In this eye-opening episode of Lykken on Lending, we’re sitting down with Rob Chrane, founder and CEO of Down Payment Resource (DPR), to reveal one of the mortgage industry’s most powerful — and underutilized — tools: Down Payment Assistance (DPA) programs.
With over 2,500 active programs and a staggering 240,000+ updates annually, DPR is transforming the way lenders, realtors, and borrowers access homeownership opportunities. Rob shares his journey from real estate to mortgage lending and explains how a single idea led to the creation of a nationally trusted platform helping thousands achieve homeownership.
From overcoming misconceptions about DPA to breaking down how lenders can implement it efficiently, this episode is packed with insights, strategy, and inspiration. If you’re in the mortgage business and you’re not leveraging DPA — you’re leaving money on the table.
[David] Listeners, we’re always trying to find ways in which we can help borrowers get into homes, and today we’re gonna be talking to a true expert in that area, his name is Rob Chrane. So good to have you here. Rob. Thanks so much for joining me.
[Rob] Thank you for having me, David. I’ve been looking forward to this.
[David] Yeah, me too. You have many decades of experience in what we call DPR or down payment assistance or down payment resources. Your company is called Down Payment Resources, if I understand correctly, right?
[Rob] That’s right.
[David] And let’s get into talking a little bit about your journey into doing what you’re doing now. You have became passionate about this topic and you explained why when we were together at the latest The Mortgage Collaborative meeting in Dallas. But I’d like to have you share that with our listening audience. What’s the why behind the passion for this?
[Rob] Yeah. First of all, I’ve been attracted drawn to the real estate business in general. Both real estate sales, but also mortgage banking. I started my first job as a realtor as barely 23 years old, had no idea what I was doing.
[David] What year was that?
[Rob] We’re the same age. So you do the math? No, it was 1974.
[David] Yeah, I started in 1973. Yeah, that’s right, I keep forgetting we’re about the right age and we should know that with a couple of gray hairs on here. But those of you are saying, oh, it’s a couple gray hairs. I don’t need to listen to them. It’s all old information. Lemme tell you, stay tuned, us old gray hairs have a lot to share and especially what Rob is gonna be sharing with us today. So you got into the mortgage industry from the real estate profession side is, what am I correct?
[Rob] That’s right. Yep, exactly.
[David] So in 1974, you became a realtor, and then you got into mortgage lending. How did that happen?
[Rob] I was as 15 years as an a 15 years in real estate total, 4years as an agent listing and selling properties, and I got my broker’s license. So for another 10 years, 11 years, I managed branch operations and I sensed somewhere deep down that I was getting restless or you get that little dis when a change is coming. But somebody else fortunately saw that before I did and it was a mortgage loan officer that called on my offices and we knew each other pretty well. And he was in calling, talking some of my agents, and he said, Hey, I have an idea. Can we go to breakfast? And I sure went to breakfast. He said at breakfast, why haven’t you ever thought about being a loan originator. And here it was right under my nose. All of those years. All those years. Yeah. But he wet my appetite and he actually said, he said I sense that you’re ready for a change. And that’s why I hope you don’t mind me telling you this, but, and I’m like, no, great. And that was really a true act of friendship because, we knew all the same people. So if he recruited me into the business. I was gonna be competing with him, he was that kind of guy. He is, he had a spirit of abundance. Yeah. I love that. That started it and that was at near the end of what was then a big refi boom. That was in around 1987, give or take and rates were, they were around eight and a half, eight and three quarters, eight and a quarter. People would call and say, Hey, should I wait? And we’re like, no, they went, they weren’t, they were 10% not that long ago, so it’s never gonna…
[David] When I started in 1973, I was originator, I didn’t know anything but increasing interest rates for the first seven years it went up from where it was at, up to, nearly 20% and then it fell down. So everyone’s saying, how did you do loans at 8%? and you go considering that they’re at 18, just a few years earlier, this looked like the best deal in the world. I remember when it fell below the double digit. Remember that yesterday? and there was an explosion of activity at that point. So you became a loan officer, became successful in it. But when did you start getting into researching down payment assistant programs?
