetty. East Winston, particularly the black and Hispanic side of the East Winston has a huge disparity in income, wealth and economic mobility and you can see. You can see the slide that comes up how where we are with in terms of the state and with East Winston, we are located Winston Salem State on the East side of 52 and East Winston is going to be the area that we talk about today. In four years we've learned a lot, including that Winston Salem and Forsyth County are not unique. In fact, there's an enormous swath of towns and cities that faced issues that have to do with broken runs on the economic ladder. And the ability to climb these runs is harder than it used to be, particularly at the bottom. Next slide please. And looking at why Americans are having trouble climbing the economic ladder we need to look at an important aspect of how wealth is built over the generations, as well as being part of connected neighborhoods this aspect of ownership. Now for those of you living in big cities the idea of buying a home for less than $100,000 probably seems like a fantasy. Today I pulled up a home from East Winston Salem selling for $85,000 a little bungalow two bedroom one bath 1100 square feet. And so, as we can see from this map one in five owner occupied homes across United States, have a market value under $100,000. The problem is it's getting increasingly hard to finance these homes through its traditional mortgages, as Tracy has pointed out with their research and this is what the subject of this report. Though what we're doing as a really deep dive into Forsyth County in Winston Salem to really distill out what's the problem. And there are also a lot of spillover consequences. Next slide please. One aspect that we focus on is the change in the relative cost of financing a mortgage and how that has changed in the era after the financial crash in the great recession. Now one part of God Frank banking regulations was to make sure that closing costs weren't too high for these small mortgages, because we know that there are some predatory lending institutions that wrapped up a lot of hidden fees that contributed to foreclosures. And as we investigated it seems like the legislation may have gone too far the other way, because now what we have our caps on points and fees that has a schedule, and that schedule is that green line that we've produced from our report that comes straight from legislation. And as you can see the line has a lot of odd kinks and slopes. We put in a hypothetical overhead cost line this is the internal cost for processing alone. And as we've spoken with bankers that those fixed costs are fairly constant. Now when you have a regulated schedule of what banks can earn. It's pretty easy to see from this figure that there's an area where there's a lot of money to be made. And there's an area in the middle where there's a little bit of money to be made. And there's an area where there is no money to be made. And predictably what we expected to find when looking at this schedule was that we would see an exit from what's the exit from the smallest mortgage areas. And that's how help guide our questions to letters to in fact, find out is this actually happening or not. Please. Now this is a pretty staggering figure of Forsyth County. Remember East Winston that is the line on the bottom, and the rest of Forsyth County is on the top and you can see what happened through the great recession there was a collapse on both ends, but East Winston suffered a tremendous collapse in value. And the other part of this is that these values have not rebounded these are real values of housing coming from Zillow a very reputable statistical source. And what we see is that, I think our logic here is that we're, I think we have as a working hypothesis, is that if you have a huge amount of buyers in the longer can get access to mortgages, because banks are not offering them. Then the logic would tell us there's going to be a falling demand in this section of the market, which is going to lead to stagnating property markets in our city's poorest areas. All you have left for for the most part is all cash buyers, they are therefore a small fraction of the entire set of potential buyers. Not only that the cash buyers who will likely turn those into rental properties or flip them have almost no incentive to maintain these properties. In our report we show a change in the decreasing maintenance. So that's a working hypothesis that comes out of the data. Next slide please. And the result here is again stunning and shocking that for someone who invested $1,000 for every $1,000 in property in East Winston, they have lost 57% of their wealth. On the West side the wealthier side, the wider side, the medium and upper class side. In average of 29% increase since 1996. In fact, when we calculated the entire amount we found that home values in in some in East Winston fell from 3.4 billion to 1.1 billion, a 66% contraction. This is not what we think of as the American dream. Next slide please. This is where our project began the small mortgage project with New America our great partners and our own center. And the project is really about documenting why it became so difficult for lower income families to get access to credit by home. What are all those hurdles to getting a mortgage that did not used to exist. And to talk about this potentially is a link we think there's a very strong potential for links between growing wealth gaps between whites and blacks and Latino families, and the growth of concentrated poverty. For side counting Winston Salem are just one story across United States, and we think they're representative of many many cities. I don't want to hand it over to severe and Zach, who have worked extremely hard as we need authors on this report to get more in depth into the report, and talk about how this got became so difficult. Thanks, thanks so much Craig. I'm a senior policy analyst at the future of land and housing team in New America. I'm one of the lead authors on the report that was released earlier today along with my colleague Zach. And we are going to be sharing some of our findings from the report called the lending hole at the bottom of the home ownership market. Tracy and Craig really did a great job of setting up this issue, both at the national level, and also contextualizing it in a local housing market of Winston Salem and Forsyth County, North Carolina. So, what Zach and I are going to do is just walk through some of our findings specific to Forsyth County and Winston Salem from the report. We explored some of the major challenges related to the increasing difficulty for low and moderate income Americans to access home home ownership, and building upon a lot of the great existing research done by urban and Pew and some of the great reporting that's been done on this issue nationwide. We largely used Adam data and home mortgage disclosure act data, as well as findings from 31 qualitative interviews that we did with real estate agents lenders and housing leaders to better understand how national trends for small dollar loans and small dollar homes play out in a local housing market. To note, we use $100,000 as a cutoff for both small dollar loans and small dollar homes in this report meaning anything we explore the loan market below $100,000. And that cutoff is intended to convey a point below which mortgage mortgage loans are becoming increasingly less accessible, but that really varies across the country. And Tracy mentioned before, other researchers use other cutoffs as well. Next slide please. So, as Craig discussed, Winston Salem, North Carolina is in many ways a prototypical US city and that it's geographically segregated by race and income. And it's divided a large part by US route 52. And we're particularly interested in East Winston, which is a collection of neighborhoods, you can see it in the left hand chart designated by purple. And we're particularly interested in East Winston, not just because it's, it's, it's segregated from the rest of Winston Salem but it also has a high concentration of these small dollar homes homes below $100,000, as well as a price mostly of communities of color it's 80% black and Latinx, while the rest of Forsyth County is 31% black and Latinx and it also has a much lower home ownership rate and higher poverty rate relative to the rest of Forsyth County. And so Craig mentioned that