On April 30, I’ll be moderating a panel on various ways that towns can incentivize the purchase of homes for affordable buyers. We will cover traditional down payment and closing cost assistance as well as mortgage write-downs and even post-purchase rehabilitation assistance. The Affordable Housing Professionals of New Jersey are sponsoring the event. They are currently seeking approvals for the session to count as continuing education credits for various professions.

Panelists will include lenders and organizations that are successfully working with these types of incentives. The more towns I talk to about these less traditional approaches to affordable housing , the more I learn about the perception of a high barrier to developing and implementing such a program. The goal of the session is to debunk those myths and allow everyone to “crack the code” on this approach to affordable housing.

Look for an update in the next few days with a registration link!

This Spring I have the chance to do one of my favorite things in the affordable housing world — teach more classes offered by Rutgers Center for Government Services as part of their Affordable Housing Professionals certification program. Having taught classes under this program for more than eight years, this is something I really look forward to. The class, Determining Eligibility for Affordable Housing Programs, is one of the mandatory classes in the curriculum and the students tend to be a wild mix of life-long experts looking to complete the certification, people brand new to the affordable housing world and everyone in between. A past student walked up to me at conference recently and said that my class was her favorite and the series and the one she relies on the most in her role as a Municipal Housing Liaison. If you know me, you know I’m blushing just from having typed that!

For the first time, the class is being offered south of New Brunswick! We will be over at the Lawrence Fire Academy in Mercer County on April 25 (tentative) this time. And due to the explosive popularity of this and the other classes in the program, it’s being offered twice this Spring. The other opportunity is on May 9 back up in New Brunswick.

Follow the link above if you’d like to sign up. If you are planning to attend either, feel free to leave me a comment below saying hello!

An ongoing series of tricks and short cuts you can use to help keep tabs on the affordable housing units in your portfolio.

One of the biggest violations of the affordable housing rules that a homeowner (or renter for that matter) agree to is the requirement that they use the unit as their primary residence. Leasing (or subleasing) a unit to a 3^rd party is a huge no-no – unless it’s pre-approved  by the Administrative Agent or Municipal Housing Liaison under one of the extremely rare provisions described in the Uniform Housing Affordability Controls (UHAC).

People that violate these rules tend to get very creative and deceptive in an effort to hide their scam. Some will continue to have certain mail delivered to the unit while they live elsewhere. After all, if you mailed them a letter and it gets returned to you as undeliverable by the Post Office, the jig is up! Instead, they might have an arrangement with their illegal tenant to, say, let them know when the tax bill arrives. Others will use the US Post Office’s mail forwarding service to have those same mailings forwarded to their real address. But, there’s an easy trick that you can use to outsmart people hiding behind the Post Office’s mail forwarding service.

Take a good look at some of the mail you receive this week. Anything that comes to you that is important will likely contain a phrase on the envelope that you might not even notice. “Address service requested.” These magic words set in motion yet another fantastic service by the Post Office. Here’s an image from the USPS showing all the acceptable places where this phrase can be added to the envelope.

Rather than auto-forwarding the letter under the previous service we discussed, they will send the letter back to you with a little yellow sticker that includes the recipient’s new address. How, cool is that? And now that you are armed with this new information that a) they don’t live there and b) you know where they live, you’ve got some really useful information to use in your next steps of dealing with the situation. But, we’ll save that for another article.