[Rob] Yeah, so about 1992 I accepted a position as a producing branch manager. Is it okay to say names? Names?
[David] Oh, yes, please.
[Rob] So at that time it was Nations Bank, precursor to Bank of America. Yeah. And Hugh McCall was the CEO. Hugh McCall was, I hear his name a lot. Yes. Yeah. And Ken Lewis was number two. But they had really high expectations about community outreach. They had pre pressures, like every bank meeting, CRA guidelines, but they were serious. And, it didn’t matter where your market was. You could be, I was on the north side of Atlanta. That was a relatively affluent marketplace, but you were expected to go out and do outreach and turn in call reports every month.
[David] And that came as a result of the Carter area where CRA came in, the Community Reinvestment Act came in to stop redlining and really start encouraging lending in that. Now we took that to another level under Clinton. We took that to absurd levels for a period of time. ’cause we were doing fog the mirror and sign here programs, which is crazy and during some of those times, but so you then really started focusing in on that and is that where you found down payment assessments?
[Rob] I learned about what I learned about was the programs that were out there, I quickly learned about the complexity. And, you’ve got, even if you’re working a local market, you’re in a metro area, there could be dozens of programs from all kinds of different providers. How are you supposed to keep up with that? I said for years there’s gotta be a better way. So in one sense, you could say, I was motivated by laziness. I wanted an easier way to do this. And again, that was early nineties. It wasn’t until 2008 that we launched down payment resource. So I just thought this was something an idea that somebody. Needed to do, but not me, that was the last thing on my mind.
[David] Be careful when you come up with an idea. Somebody ought to do this. I had that when I started the podcast. Someone ought to have a podcast about mortgage lending. So I could go listen to it and learn more information and then find anybody doing it and that’s the definition of an entrepreneur. They see a need and they go fulfilling it. So tell us a little bit about down payment resource. I mean your company, A DPR down Payment resource. So tell us a little bit about it and what you do.
[Rob] Yeah. So what we do one way to I guess envision it is if you think about if you picture AllRegs combined with match.com for DPA.
[David] Okay, that’s a good way to put it.
[Rob] That’s an analogy that maybe cuts to the chase in terms of simplification. Now obviously it’s not as simple as it sounds, but yeah we and it’s all rolled up into an easy to use platform. So what it does is it operationalizes it streamlines and de-risks and demystifies doing down payment assistance programs because we know how complex it is and we will get into that too in a minute.
[David] Yeah it is complex, but it really started with a vision or recognizing a need that someone ought to claim. Create a database that we can all just call into or look into and on which programs are available and keep that database updated. So that really is what you really launched out to do. So when you’re doing what you’re doing, how do you make money? What’s your revenue model?
[Rob] Yeah we’re software sales, SaaS subscription license. That’s primarily our revenue model and 93% of our revenue is recurring under that model. We have some other we have some rev share agreements that there’s very small part of our income, but we’ve dipped our toe in the water of trying some different things and but it’s primarily subscription sales and our primary customers are obviously mortgage lenders of all types, credit unions, banks, IMBs and then also multiple listing services. And we actually started with multiple listing services and there’s a reason I’ll tell you about that in a [minute too, but yeah.
[David] Yeah, but one of the guys you that really shined the light. Now I met you before I met and talked to Jeff Bode at Click n’ Close, but it was really Jeff that again, shine the light on what you’re doing. I enjoyed our conversation of, oh, I believe in down payment assistance program. I believe in anything that can help people get into a home for the first time, or if they’ve been out of a home ownership for a long period of time. Any tools we can have to help them get back into home ownership is gonna help them personally and help their financials, financial status, as well as gonna help the economy. Very passionate about what you’re doing and I saw how Jeff, who we recently interviewed and talked about you, and we’ll share in that podcast, I think just before we release yours this interview. So anyway, anytime you start a business, you oftentimes have to pivot. So we all have to shift in our based on market conditions. What are some examples of areas where you’ve had to pivot with your business? DPR business.