across the country, affordable homes, homes under $100,000 do exist and the same is true in Forsyth County we see that 30.4 30.4% of homes are below $100,000. And like I said, most of these homes are, there's a high concentration of these homes, specifically in East Winston which you can see in the map that's from the report on the, on the right. Next slide please. So Craig and I are going to discuss three interrelated challenges in accessing home ownership for lower income families in Forsyth County. And those are the decreasing availability of small dollar loans. The catch 22 of mortgage standards or the relatively strict criteria for loan products intended for lower income families that further locks, many people out of home ownership, and then lastly the competition with all cash buyers. So all these challenges we found that what's happening in Winston Salem and Forsyth County and the housing market there really mirrors what's happening nationwide. So now I'm going to turn it over to my colleague Zach. Thank you. So my name is Zach Blizzard. I'm the research manager at CSIM and one of the authors of the report. So I'm going to begin by establishing some trends related to small dollar loans and how they have become increasingly unavailable over time. Next slide please. And one more slide. Thank you. So small dollar loans have declined substantially relative to their pre financial crisis levels, and they have not rebounded, unlike for larger loans. So this chart shows the percent difference in originations for mortgage loans which are just, you know, the number of loans extended to applicants of differing amounts relative to their level in 2007. So by 2019 loan originations for small dollar loans which are represented by the blue line were 52.5% below their 2007 level. Loans between 100 and $200,000 are also below their 2007 level but only by seven and a half percent. And then originations for loans above $200,000 have completely surpassed their pre crisis levels. So what this chart basically shows is that lenders are making fewer small dollar loans than they did prior to the financial crisis. This lower level of originations in combination with the fact that denial rates are two to three times higher for small dollar loans compared to larger ones means that it has become harder and harder to purchase homes with a small dollar mortgage loan. So with that I'll turn it back to my colleagues to be next slide please. Thanks, Eric. So, finding from our qualitative interviews we heard time and time again from agents, lenders and housing experts that one of the biggest barriers facing low income residents in accessing homeownership was the lack of affordable housing in good condition. So the in good condition part is really important since loans that are intended for lower income borrowers like federal housing administration loans or in Forsyth County affordable home ownership programs through the state or the county have higher criteria on the condition of a home. And without passing this higher criteria these sort of mortgage standards lenders won't are not likely to approve of those loans. Local FHA loans require a home meets minimum property standards for the safety, security and soundness and local loan products through the North Carolina Housing Finance Agency or Forsyth County have rigorous inspection requirements. Next slide please. So this is all of course intended to protect protect buyers from having to make repairs they can afford but it has somewhat of a perverse effect because homes under $100,000 are homes that we would typically consider affordable are often older and in need of substantial repair. That relatively poor condition of these small dollar homes in combination with these stricter standards on the condition of the home. For some of these more accessible loan products kind of creates this catch 22 in which the buyers who most need financing find it most difficult to access. Next slide please. So you can see in this map also from the report and one thing I should mention is in the report all of the all of the maps and charts that you see are interactive so you can actually hover over them and see the underlying characteristics of the census tract this is not a census or so I encourage you to take a look, but this map shows that homes that it's showing map where homes that are assessed to be in poor and fair condition, where they're located without throughout Forsyth County. And you can see here that those that are unlikely to pass inspection so those that are in poor or fair condition are clustered in East Winston. And this, you know this, I have a quote here from a real estate agent that we spoke to and they said say there's a beautiful house and someone stole the heat pump that's not going to stop someone with a conventional loan from buying a house, but it would, but it could with an FHA loan. So this is just sort of another instance of criteria designed to protect lower income borrowers unintentionally preventing them from accessing financing on homes. So I'll turn it back to Zach to talk through cash purchases. Thank you. So we're we next turn to patterns we observe related to cash purchases of homes. So most Americans need to borrow money to be able to afford home. So the use of cash can help us understand who is and who was not purchasing homes in a certain price range. Next slide please. So this chart shows the share of home purchases made in cash versus with a mortgage loan since 2001. So we can see in this chart that there has been a slow and steady increase in the prevalence of cash purchases of homes in Forsyth County but that trend leveled off and kind of remained stable since 2013. But the primary takeaway is that mortgage loans have always been more prevalent in the cash across all home purchases so today around 64% of all home transactions involve a mortgage loan and around 36% involved cash. That being said, things look very different when we look only at the market for small dollar homes. So if we can go to the next slide. Today, small dollar homes in Forsyth are three times more likely to be purchased with cash than a mortgage. So as you can see in this chart, there has been a steep and steady increase in the prevalence of cash among small dollar purchases since at least 2001, when the percentage of small dollar homes purchase with cash was just around 25%. So in the report we actually look at the geographic distribution of cash purchases across Forsyth County. And we see that there is a higher concentration of cash purchases for small dollar homes in East Winston but in general, they're fairly prevalent across the county. So cash purchasers which they tend to be investors they seem to be filling the gap by the absence of potential buyers with small dollar mortgages. And additionally, you know cash purchases are out competing those buyers that happen to have a small dollar mortgage loan simply because cash is a lot more attractive to a seller. So I'll turn things back to Sabina. Next slide. Yeah, so what does this all amount to. So over the last decade and a half we see a steady downward trend in small dollar lending, consistently higher denial rates for small loans compared to large ones. There's been an increasing prevalence of cash cash purchases on these homes. And essentially, the reason that we studied this in the first place is because it's the fact is it's squeezing low and moderate income buyers out of the market all together, even those with good credit and money for a down payment in Forsyth County and Winston Salem has relatively robust home ownership programs that lower income residents can take advantage of. And so, essentially, what we see is would a lot of would be first time homeowners are unable to get affordable homes and because of that unable to start building wealth. Instead, as Zach just pointed out we see cash buyers snapping up these relatively affordable homes and turning them, either flipping them and selling them for profit or turning them into rentals. So we hypothesize that on an individual level this is contributing to the widening of the racial homeownership gap and leading people as trace as Tracy talked about to turning them to riskier alternatives like contract for deed arrangements and the like. And we also think at the neighborhood level something we want to explore a little bit more that this is contributing to a downward spiral of disinvestment