Introducing the New Power. Saver Loan Program from HUD/FHA (Text Version)Brett: Hi, this is Bret Kadison with the Department of Energy. Thank you for joining us today on the webinar on FHA Power. Saver. As you know, the Department of Energy has been focused on using the recovery act to bring private capital to support energy efficiency lending as well as to support energy efficiency over all. The lynchpin to doing energy efficiency and bringing it to market right now has really been getting the capital engaged in the market to make retrofits possible on a large scale. To that end, the Department of Energy has been working with our grantees to help come up with financing programs, as you all are well aware. The Department of Energy, however, isn't alone in that. HUD/FHA are certainly. This is because reduced monthly utility bills should offset the financial burden of the new loan. HUD and FHA have been working to develop an innovative new financing tool called the Power. Saver, which is based on a similar product that FHA has right now based on Title I lending, which Stockton Williams will be talking about in a minute. Stockton Williams is with the Office of Housing and Urban Development and has been leading the charge to develop the Power. Saver product, and he is here now and he is about to walk us through a presentation on Power. Saver and we will address all questions in the end. But without further ado, I'll hand it over to Stockton. Stockton: Hi, good afternoon or good morning depending on where you are. FHA PowerSaver Mortgage Now Available. New FHA “PowerSaver” loan coming. FHA mortgage financing is an. Eliminating fixed-rate HECM loan makes no. HUD/FHA is certainly. The Power Saver loan program is a new. Introducing the New Power Saver Loan Program from HUD/FHA . Broader source: All U.S. Department of Energy.
Thank you all, everyone, for your interest in today's presentation. We understand we have a lot of you on the phone and so I will spend several minutes going through a discussion of FHA's new finance initiative for single- family home improvements called Power. Saver. But if you've got questions as I'm going, don't worry. We have plenty of time to take them all at the end. So I want to make sure we have that opportunity for discussion. Also, as you'll see as we start to go through the slides, everything that we'll discuss today is available for you all to read in even more detail on HUD's Web site on links that are posted in this presentation, so don't feel like you have to write down every single thing that we talk about today. There'll be plenty of time for follow up. I also want to start by thanking Bret Kadison and Brandon Belford from the Department of Energy who are here with me, and many other colleagues of ours at HUD at DOE. HUD and DOE have worked very closely on this initiative, on a number of other initiatives to expand home energy retrofits. And it's just a tremendous partnership that we feel terrific about and hopefully this new program will be another successful endeavor of the two agencies together. So let's get started on Power. Saver. So let's get started, and we'll go through some of this background quite quickly because I know it's very familiar to all of you. But obviously, there's a huge need and an opportunity to make single- family homes more energy efficient. It's a top priority of the Obama administration and of those of us at HUD who are obviously part of that administration. We see the opportunity in home retrofit to obviously reduce energy use and carbon emissions, but also save families money and create jobs. And so it really is a multiple- win scenario and the challenge for us is how can we scale up retrofits and make it more possible for more homeowners to do retrofits on a more cost- effective basis. As Bret said, one of the big barriers - not the only one, but one of the big ones - is a lack of financing. For most folks, coming up with the upfront capital to pay the cost of the retrofit is a real challenge. And so the FHA Power. Saver program is really designed to provide a new resource to consumers to enable them to afford to make energy improvements to their homes. So let's talk about Power. Saver. There are, as I think many of you know, a handful of options for homeowners today to access financing, to make their homes more energy efficient. There are consumer loans and credit card products. There are home equity line type of products for folks with outstanding credit and significant equity in their homes. You may be fortunate to live in an area where your utility offers you a chance to pay back a retrofit loan on your home energy bill. But for the most part, a lot of the initiatives that DOE is now helping to support and take to scale have been pretty small in the past and they haven't been widely available. One of the reasons is that the products that have been typically focused on the single- family home retrofit market haven't always been economic and viable for mainstream financial institutions to offer. So FHA's Power. Saver program is really designed to create a financing product that mainstream lending institutions will be able to offer to consumers. One of the really important features of the Power. Saver loan that we