[Rob] Yeah, absolutely and that pivot came very early on, we filed our LLC April 4th, 2008, so just a little over 17 years ago and my first and our business plan, our primary market was gonna be, of course, lenders for obvious reasons and the GSEs and so I actually, through LinkedIn found the right person to talk to at Fannie Mae, who had just been promoted to VP of Innovation and they were looking for startups and outside vendors who could do things that they couldn’t, they wanted to do or couldn’t do internally.
[David] Yeah. And who was that individual? I always like giving them a shout out. You remember her name?
[Rob] Yeah I should have looked that up because he hasn’t been there since 2008, oh, okay. But anyway, great guy and he set up a meeting and the meeting went well and people talk in the.com bus people talk about having vaporware. I had slideware meaning PowerPoint slides. That was my software. And we, he got a great group of people together in this room. I presented the concept. Everybody’s nodding their head and saying, yeah, you’re onto something. We actually tried to do this a while ago. We couldn’t get it done internally, and we talked about next steps that afternoon, I was sitting on the plane ready to take off, to come back home, feeling pretty good and then I thought, wait a minute, we just started a month ago. It’s not this, it’s not gonna be this easy. It can’t be this easy.
[David] Can’t be this easy.
[Rob] And that was 2008, so a few months later, you know what happened. And so our secondary market was gonna be the real estate point of sale. So that’s when we pivoted and said, okay, lenders are too busy fighting fires and all the things that were going in 2008 and so we pivoted and I decided having a background in the real estate business, I decided that natural distribution point would be multiple listing services because they keep listing data and the whole idea about doing it that way is, when you talk about DPA and you talk about the eligibility guidelines and how, you know who’s eligible, who qualifies for DPA and how much. So everybody’s focused on the household characteristics, income, household size, all that kind of stuff. But if you think about it, the property has to qualify because for one thing, they have very specific geographic boundaries, property types, sales price, things like that. So, we decided what if we came about it another way and filtered listing data, active residential listings, filter those and be able to identify is this home for sale? are there programs available to a buyer of this home? and if so, which programs? So we started presenting the concept to multiple listing service and said, yeah, we only need a few data points on the listing. Then, we’re gonna be able to tell your members for every active home for sale what programs they might be able to present to a buyer and help most people qualify like you’re talking about. And so thank goodness that, I won’t say it took off like a rocket, but…
[David] It started the acceleration though.
[Rob] It started the acceleration and, timing is everything. And one of the amazing things, as you know from any entrepreneurial journey is all the magical things that happen that are beyond your control to make happen, you can’t engineer. And in this case, and this has been the story for 17 years now, all kinds of, the right people at the right time. I’ve always showed up. But in starting to present this to MLSs, the CEO of NorthStar MLS, which represented Twin Cities, and his name was John Mosey and he got it right away. And when you say Twin Cities, there’s a couple of communities that refer to themselves as Twin Cities.
[Rob] Yeah. Minneapolis, St. Paul. Minneapolis, man. Yeah, that’s,
[David] I’m from Minnesota, so I thought that’s exactly where my meant, but there’s a couple other cities that say we’re the Twin Cities. You go no, you’re not. Yeah. Minnesota. Anyway, so I agree. Okay, got it.
[Rob] John. John got it and that’s where we started getting some traction in the MLS world. He was the first one to see the benefit.
[David] Yeah it’s a, I got a house up for sale right now and it’s a little bit more expensive than for that’ll work for a down payment assistance program, but it is such a tool to have, for anyone selling their home to be able to have that knowledge, to be able to say, this house qualifies for down payment assistance. One thing we talk about is we’ve talked about DPR – Down Payment Resource, that’s the name of your company, DownPayment assistance is the programs that you help accumulate. How do you stay on top of all these, Rob they’re changing constantly. It’s gotta be an argenous process to be able to do that.