in stagnation. In short, homeownership for lower income Americans is becoming extremely difficult to access and it's not getting any easier. And there are, you know, expanding access to reasonably price small dollar mortgages would help many households in communities with lower than average homeownership rates, similar to those that we see in East Winston. So we really encourage everyone to check out the report it's on new America's website. And we would be happy to answer any questions. The next slide has Zach's in my email and then we also have a Q&A at the end of this event, where people can offer their questions for us to respond to. But with that, I'm going to turn it over to Malcolm to start our panel discussion. Thank you. Thank you so be and thank you all for joining today. My name is Malcolm Glenn and I'm a fellow with the future of land and housing program here in New America and I'm also the director of public affairs at better.com which is a digital home ownership platform that helps you go identify by and ensure their homes and this challenge is something that we've certainly grappled with. I'm at better as well. I'm really excited to dig deeper today into some of the findings of my colleagues report, which you just heard about, and hear from a bunch of people with real expertise on this topic. And I'm going to spend the next portion of our event today, I'm moderating what I suspect will be a really wonderful conversation with some really, really great insights from experts on this topic of small dollar mortgages. And so what I'm going to do is I'm going to briefly introduce each panelist and then I'll give them all a chance to go into more detail about their backgrounds in their areas of expertise. So without further ado, joining me for the panel today is Lena Zhu, who is a research research associate with the Housing Finance Policy Center at the Urban Institute. I'm Adam McClain, who is the co founder of hurry home, which is a platform focused on solving the very problem that we're talking about today. We also have been icing, who is a banking and finance reporter with the Wall Street Journal. And last but not least we're joined by Neil Parnell, who is the chief sales officer at Piedmont Federal Savings Bank. Welcome to all of our guests. And before we jump in, I will just remind the audience as to be had just said that we have a Q&A that we will be getting to in the last 15 or so minutes of our time today. So please do submit your questions around any of the folks who you've heard from today. We'll get to as many as we possibly can so we really want to hear from you all as well. So to jump into the panel discussion, maybe we can start and just go around and hear from each of our panelists to talk a bit about your specific orientation to small dollar mortgages, including the context that you've come to understand the issue. So maybe we can start with Jada and then we can go around and hear from everyone else. So Jada, feel free to kick us off. Yeah, hi everyone. Thanks for having me. So I'm Jada McClain. I am the CEO and co-founder of Hurry Home, which is a startup that aim to provide a friendly rental home for small dollar mortgages in South Bend, Indiana. So we started off really looking at what was out there, like, you know land contracts and some of the other type of really predatory mechanisms and then looked at the lack of small dollar mortgages and tried to find something that's in all of those that could serve these homeowners. Wonderful. Thank you, Jada. Thank you for all the work that you've done in this space. Ben, perhaps we can go to you next. Thanks, Malcolm. Great to be here. Thanks for having me. I am a reporter at the Wall Street Journal. I focus on banking and read a lot about the large financial institutions but also focus on the ways that consumers and individuals interact with the home and where they're excluded. So I kind of stumbled upon this issue of lack of small dollar lending, you know, actually after seeing some data on it from the Urban Institute. So glad that Lena's here. And, you know, I really raised the question for me of, you know, isn't it strange that you kind of have this this entire portion of the housing market where the obstacle to homeownership really isn't the price of the home itself. It's the lending market and that kind of piqued my interest. So I've been exploring this from a couple different angles over the last few years. Wonderful. Thanks, Ben. And I love that your introduction to this space came in part because of research from folks like Lena. So with that in mind, Lena, perhaps you can introduce yourself next. Thank you, Malcolm. Good afternoon and good morning to those who are in the West Coast. I'm a research associate with the Housing Finance Policy Center at the Urban Institute. I conduct data-driven quantitative research on policy issues related to the mortgage finance, housing policy and racial inequality. Thanks so much for having me today. And big shout out to New America and the Western Salem State University for putting out this important report on small dollar loans. Really inspiring findings. I always appreciate the opportunity like today to discuss issues around small dollar loans and this space is full of challenges as comprehensively summarized by this report. I was motivated by those challenges in 2019 Urban Institute together with Fahee and Home Ownership Council of America launched a micro mortgage demonstration project in Louisville metropolitan area, aiming at making small dollar mortgages more feasible and accessible, especially to alumni home buyers. I presented with different approaches and learned many important lessons on small dollar loans. So really looking forward in today's discussion to exchange those thoughts and learn more about challenges and solutions at both national and regional levels. Thanks for having me. Wonderful. And thank you for being here. Neil, you're up next. My name is Neil Parnell. I'm the Chief Sales Officer with Peabot Federal Savings Bank here in Western Salem, North Carolina. Been either a mortgage loan officer, retail mortgage loan officer or in this role for going on around 10 years. Really appreciate the opportunity to be a part of this panel. This is something we try to keep our ear of the ground on quite a bit to continually adjust our products to focus on being able to help alumni borrowers. So thank you again. Wonderful. Thank you all for those introductions. I think you all bring a real wealth of expertise to this issue. And I suspect that you've all probably drawn upon your respective areas of expertise in your own journeys, exploring this issue. So I want to kick us off maybe talking a little bit about some of Ben's reporting actually on this issue. I've read some of your pieces Ben, and you describe how the American financial machine works pretty well for high earning Americans with pretty traditional businesses, but perhaps not as well for borrowers on the margins so I'm hoping that maybe we can broaden the scope of that idea a little bit and talk about how this issue fits within the larger context of access to homeownership and wealth building, and how it might be impacting neighborhoods in cities and counties across the country so Ben maybe we can start with you and then we can hear from Lena as well on that question. Welcome. I, you know, one of the things I found in reporting on these issues of just access to credit generally is just the more you look the more holes there are in this in this system that otherwise works very well for affluent people and people with traditional businesses, you know recently have done some stories on access to credit on American Indian reservations and also in the manufactured housing market, but focusing specifically on small dollar loans is a particularly important kind of hole in in financing because it really cuts off an entire price range of people to to affordable housing and a lot of people who might access mortgages in this part of the market are people who would benefit from homeownership the most and benefit from kind of the wealth building characteristics that come with homeownership. Typically, so this is an issue which spent a decent amount of time looking at and one of the things I found in my reporting is, is that when you do have this kind of lack of access to small dollar lending. It's not just an impact on the individual that's locked out locked