Center served more than 18,000 homebuying clients and helped nearly 600 households to successfully avoid foreclosure.
Each summer, the Minnesota Homeownership Center crunches the numbers on clients served during the previous year. Details include not only the number of households served, but also demographic statistics including age, race, income and more. These annual reports have been compiled for many years now, and illustrate well the impact the Center has made against its mission of promoting and advancing successful homeownership in Minnesota with an emphasis on serving those facing the greatest barriers to homeownership: lower income households and communities of color.
During 2019, the Center worked with 18,539 homebuying clients and helped 596 homeowner households to successfully avoid foreclosure. On the homebuying side, 89 percent of participants would become first-time homebuyers upon purchase, and one-in-five would be the first generation of their family to own their own home. While we know anecdotally that the large majority of homebuying clients go on to successfully purchase a home (nearly half are engaging with us as a requirement of their home loan), in future years we will be able to track this number specifically and compare it with annual fluctuation in home prices and inventory, mortgage interest rates, the health of the economy and other factors. Additional key stats of note regarding homebuying clients during 2019 include the fact that 63 percent of participants were households of color, and 83 percent had household incomes in the low to moderate range for their area of residence.
On the foreclosure prevention side during 2019, the Center worked with 891 homeowners. 685 cases reached completion during 2019, with 596 successfully avoiding foreclosure – a success rate of 87 percent. According to U.S. Government statistics, each foreclosure avoided saves $79,443. Thus our work contributed to more than $47 million in avoided expenses and losses, which accrued to homeowners, lenders/servicers, local government entities and neighbors via more stable property values. As is obviously demonstrated, foreclosure prevention is in everyone’s best interest. Since 2008, the Minnesota Homeownership Center has worked with homeowners to successfully prevent more than 38,000 foreclosures – a collective financial value of more than $3 billion.
The full 2019 Consumer Services Report is available on the Center’s website here. Looking forward, the 2020 report should be the most interesting in more than a decade as we’re currently working in the most financially challenging environment since the foreclosure crisis of 2008-2009. We look forward to sharing those results with you next summer.