[Rob] Yeah. It’s funny too, ’cause when I had that first meeting I was telling you about at Fannie Mae, somebody said, so how many programs are out there? And I didn’t know, but I figured I would get that question. So before the meeting, scribbled it down on the back of an envelope and I said, I think a couple of thousand. And everybody’s like nodding their head, yeah, I think that’s right. Today we have 2,509 programs in our database. Sometimes you just guess lucky.
[David] That’s amazing.
[Rob] And it’s not just down payment assistance. Of those 2,500 75% are down payment assistance, and then you have other types of programs, related to affordable lending that we track.
[David] It’s so important that loan officers have that. Our audience is largely loan officers. We have an increasing number of realtors listening to our podcast, thankfully, and because they’re getting benefits out of it from, as a result, these kind of conversations that we’re having today. When you look at how many changes there are in a year, how do you track them and what is the number of changes? That’s what are the number of changes?
[Rob] That’s a great question and when I started seeing that, I didn’t believe it. But we have a team of experts. So your first, your question of how, that’s the hard part. That’s why everybody doesn’t do this. Our strategy from the beginning was if you could be the trusted source, you only need one entity doing this and people will pay to get it faster, cheaper, better if somebody’s doing it that they can trust. We have a team of experts that come from mortgage banking, that come from affordable lending. They know the nuances of these programs, but it’s a manual process. It’s heavy liquid.
[David] Aren’t there APIs that do that?
[Rob] Actually we’re I say we’re the defacto API because we have APIs, but none of these agencies do and these programs are coming from over 1,500 different agencies. And we stay in touch with them on a monthly basis. And to get to your question about how many changes, last year alone, it was over 240,000 updates.
[David] 240,000 updates on your database. And you’re doing it all manually. You happen to get that out manually.
[Rob] Yeah. And we have some different techniques. It’s part of the part of the secret sauce. But I can tell you, we’re not out there scraping websites, that’s not gonna get you what you need because those 2,500 programs could have our database will has the capability of about up to 254 data points about each program. Not program has that much, but there’s a lot that lenders need to know when they’re executing on it. And then, but the crazy thing too is I just learned we had our team meeting two weeks ago and we’ve already done a hundred more than 180,000 this year through April. So the number’s going up partly because we’re gathering more data points and there’s more programs.
[David] And I was gonna say, are the programs expanding? The number of programs expanding? I’m assuming so. Especially in this market where sales are slower, it’s a buyer’s market and yet we have affordability issues. So this is a great tool. One of the things that we have seen is, or I’m actually surprised at, is how few lenders are taking advantage of these programs? are they avoiding them or they’re unaware? Is it ignorance? Or why is it that we don’t see more adoption from within the lending community?
[Rob] Yeah. I think it’s a combination of things. But if I was to sum up all the conversations we’ve had with lenders all these years about it, it’s we love the concept of down payment assistance but we struggle with the logistics and the economics. It really comes down to that for the most part. And that’s why I was saying, part of what we do is, we’re solving for a big part of that complexity and keeping it up to date and demystifying it and so that’s, I think that’s at the root of it for most lenders who choose not to. But I can tell you, and it’s blinding flash the obvious that in this kind of market every, you know. You gotta have every purchase, you gotta purchase loans and you gotta get every loan you can. And so we have more lenders coming to us saying, Hey, we’re just getting started with down payment assistance and we’re like, that’s great because you can save some of the headache and time and expense that some of the other lenders who are now customers have gone through. They had to work their way through that before there was a resource to to make it a little bit easier and I’m not, and I’m not claiming that it’s it’s not Rocket DPA yet. It’s not push button get DPA one day. One day, maybe my lifetime maybe after I’m gone.
[David] Yeah it’ll be interesting. But as you say, it’s a very labor intensive process and not everyone is as knowledgeable about as they need to be. Can you apply DPA to more qualified borrowers? there’s people that are fairly well qualified that actually can use these programs.
[Rob] Absolutely. Yep. There sometimes when we’re talking to people, you can you could see the wheels turning or the shades go down or whatever because they have this impression of, some people even say I didn’t know you, I didn’t know anybody did subprime loans anymore. This is not subprime lending.