out of homeownership it really can kind of take a toll. Excuse me on an entire neighborhood. And I like this specifically in Detroit, which is a city that has a lot of affordable homes. A lot of homes that are priced under $50,000 these are houses that often need a lot of a lot of work, you know, a new roof might need, might need a new foundation all these things. But because there's no way to kind of finance the repairs finance the purchase. A lot of the neighborhoods where these homes exist really kind of sits stagnant and when you look at the city itself the city and in some parts is really staging a rebound you have neighborhoods that are kind of property values that are rising really quickly and then at the same time you have neighborhoods where they really aren't and you can kind of walk one block from one neighborhood to another or you know just a few blocks and you end up going from one place to another and so the dividing line between these mortgages is is really kind of a key effect that can kind of hold back some of these neighborhoods and in Detroit specifically we found is it often divides along racial lines Detroit's a very historically black city and it's now becoming a bit whiter but you end up having the homeownership rates for white people in the city dramatically are are they own a much larger concentration of the homes in the city than than people of color and that that is sort of one of the kind of lingering issues that that you see as a result of that. Thank you Ben and I love how you connected not just the broader financial system to this challenge around people getting access to ownership. But you also really talked about the racial component and how whether intentional or not there are real implications along racial lines for this issue as well. I just want to say to all of our panelists I might direct specific questions to one or two of you but you should certainly feel free to chime in. Even if it's not directed at you I'm sure you will have a lot to add to all of these questions. We know maybe we can hear you answer that same question how does the broader American financial machine really play a role in this limited access to homeownership for so many Americans. Sure. Thank you Ben for laying out the context and this is a really great question. Under the current CRA regulations banks receive credit if they make loans to alumni neighborhoods were alumni borrowers. But the problem we're facing here is that we not only need an income proxy but also risk proxy in this modern long landing space. All the research finds that LMI neighborhoods are not the same as minority neighborhoods and LMI borrowers are also not the same as minority borrowers. The majority of the demand for small dollar mortgages come from African American Hispanic renters. So lack of financing support to minority LMI households for small dollar loans have large implications on whitening home ownership gap as well as racial wealth gap. At both individual level as well as the neighborhood level. So more specifically at the individual level access to small dollar loans is not readily available. Forcing buyers to turn to cash land contracts or channel loans and providing advantages for speculative now owner occupants. Those low cost homes tend to be concentrated in LMI minority neighborhoods with more than 60 or 70% of their current residents as minority households who currently are less than 80% of EMI. So without access to purchase loans current minority residents won't be able to buy the property for in cash. This will deprive the home ownership opportunities for African American, Hispanic and other minority neighborhoods. Moreover, at the same time many LMI families pay more for rent than the monthly cost required to own a home. So this situation will leave them continuously rent burdened with limited options for upward mobility and home ownership opportunities. And at the same time at the neighborhood level long standing segregation disinvestment and redlining have further increased barriers to home ownership in neighborhoods of color that have low cost housing stock. Neighborhoods concentrated with large number of low cost homes tend to have very limited resource of allocation measured by economic opportunities and education resources. So without support for LMI renters they're also at the risk of displacement when their neighborhoods experience influx of investors. This will in turn form a vicious cycle in which LMI minority neighborhoods fail to maintain stability for current residents. And at the same time also fail to provide options for upward mobility and ownership opportunities for local homeowners. So I think it's a problem that needs a holistic approach. But the first step is always to raise the awareness for the public. Thank you. Yeah, thank you, Lena. I really appreciate you speaking to that. Neal, I just saw you come off mute. If you want to add something, please go ahead. Thank you, Malcolm. And I will touch on this a little bit from the lending standpoint from the banking as well. You know, looking at the current economy, there's been so much stimulus money that's been put into the economy over the last 12, 18 months. One of the most recent things that we're seeing is you've got consumers out there that have quite a bit of liquidity that they're sitting on right now. And they're looking for a yield and they can't get those yields that they're needing sitting in a bank because the interest rates are so low on deposits. So what they're doing is they're taking that money and they're driving up the prices, the asking prices and the contract prices of these homes, which is outpricing the small-dollar mortgages or small-dollar affordable homes, which is taking up that inventory. So we talk about kind of the American machine and how that works and how it's driving this. This is what this continual cycle you continue to see. And this is what's making it so difficult is folks are looking for yield and it's basically the market in itself, which is making this very difficult and causing the inventory shortage as well. So I just wanted to add that. Yeah, I appreciate that addition. And one of the things that I heard across what all of you said is that despite the fact that there have been efforts put in place to sort of exactly mitigate these type of circumstances, you know, all of these different interrelated issues have brought us to the point where we are now, and there's a level of complexity at play that makes solving these problems really challenging. That's something that I've heard from some of the folks who I've talked to who have actually been involved in the process of trying to buy a home, and it found it really difficult in part because of that complexity. Jada, maybe we can turn to you with that in mind. You're someone who actually works with potential home buyers and have done so in the past as well. I'm wondering if you can share more about who from your perspective is most impacted by this issue and whether there are aspects that we may be missing when we're examining this issue through the sort of high level lens that we always take. So Jada, I'd love to hear from you and then anyone else who'd love to chime in on that question after Jada, we'd love to hear from you too. Definitely. So it's, it's, it's so funny that that like you guys ask about the profile of the person because I often describe the profiles person as as the everyday American. So it'd be, you know, people that may have never left their hometown, you know, strong roots in their community born and raised and have no intention of leaving. The average income was about $41,000 was what we were seeing. And I mean, now we can say they're central workers, you know, they're the bus drivers, they're factory workers, they're CNAs. They're people that are like hard working people that are working full time jobs. I mean, sometimes they have their own businesses or business owners they're creating jobs. So it's like hard to say who's kind of within that group. But we know the ones that have been the most successful in our program. And I guess I can go a little deeper on our program it was, it's a, we looked at everything that was out there. And we said what can we, what can we create that aligns the incentives better. So as to not, not, you know, get a source to not limit the amount of families that are able to convert to full home ownership. We came up