wanted to flag for everybody up front is these are typically going to be mortgage loans. There is an exception to that that we'll get to as we get to the presentation, but these will be mortgage loans and they will be mortgages that area subordinate or second position if there is an existing first mortgage on the home. So they will not supersede a first mortgage lien if there is a first mortgage lien on a home. FHA's got two goals with this program that I just wanted to make sure everybody fully understood because a Power. Saver is starting out as a pilot and we are hopeful and optimistic that it's gonna provide real value in the marketplace and if it does, and if the loans perform well as we expect they will, this potentially could be a permanent FHA program in the future. But we have to prove that it works. So we really have two goals. One is to create a mainstream mortgage product that can be offered through various kinds of traditional lending institutions resulting in low- cost financing for consumers and that we can create liquidity. In other words, the means for lenders to make more loans. As we hope the demand for homeowner retrofit financing will increase, we want to make sure there are opportunities in the secondary market for lenders who would like to continue to make loans to have the liquidity to do so. The second thing that we want to do in the Power. Saver pilot is really important, and that is to really get good data and evidence on the costs and benefits of home energy improvements. There's been a lot of study of home energy improvements over the years, but we still don't have the kind of data we need to make the case to mainstream financial institutions that retrofit financing makes a lot of sense. So we're really gonna be working hard to study what happens after retrofit loans are made. Do families realize the energy savings and the bottom- line economic benefits that we expect, and do homes appreciate in value as a result of the energy improvement? We certainly think that more energy- efficient homes should be recognized as more valuable in the market, but now that's an uncertain proposition, and in part that's because we just don't have as much data on that as we need. Now we did say a little bit about the program overall, and then we'll talk some about the details and open it up to questions. As I mentioned, the Power. Saver initiative is a two- year pilot program. So what that means is for the first two years, FHA will be working with a limited number of lenders to make Power. Saver loans available and really to evaluate how the program performs in the market and what we learn from it. So this at this pilot stage, we are looking for lenders and we are asking lending institutions. Lending institutions could be big, national banks, smaller community or regional banks, credit unions - really a wide range of financial institutions to submit expressions of interest that we'll talk about a little bit more to FHA in participating by the end of the year. Now the only real limitation on what kind of lender can participate in the program, which is an important one, is that the lender does have to be an FHA- approved Title I lender. Title I refers to one of the FHA home loan insurance programs, the basis for the Power. Saver initiative. The good news is that if a lender is not a Title I approved lending institution, but is approved under FHA's Title II program, which is the regular FHA insured mortgage that everybody knows about, and many thousands of lenders are approved to make those kinds of loans, then the process to get approved to participate in the Power. Saver program will be quite straight forward and expedited. So by the time a lender would start to participate in the program, and they will have to be approved under the FHA Title I program rules - and we can talk a little more about that toward the end - I mentioned that we're looking for lenders to step up and express an interest in helping us prove out the Power. Saver concept by the end of the year. During that period, we're also taking general public comments on the program. We love to hear from you all and others about the nuts and bolts of the Power. Saver and how we might think about making modifications or revisions to it as proposed before it becomes final. We don't have to change it, and if the general feedback from the public and participating lenders is that it looks pretty good, it probably will be a final program that looks very much like the proposed program that's out today. But we do welcome from you all, and others who might want to suggest modifications to it. Our goal is to be able to announce the final program and the participating lenders early in 2. So some key features just to kind of ground us as we turn to some more details of how the Power. Saver loans and loan insurance from the federal government will work. As I've mentioned, the Power. Saver is based on an FHA program called Title I Property Improvement. This is a long- standing, although fairly underutilized, FHA insurance program that has historically focused on home improvement. So the Title I program is really the basis - the sort of skeleton and bones of the Power.
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