[David] No. Yeah. That’s a important distinction. Yeah. This is not that.
[Rob] Yeah. Yeah. It’s not. Now the household income limits can get into the six figures sometimes, depending on the marketplace. There are people that are mortgage ready that still qualify for DPA, which would you rather have if you could scrape together the minimum amount of money to get an FHA loan? or a 97% conventional loan and walk away from the closing table with minimum reserves. Would you rather do that or if you’re, find out if you’re eligible for DPA and have some cash left over after closing. So I think that’s why, more people should look at it. But you’re right. There’s a misperception that this is only for super low income households and super low priced homes. Maybe homes in distressed neighborhoods And all that. But it’s everywhere. It’s not for a lot of people.
[David] Yeah, it’s, so many of this is community based and you just gotta have, that’s why I recommend people to have a relationship with you. We’ll get into how to subscribe and how they get there as we get towards the end of the interview, but, what really moves the needle as far as getting lenders involved in this?
[Rob] Yeah. I think when lenders if they don’t already know the opportunity that comes along with it, once they figure that out. They it busts some of the myths.
[David] It’s awareness, isn’t it, more than anything else. It’s just general awareness. That’s what people like. I didn’t know, I didn’t know, like a lot of things you’ve revealed since I’ve been working with you and I thought I had decent amount of knowledge. I researched it a lot when my oldest daughter was buying a house, she and her husband were buying a house and I said, you guys gotta check into these programs and that’s started realizing how verses were, and I thought I had decent knowledge and then I talked to you and I find out, my gosh, I’m a neophyte when it comes to this. So anyone listening to this. One thing, there’s a call to action afterwards. We’re gonna put at the end of the program, you’ve gotta reach out to talk to Rob or one of his people about these. Go to the website and we’re gonna give that information to you later. So on, let’s continue on. Awareness is what’s the biggest thing that moves the needle?
[Rob] Yeah, so one of the things we tell people, and I’ve just gone on and on about, 2,500 programs, 1500 providers, blah, blah, blah. Somebody pointed out to me that the lender on the other side of the desk from me who’s hearing that. I’m bragging about it because that’s amazing. They’re thinking, oh my God, I didn’t, oh my, this is worse than I thought. So we’ve learned to start saying, you do not have to boil the ocean. You don’t need to go, if you’re not doing it yet, go out and start with one or two programs. Get them under your belt.
[David] Then it’s, you really help administer the programs though, don’t you? That’s what your, what are your roles?
[Rob] We don’t administer the program.
[David] No, but administer is not the right word, but you help get them you, I’m gonna use the word expression, grease the slide. You make it easier for them to get into it, start getting there. Is that correct?
[Rob] Yeah. Starting right from finding the programs. Yeah. It’s amazing. There’s some well-paid well-paid people in lending organizations that are doing internet searches, trying to find programs in their database or in their marketplace, their footprint. And when they find them, then you gotta make a phone call and you gotta wait for somebody to, you’ve got all that work done. All that stuff. So our DPA directory, that’s the AllRegs for DPA part. Whoever responsible in a lending organization for doing that? Can you know that they, there that’s access into our database and there’s tons of filters so you could do all kinds of searches, narrow it down to the type of programs you want, where you want them, decide which ones you want to onboard and have all the information at your fingertips to just make that step to begin with, make that easier.
[David] How many homes are eligible for down payment assistance?
[Rob] Yeah, I can give you a couple of couple of stats on that. One is I mentioned we have multiple listing services and we flag the eligible listings and we certainly don’t have every analyst across the country, but across our MLSs, on average, 80% of for sale listings have programs available. 80%. 80%. Now in Southern California it might be 60%. But, and there might.
[David] Is that because of the price range? The price of the range?
[Rob] Yeah. Yeah. Although the eligibility rules, fluctuate up and down take into consideration the area meeting income and area median cost of housing, so those limits are gonna be higher in California than they are gonna be in Des Moines.