with a 10 year product, where we were it's a friendly rent to buy. And we realized that over a 10 year period. The families do so much to care for the house that they should get credit for that and as an as investors view that families also long term residents, save them a lot of money on property management on a turnover and other expenses so we applied some of that savings back to the family, to earn credit, and then that on top of their monthly payments was able to allow them to accrue 100% ownership in the house at the end of a 10 year period. So the families that we have had been really successful with this are again some of those everyday Americans but the ones that were totally ready to be to be a homeowner, and we determine that by you know, two years of positive track record, and utility track record, and then making sure that their monthly payment is below a 30% 30% of their gross monthly income. So because we put those thresholds in place, we had families that have even left their houses you know within four years and was able to walk away with a big lump sum of cash that is you know the beginning of generational wealth. Or they could use to maybe purchase a higher value house, or and then some people that have actually paid more than they needed to on a month to month basis to then earn the home ownership in their house. So, it's definitely not the families living on the edge. It's the families that you know have been been paying the rent and can demonstrate they've been doing that. And, and if you give them the right structure, which we kind of did with with the kind of guardrails of you know 30 no more than 30% of their income, and making sure that they had a demonstrated record which we actually took that from Urban Institute. And then there was data on if a family had more than two years of positive rental payment history it is likely that they, they will not default, and, and then they're able to really cash in on some of the city's home ownership programs, and then they even able to start to build credit, because that was definitely want something consistent is our families did not have meet the credit threshold, their average is really around that like 56580. And I love that you described, you know, the, the folks who find themselves in these situations is everyday Americans, because I think that's exactly right these people are going to work trying to provide for their families, the same profile as everyone else who has this dream of engaging in the home ownership space. Any other folks maybe want to talk to how they envision the profile or at least in their experience, who they've seen was really most impacted by these challenges. And I'll jump in their mouth from Jed, I wholeheartedly agree with you this is, this is the everyday American it's also you know we work with first time home buyers on a day in and day out basis and we're trying to educate folks to make sure exactly what you were saying, Jed is make sure you put a guardrail in place that you tell you give them an idea of what their monthly expense will be so that they one, they can comfortably make that payment and to build that equity in that home. One of the biggest things that we see a struggle and a challenge is it's making sure in this environment, it's even more complicated is making sure that we can come up with that down payment. And I will tell you for years in the Winston-Salem Market, we felt like we had a competitive affordable first time home buyer program with a 97% loan to value. And I'll tell you as we kept going it was not competitive because you continue to see that struggle with saving up that 3%. And we actually just revamped our program and our product to go to 100%. And the way we did that is we did a 90% on the value alone and we took down payment assistance, which ends up through the county and city and we utilize as many different markets as we can with that to make sure that we're able to help as many as many customers who can, especially in that little moderate income bracket, because it is so difficult to save that kind of money. We talk about the current inflation, whether it's here to stay or whether it's transitory. This is a challenge and coming up with that down payment is very, very difficult. So making sure that we utilize these down payment assistance funds is how we're going to help with that and to bridge that gap. Yeah, I just make one comment regarding the down payment. Very, very true. I think for us, our families could come up with $1500 maximum. That's it. Like they can maybe get that a part of it as a gift from other family members or maybe from the other people that were in the household, but that's it. So how we end up thinking about that when we're developing the product was like, of course, from a risk perspective, but I think for us to determine the risk was how painful is it for that family to come up with that money. And that's kind of how we thought about the amount of down payment that we would need to require from the actual family. And then we did go to the city of South Bend and was able to get a little bit more to supplement the down payment. But our main question was, is this a painful amount for the family to give us and to invest in their first home. Yeah, it feels like all of you in some way have spoken to the importance of cash in this equation and the challenge for so many families in coming up with the cash for say the down payment in order to get that small dollar alone. By contrast, of course, there are all of these people who are coming in with all cash offers and part of what exacerbates this problem is that sellers have cash buyers at their door. And so it's easy for them and the incentives are oftentimes aligned for them to just simply sell to the people who have that cash. Ben, maybe we can start with you can you comment on how you see this cash buyer phenomenon playing out and maybe what folks might be able to do to help push back against some of how this exacerbates challenges for people trying to get small dollar loans. Sure. I mean I think it's important to note that there are cash buyers across the entire housing market. I was looking at some data from a few months ago that we had in a story that something like a quarter of home buyers in April bought homes with all cash and beyond that more than half put over 20% down on their home so even even without cash, you still have people putting down huge down payments. That said, I think in the in this sort of small dollar housing market you, you have sort of this exacerbated just this exacerbated issue of what you experienced more broadly and when the home prices are low you have makes it easy for someone like an investor to come in and purchase a home with cash. Even if it's out of reach for sort of a lower income person that wants to buy the house. And so going back to the example of Detroit I mean one of the things that we found is that a lot of the homes that can be purchased for 2030 $40,000 end up getting purchased by investors. And there's sort of a long history of investors in Detroit buying up homes and using more informal arrangements to rent them out or sell them to potential buyers but you it ends up being fairly predominant in that housing market and I'm just thinking in particular of one example of a woman that we interviewed for a story. She didn't go to get a mortgage, she went to one of these investors to get a house and because she entered into a more informal arrangement it was very unclear to her what was what she was purchasing whether she was buying the house the paperwork said you're now the homeowner. Technically, the company said it was a rent with an option to buy. And it ended up being a long legal struggle, because she was sort of trapped in this informal arrangement. Eventually she did take ownership of the house. So there was a happy story at the end. But when you do have these cash buyers you end up having a lot a lot of investors who can really come into this market and I think we've seen that a lot during the pandemic with with the current housing market we have. Yeah, I appreciate that Neil, you're you work at a bank and so in some ways these cash buyers are in competition with you in some respects maybe we just love to hear your comment on what impact they have on this small dollar mortgage challenge. Thank you Malcolm. You know we see this year exactly right the competition is a day in and