With 20 years of experience in real estate as an agent, developer and broker, Josie Hood is often on both sides of the selling table. Born and raised on the South Side of Chicago, Hood is now a managing real estate broker for Neighborhood Assistance Corporation of America, a nationwide non-profit organization that advocates for economic justice through homeownership and community action. She works in Chicago and elsewhere in Illinois and Indiana.
“I’ve been doing this since 2004, so I’ve been around long enough to see the crash, the rise, and the crash again. It’s cyclical,” Hood said. “Whatever’s going on in real estate, when it goes down it comes back up — you just got to stick it out.”
Hood started in 2018 as a real estate agent at NACA, which is the largest certified counseling agency in the country.
Hood spoke with Austin Weekly News about how NACA helps home buyers navigate the real estate market.
What does the real estate market look like right now?
We just came out of a seller’s market, where you could go $20,000 to $30,000 above the asking price and still not get the deal. We entered a market not too long ago where there’s just no inventory. We’re still very short of housing inventory across the country; there’s such a housing shortage.
What do you expect to see from the real estate market in the coming months and year?
What’s happening across the country is you’re getting more and more developers who are switching gears, myself included. In a lot of cities, including Chicago, there’s a housing shortage, so people are building more multi-family units. Not only are people doing more multi-families, we’re doing multi-families with different incomes. So we have some units at market rate, some affordable units and we have some low-income units. Because there’s such a shortage, a lot of the cities have funding to help with that. With those multi-families and condos, you’ll start to see more amenities with more people, like co-working spaces, because so many people work from home.
Do you work only with buyers and sellers associated with NACA?
A majority of our clients are NACA. We used to say we work exclusively with NACA buyers, but I will not say that anymore because if you sell, you may not buy with NACA. So we don’t work exclusively with NACA buyers. We do work with sellers — we offer them a discount when they sell with NACA. We occasionally have members who leave NACA and they still want us to be their agents; we’re licensed the same as everyone else. There’s nothing that any other brokerage in the state that I can’t do as a managing broker at NACA.
What services does NACA offer?
We do organic lending. We don’t look at the things traditional lenders look at in terms of credit score. Now, we don’t look at credit score, but we are going to look at your payment history, if you have bankruptcy or foreclosure, all of those things do matter. We just don’t look at the actual score.
With us, if we don’t qualify you right away, you have to be HUD-counseled. We have people that come through our program who have never saved before in their life, and they may not really have a lot of credit. If you don’t have a lot of credit, that affects your score too. They may have one credit card bill and a light bill and a cell phone bill that we have to use to qualify them. We put everybody on a plan so they have to attend a workshop.
Every two weeks, we do a home buyer workshop where we go amongst the group and we say, “Hey, this is who we are. We’re going to help you.” When we do these workshops, it’s a couple hundred people there. They’re offered a priority appointment if they work with me or my team, meaning the in-house agents — but they don’t have to. They can work with any agent they want. We always help. We make sure that people know that you are not required to work with a NACA agent, it’s just that we know the program.
And then what happens is they go through counseling. Some people may be approved in two weeks, some people may be approved in two months and some people, it may take them two years. It just depends on where they’re starting from. But we don’t tell anybody no. We may say not now, but we’re not going to say no. We get people that have been through foreclosures, they’ve been through bankruptcies, they’re going through a divorce. If you can’t get qualified right away, we put you on an action plan, and from that action plan, it is determined that it’s going to take us a certain amount of time, and we need you to do these steps, but if you do exactly what you’re told to do, and you follow that time frame, you’re going to get approved for the mortgage.
Why is the work NACA does important?
We get a lot of buyers who are the first person in their family to ever purchase a home, and a lot of times that’s just because people perish for lack of knowledge, which is what I always say. People don’t realize that there are programs out there like NACA that can help them. If you go to a traditional lender and they say, we’re looking for a 680 credit score, we want you to have 20% down, all of this criteria — everybody doesn’t have that. There are people who are on Social Security with a fixed income, or people who have gone through a divorce, or have had some hiccups in life, some foreclosures and some bankruptcies. Those people need a chance, too, and so we advocate and we fight for them. We counsel them back to health. And the people that aren’t being counseled back to health, we help them to get healthy financially.
You get some people that come back and they cry because they say, ‘I’ve never saved in my life’. And I said, ‘You know what? You just needed to not go to the coffee shop five days a week. Maybe you can just go one, right?’ or ‘You don’t need to go to the salon every week, maybe try to go once a month.’ Stop paying those little payments on those credit cards. Stop ignoring those hospital bills.
You don’t know what you don’t know. Sometimes the situation gets so helpless that they just need direction. And our buyers oftentimes do need more hand-holding. People just need to know there’s help out there. What I always saw in my workshops is, “If you got to pay somebody’s mortgage, it might as well be your own. If you can pay $1,800 a month to rent, you can purchase.”
Also, people think NACA is just for low-income people. People think you have to live in a bad neighborhood. That is so not true. You can go through NACA and be extremely well. NACA does 100% financing, so why spend that money on a downpayment, for example, when you can take it and invest or do something else with it?
What is your advice to a first time home buyer?
Even if I did not work for NACA, I would say to go check out NACA, if nothing else, for that HUD-certified training, because even if they go through that process and they decide they’re not going to go through NACA, they will certainly be on the right track, because they’re going to talk to you about savings.
Oftentimes, your first home, your first property purchase is not your dream one. But you got to start somewhere. Stop maxing those credit cards out. You need to probably start to prepare yourself six months to a year before you’re preparing yourself. A lot of times, we have to change our spending habits, because when we use our debit cards and credit cards, they make it so much easier to spend money that you don’t have because it’s just a swipe. And when you’re in the process of buying a house, those are things you got to control — the swipes — because you don’t really realize sometimes how much you spent.