[David] What are the lending limits? What is the ceiling, the upper end? I know it varies from program to program, but just general rule of thumb.
[Rob] Yeah, I, it, is it okay if I express it as a percentage of area median income rather than
[David] Yes. Yeah. Yeah, that’s good. And you need to explain that a little bit. Yes.
[Rob] Yeah. Yeah. In the old days, a lot of the times programs were targeted for 60 to 80% of area median income. So if the area median income was a hundred thousand dollars, then it’d be $60,000 to $80,000. But now you see programs that can be. A hundred ten, a hundred twenty, a hundred thirty, 140% of are a median income. There’s some programs I’ll put in another shout out to Jeff Bode and Click n’ Close, their DPA program has no income limits and no sales price limits.
[David] No kidding.
[Rob] Yeah. So yeah, you can’t even assume that there’s gonna be a cap on it just depends on the program.
[David] That is interesting.
[Rob] Yeah. Yeah. So it’s it just, it’s, there’s so much more opportunity out there that that people don’t realize. And back to the question about how many homes too. We did several years ago, we did a study with Realty Track before they rebranded Adam Data, and we found that 86% of all US housing stock. It would be eligible for at least one program. So that one just for sale homes, that was 86% of housing stock, so it’s hits a lot.
[David] That’s significant. Yeah. And a lot of people are not aware of that. And then you start thinking about this, you’re going like, oh my gosh I know there’s, people already say, get to the point Lykken, get to the point, we want to hear what these programs are. But there’s a couple other really important parts that we need, really need to talk about. One of the things is that we hear that real estate agents don’t like to see purchase offers with DPA. Is that true? And if so, why?
[Rob] I’m sure there’s situations where that’s the case, and especially a few years ago when homes were getting 20, 30 offers the first day and half of them were all cash. But changed a little bit. Now it’s changed a lot dramatically. And again, through our relationships with MLSs, we’re communicating with their members, agents, and brokers. We train thousands of agents every year on this and on our system and the number one question we get is tell me loan officers in my market that offer these programs? Because clients need help and I don’t know anything.
[David] A differentiator loan officers, did you hear that?
[Rob] Yep. Absolutely. Absolutely. And we even tell the agents we can, we say here’s how you could find them. But ask the lenders you already have relationships with because, they may be able to do it, but they’re not advertising it. And is, you could do it, advertise it.
[David] Yeah. My gosh. Yeah I’m, I’ve got my house. I’m gonna send you my address here after we’re done to have you see if there’s a down payment assistance program in my community for the house I have on the market. But doesn’t a DPA distort the housing market by artificially increasing demand, thus driving up home prices,
[Rob] On the surface, that sounds like a logical argument. I would call that a red herring. And for one thing these programs aren’t available to every segment of the market. They are targeted for the most part. There are household income limits, so low to moderate income, maybe a little bit over moderate income and so it’s a small, it’s a, it’s just a small part of the market, so it’s, I don’t think it’s enough to impact the market. When I say small FHA borrowers FHA in HUD in their annual report to Congress every year. One of the things, one of the footnotes is how many FHA borrowers used down payment assistance last year, or the last report that came out last October was 16%.
[David] Really only 16%.
[Rob] But here’s the mindblower. We’ve done an analysis, we’ve done our database is so unique. You can, we can overlay different data sets and start to answer all kinds of questions by having information on these programs. We did with the Urban Institute, we did one, we looked at HMDA data, we looked at the 10 largest metropolitan areas in the country. HMDA data. Owner occupied purchase transactions only for a year. In those 10 markets, 79.8% of FHA borrowers were actually eligible for down payment help, but only 16% got it.
[David] Wow. See, that number 80% were available, but only 16%. Did I hear that correctly?
[Rob]Yeah, you did.
[David] It’s, that’s staggering. That’s staggering.
[Rob] Yeah and so I think that speaks to money left on the table opportunities.
[David] Oh yeah. That’s for sure. But one of the criticisms I think some people have is that the DPAs are really just another subsidiary shoulder by the taxpayers, which are already overburdened with taxes. Is this a tax program that burdens the taxpayer that.