day out challenge we hear reports daily that in a situation where they're putting in any type of borrower or consumers putting in an offer. You're getting a multiple cash you're getting a multiple offer situation where they're they're making bids that are 510% more than asking price. And you get down to a situation where you get a several agents that have to say we need a highest and best offer and we need it within two hours and what they end up doing is is you to get a cash offer. And you take that offer or you go with with the what you feel like are the best financing terms. One thing that one thing that I did want to touch on as far as a challenge in the in the small dollar mortgage pieces is you touched in the graph one of you touched in the graph in the presentation earlier of the initial cost of originating a mortgage for for all banks. And that's kind of a standardized cost and if you look at that from that angle. That's why several lending institutions have put a put a minimum loan amount that they will offer and we go back to working with first time home buyers and making sure that we educate our buyers of where the where the lending opportunities are what banks will will not have a minimum. Our minimum is $10,000. There's not too many homes out there that $10,000 won't get won't get that mortgage that they need. But there are several instances out there where the minimum is $75 or $100,000. And that makes that very difficult. Another aspect of that is, it's from an origination standpoint. A lot of your mortgage loan officers, especially on the secondary market, they're not on salaries, they're on commission base. So they have the same energy the same time devoted on a $75,000 loan as they do a $750,000 loan. And they're they're focused based on their if they're on commission base they're going to focus on that that larger dollar loan which puts a lot of competition on that. So I did want to point that out as well. Yeah, I appreciate that thanks for that comment Neil. Again, audience members please do submit your questions we have some really great ones in the queue, and you want to get to them, and just a few minutes but before we do that I want to ask a couple of more questions to our panelists, specifically focused on solutions so we've talked a lot about kind of what the problems are, how they manifest themselves and who they affect, but I want to talk for a bit about how we can maybe find some solutions to this problem. And there's some really valuable local solutions focused on addressing these issues being implemented all across the country just two examples are the micro mortgage marketplace demonstration and Louisville and in southern Indiana, and as well as hurry home in South Bend, Indiana so Lena and Jada I'm wondering if you two could briefly describe these potential solutions and any early lessons that you've learned Lena maybe we can start with you and then turn it over to Jada. Sure Malcolm. So the, let me first through in some background so in 2019 Urban Institute collaborated with two other institutions one is like he a CDFI, and the home ownership console of America, a technical assistance advisory form. So the three institutions formed a team in 2019 to launch a micro mortgage demonstration project in Louisville metropolitan area, and we specifically targeted at three countries, Jefferson Clark and Roy counties, and this demonstration project aimed at making smaller loans more feasible and accessible. So this is just a background. And what we did is in this project with experimented with approaches, mainly targeting at three dimensions. First, expanding the enter writing criteria second reducing ancillary fees in the original in the origination process. And the third is we tried to leverage more CDF eyes and community banks to support mortgages, and more specifically in terms of expanding enter writing criteria. What we did is we allow to account for rental payment history now alternative to the traditional FICO credit score and allow borrowing of up to 100% of the cost of the home. On the DTI side, we allow DTI debt to income ratios of 45% with the ability to raise to 50% with compensate compensating factors such as sufficient cash reserves, vested retirement and rental payment history, as well as the down payment assistance allowing for a combined loan to value ratio the LTV of up to 105%. So we experimented with expanding those enter writing criteria and see how the demand goes. And on the fee side, we reduce ancillary fees in the origination process such as full appraisals title and origination fees. In this demonstration project, we allow the usage of AVMs which saves the borrowers up to $500 in fees and shortens the overall orange nation timeline. So those are the approaches we took. And we learned really important lessons throughout this entire process. I'd like to highlight to today. So the first one is on by saying we provide greater accessibility and flexibility. There's always a cost here. Traditional mortgages that can be sold in the secondary market enjoy the low financing rates available in today's environment. And a loan, a loan originator must rely on alternative funding sources to be able to offer a micro mortgage loan. So at the, at the project on site for he the CDFI was able to tap a capital source that relied on funds originating from a bond program. However, this source established our interest rate on the micro mortgage at 4.5% back then, which is higher than the market rate last year and meet the pandemic where the market experience the historically low interest rate environment. So although homeowners with non traditional credit open face higher interest rate through alternative lending sources. A rate that is perceived to be higher than the market has limited product adoption among potential home home buyers, as well as real estate agents who can be reluctant to market the program. So this means this lesson means the CDFI needs to secure more lower cost of funding to pass on a more competitive interest rate to potential home buyers, which is very challenging right now. The second lesson we learn is the need for renovation financing. So often when we say low cost homes, we say they are affordable. But in fact, they tend to be old and in need of repair were upfront costs. However, small dollar mortgage credit is very scarce for rehabs or renovation projects in older homes, which means it is harder for alumni home buyers to maintain home ownership, even if they can get approval for the purchase loan. So this means additional support is definitely needed to couple renovation financing with purchase and address and also address the appraisal gap issues in low cost market areas. So I will stop there and turn it over to Jada. Wow, that was that was amazing. So our we have some similar learnings as well with our program so our program is definitely not a mortgage. So it was a rent with a purchase option. And again, we kind of we looked for non traditional funding sources because we weren't sure that you know we would be able to to tap in to to large amounts of traditional funding sources. And we took one insight so it was we realized. Yes, a lot of these these investors in these markets are cash investors, but they weren't institutional investors. So they were these small kind of mom and pop investors, because they love these assets because of the high yield of these assets or potential high yield of this at these assets. But the big kind of single family investors that we saw like really rushed to single family investing posts, post the financial crisis. They were staying out in this part of the market, this this part of the asset class because of the volatility or the perceived volatility of the asset. So what we thought is the potentially huge pot of money that we could go after as as this investment class is for this investment, if this asset would be these single family investors, if we can make this product less less volatile. And, and we thought by making this product less volatile and still giving you know pretty good yield. So we have to validate that by putting people that wanted to own these houses and that had the intention to own these houses. We could decrease the cost basis of property management. And so, so I mean a few things worked a few things absolutely did not work. I think the hardest part for us was finding the right type of capital and or mix of capital to support this to support the affordability of this product. And I think we got close with our initial product but ideally we would have had just a capital stack that had maybe a CDFI loan from a CDFI mission aligned equity from a foundation so like MRI PRI, and then some a small amount of capital from like kind of like vanilla equity investors were and then potentially maybe like a PMI type insurance that was backed by the city or something like that. So I think it would help to to maintain one, I think it's really cool to have all these parties that are invested in the future of this neighborhood, working together, but also it would help help with the to drive the yield down that's required by the really just really to drive the yield down because now the perceived risk of this product would be would be less would be much lower. And then another point would be credit credit was always was always an issue for the residents. It was really tough to qualify in the beginning, especially because we were looking at tons of different types of documents to you to make sure to So I can see like we talked to a bunch of community banks that were doing work to provide this just just like just like Neil here, and they what they were doing is they always said that qualification was just really the longest part of the process. So because because that was a bottleneck they just couldn't even really provide the amount of loans that they wanted to provide. So I don't know if maybe a potential solution to be you know other CRA requirements that would help support some of the the manpower behind behind the qualification needed for these first time home buyers. So maybe looking to some technology that can help with with OCR and reading the documents and streamlining or even like plaid which what which we started using in connecting the family's bank accounts and quickly identifying what would be the the you know the rent the utilities and everything coming in on a month to month basis. And then another piece would be the. So there was a large amount of houses that were ready move in ready. But there also were definitely houses that were maybe a little bit under that where they may have needed that maybe 2000 to $5000 within the next year or two years to be invested. Maybe that's on a sun pump maybe that's on. I mean there's there's so many little maybe that's on new windows that's an installation like little things like this that may not have been with considered in the to be a part of the family's budget. And then how we got around this was in that initial qualification we included a force savings of $50 per month that was reserved for the family to only use on maintenance and repairs that would come up. And I think that maybe something like that could be could be considered in a more traditional product that would ensure the longevity of the actual housing and and the the affordability of liquidity to to pay for those those fixes as they came up. I think that covers most of my learnings, but thanks for thanks for having me guys. And we would just want to do I want to do one more question before we take Q&A from the audience. Maybe we can just go around and have each person answer quickly, because we do want to get to those audience questions. If there's one thing that you could change right now to improve outcomes for people looking to get small dollar mortgages. What would that thing be so we're going to just do around Robin. We'll start with Neil, then we can do Jada, Ben and then Lena. Very, very quickly. What's one thing that you would change if you could wave a magic wand and do so immediately. Neil, go ahead. Thank you. There's one thing I could change it would be to make sure that we can provide the financial education to every every buyer every homeowner every first time home buyer that's looking for it for a home for a mortgage to provide the resources to them because I don't feel like we're going to fully get the resources out as we should. No matter how, no matter how much resources financially and how much time that we volunteer to get this out I never feel like we fully get there. And that's the one thing I would do. Jada, go ahead. Yeah, I think I mean the lowest hanging fruit for me is probably to support the, the institutions that are that are actually making these. My research a few people few institutions were saying that they were doing these, but they're, they're actually not so I definitely kind of would like to shame them, but then the there's the ones that are doing these. And, and I would like to give them the resources providing the resources that they need technology whatever it is to help them bolster their efforts. I think I'm next here. I, I'm not sure I have one answer in particular but when I think about of the sort of this issue so much that goes back to kind of a historical legacy of exclusion and it's not just really small dollar mortgages but I know Jada was talking about how some of the, some of the home buyers are not necessarily prepared credit wise to to become homeowners and I think a lot of that goes back to the fact that a lot of these same neighborhoods that don't have access to credit are also underbanked and so you have some of some of the sort of larger historical issues that that need to be fixed is kind of like a baseline in order to be able to make small dollar mortgages. And if I have to say one thing then I guess it's after hearing our conversation today is to incentivize more warriors into this battleship. I guess it's just we need to realize it's a really complicated issue that needs a holistic approach with collective actions and this involve local nonprofits housing developers counselors real estate professionals, lenders and maybe even local buyers who can help potential home buyers understand the opportunity they have and how to access those resources to make it happen. So yeah, I would just say risk the awareness try to make it happen and have a collective action. Wonderful thank you all for your insights, really really valuable we are not done yet because we do have a number of audience questions that we want to get to and, of course, these questions are open to all of our panelists but I would also say to our panelists, if you feel like there is something that you'd like to add to any of these questions feel free to hop off mute because we'd love to hear from you as well. So, I'm going to start with the first question and this is for anyone who would like to answer. This comes from the audience. Is there a higher risk of predatory lending in the case of low cost housing mortgages being unavailable. Anyone have any thoughts there. Well, I'll take a stab at that I'm not sure I have any numbers per se to back it up but just in interviews with home buyers who can't get access to small dollar mortgages we have. I have found that they are, they tend to be more likely to turn towards these alternatives and I'm not sure there's one necessarily one answer about whether the alternative is predatory or not there's some there's some very good options and there's some very bad options but I have found that there are a number of specific cases where people do end up in these very complex situations and might lose the home as a result they use an alternative type of financing like like a contract for deed or such. I did hear a particular in particularly in Chicago back before the Fair Housing Act. I think it was over maybe I can't remember the exact span of years so I won't say it but kind of has he coats also covers it and a bunch of his Atlantic articles, and there's some definitely some housing warriors in Chicago that that'll definitely speak at length about it. And they, it was said to be about $4 billion was stolen from the African American community that had chosen to to engage in land contracts because of the the the cons I mean the consequences of redlining. Not alone in one community right in in Chicago, who's to say kind of how how other citizens fared across the nation. That number is massive, but I suspect shouldn't be too surprising considering the scale of of this issue that we've talked about. We can do a little bit more of a research focus question for the folks who spoke earlier. How are you measuring the quality of homes in Forsyth County, does this come from local tax assessor records somewhere else, a person from the audience asks that question. I'll take that one so that is data that's actually publicly available. You can get it from some of these larger data companies that's great. You know tax data and stuff like that but it does come from local sources that log that information and log that as tax assessment data, but but you can you can acquire that through many different means. Wonderful thank you for that sack. So, the next question is a little bit of an open question to kind of anyone who'd be interested in answering. Andrew says they would love your opinions on how to balance the need for small dollar loans with the need for habitable homes. Any thoughts. This is this is kind of a new newly developing project that we are working with currently. And what we're doing are taking homes that are in a high need of repair and working with some local nonprofits to provide the financing to purchase these homes and renovate them. And then also work with with local financial literacy programs to get these to get these homes purchased by by low to moderate income borrowers so we're just starting this project actually in our first first property now so I would love to keep you guys aware of how this goes, but we're just starting this wonderful thank you. So maybe we can turn back to some of the research we heard about earlier. So Sabeha and Zach this one's probably for you. Did you analyze the current ownership of available affordable homes in the context of your research. So we, we didn't dive too deeply into that I think that's, that's probably going to be an area for a deeper dive for maybe some follow up research. I mean we looked into what percentage of those affordable home stock is owned by investors using our the particular data source that we've had. The percentage of the percentage is perhaps I was expecting at the outset I don't have that number on hand. But that's definitely an area we'd like to do more follow up research on that's a great question. And I'll just add. So we looked at, you know, ownership, kind of, we use sort of cash as a proxy for ownership of buyers not of existing existing affordable housing stock, but another sort of area for deeper dive is the presence of institutional investors which I know that Jada mentioned, and looking at the, you know, there's obviously a lot of a lot of interest in this topic with wall street and hedge hedge funds interest in real estate investments recently and so we have looked a little bit and did a lot of qualitative research on the presence of institutional investors and really trying to tease out who is a large investor versus sort of those more small mom and pop investors. And some from some of my research, I've, by, you know, comparing where where small mom and pop investors are versus the institutional guys. It seems that of the investment properties in this range, or in both the full range of single family investment, about 90% of them under the 200,000 value would be small mom and pop so owning less than 10 properties versus anything above the, I can't exactly remember the threshold but I want to say it's probably a 350, or maybe 300 plus, it would be like, again, like crazy like maybe 70% owned by by the single, the institutional guys that really gobbled those up since the financial crisis, when they kind of went on a huge spree. data, while I have you just a quick question for you from an audience member out of curiosity how many home buyers has hurry home helped and how large is the current lending portfolio. Pretty pretty small so we've only helped about 15 families of which now we have maybe three of them that are homeowners of their house. I think we've we had some really cool cases where you know some of them are in self employed. And they had been living in their house for nine years, plus, and we came in and help them purchase the house and in, in three years they, they finished purchasing all. So really you can tell like these are, these are high quality bars. And then we've had one woman actually recently, she wanted to leave her house so we sold it, and she walked away with $15,000, which is just it's like money she would, she would never see otherwise. And so yeah I think the limitations for us is is the capital like finding capital that is mission aligned enough that's not going to push us to be too unaffordable for for the home buyers, because finding that that balance between yield and and affordability, honestly has been been really really tough. I don't know if it's really great to hear about the impact of your work and those examples I think are exactly why we're so pleased to see you working in this space. We just have about five minutes left so I'm going to pose one more question to all of our speakers today and anyone who feels so inclined should feel free to jump in. And this question again from the audience is, in what ways are lenders actively deconstructing discriminatory practices that have been created in large part, the challenges of these small dollar homes. Anyone have any thoughts about what lenders are doing to push back against these challenges particularly the discriminatory components that have exacerbated a lot of these challenges, the floor is open. And one thing that are several lenders are going away from the commission based compensation of more zone officers going to salary based. And I will tell you that's that's the way our entire model is this salary based to make sure that we're able to help everyone needs help. And we're not putting any type of favor to them. Another thing is as we talked earlier, continue to look for down payment assistance. That continues to be a key data touched on one issue that we didn't touch a lot on is the appraisal issue. And looking for and looking for several different avenues between the local counties and municipalities to one look for down payment assistance but also look for funding to breach that gap between purchase prices and the appraisals. And we're starting to see a little bit of success with that, but we've got to continue looking for that and continue to not take no for an answer. So few ideas. Thanks. Thanks for that Neil and I'll just echo what you said, and this comes in large part from my perspective, working it better where we, like you said have made sure that our loan officers are not working on commission. So there's more alignment between the incentives of the customer and the incentives of the loan officers. I love that folks have talked about down payment assistance over the course of our time together. I think that is a very underutilized space and we've spent a lot of time, I'm talking to lawmakers and regulators about the importance of continuing to emphasize and market these down payment assistance programs to folks. And I'm also really pleased that you talked about appraisals. It better we have a really wonderful appraisal expert, woman named Jillian white, who's done a great deal of extensive research over the last many months and years about how we can make what has historically a very homogenous industry that hasn't taken into account a whole lot of input from outsiders. How can we make that industry a little bit more thoughtful about some of those discriminatory practices that you all have mentioned so I think those are really great examples but speaking as someone who has a foot in the industry I think our industry has a lot more to do. I'm appreciative of that question and my hope is that the next time we have a convening like this there will be a lot more inputs from industry players about the work that we can do to push back against some of those discriminatory practices. So with that, I just want to say thank you to all of our panelists and speakers. You all have been really, really fantastic and your insights have been just exceedingly valuable and I know will help continue to enliven the research and the conversation around this topic. Before we leave, I'm going to pass it back to my colleague Yulia, who's going to close us out today. Thank you all so much. Thank you Malcolm and thank you to all of the panelists and presenters for a really rich discussion I have a feeling that this will not be the last we hear of this topic, there's clearly so much more that needs to be done. So for now I would like to thank all of you to the audience. Please take a look at the report that came out today and it should be the link to it should be on the bottom right of your screen and wishing everybody a lovely rest of your afternoon.