[Rob] I don’t believe so and I’ve got two answers to that. One. One one’s my snarky answer, and the other is my facts.
[David] Start with a snarky answer. Go ahead. I the can I’m meeting you. I just don’t think you have any snarkiness in you.
[Rob] So I so the Snar, I’ve actually had this conversation with people and they’ve said that, and I said are you a homeowner? Yeah. You have a mortgage, you making payment? Yep. How do you like your mortgage interest deduction? I like it. We Are you willing to give it up? No. The mortgage interest deduction is one of the biggest sub tax subsidies. Get over it. But also, I. Not all of these programs are funded by the government.
[David] That’s good to know.
[Rob] You’ve got some, there’s some HUD money community development, block grants, home funds, stuff like that, that funds some of these programs. But a lot of ’em have other funding sources. And one example, and people don’t make this connection necessarily, but a lot of times when you talk about DPA and affordable lending, people think. Bond programs. Bond programs. Those are tax free municipal bonds. They’re bought by investors, they’re, that’s not a, that’s not a handout, that’s not the taxpayer foot in the bill. A lot of the programs are funded by TBA so basically premium pricing, but instead of the premium pricing going to the lender of the premium pricing goes to fund the down payment. So you know that’s. That’s not taxpayer money. And communities states and communities have their own economic development programs, and some of those will fund those because, to your point home ownership is good for the economy, it’s great for communities, it’s great for households. That’s why some of the programs are funded by governments and however, however they fund those. But yeah it’s, it, and most of these loans are repayable, they probably have deferred payments.
[David] Okay. So this is a loan, a down payment assistance is a loan. It’s not in, in most cases, there are some cases where it’s forgiven.
[Rob] That’s right there are true grants, so those true grants there, there’s no lien. It’s a gift from day one. And that’s about.
[David] There’s some states, like the State of Florida has one where I was up to 15,000. And if you, but if you stayed in the home, I think it was for five or seven years, it went away. But if you sold that home before, exited that home for some reason there was a certain amount of repayment. So there were some timeframes on that. Is that a common thing to see?
[Rob] It is not, certainly not uncommon. I wouldn’t say it’s the, the biggest percentage of programs. But yeah that’s a typical example of a forgivable loan. So it wasn’t a grant day one, but like you said, five years, 20% a year, each year, 20% burns off and then you get there five years and your debt’s forgiven. But a lot of them are our second mortgages. Silent soft seconds. And they’re repayable usually upon it’s due on sale.
[David] So due on sale. Okay. So when it’s a soft second, there is a lien in there. When there is a lien that stays on there and not forgiven, then it stays there. But there’s no payments associated until you go to sell the house.
[Rob] Typically not that and again, there’s all kinds of programs, which is why we do what we do, is to sort help people figure out how does this one work? How does that one work? How do they compare? But yeah so there’s some, most of ’em, and don’t, most of ’em don’t have interest rates any interest rate charge or monthly payment?
[David] Did I hear you say there’s no interest rate charge on those.
[Rob] On some of those, there’s no interest. Yeah. And there are some that have a nominal amount of interest. There’s some that have nominal monthly payments, but it’s still, it’s, if it’s not free money, it’s the free use of money. And while you build equity,
[David] It’s just, it’s like a no brainer. Anyone listening to this. Okay. I’m, I’ve asked so many questions now, how people can learn more about this. How can they get ahold of you? How can they get signed [up? What’s the cost, et cetera.
[Rob] Yeah they can, our website is downpaymentresource.com.
[David] Pretty easy to remember.
[Rob] And they could get ahold of me. They could either type the email info@downpaymentresource.com or they could put my first initial and last name, so rchrane@downpaymentresource.com can reach me. We have the pricing is, it depends so much on, on how. You know how many states the lender wants to license, an annual license fee could range from five figures. Call it $30,000 up to 10 times that, depending on the lender.
[David] And then the regions that they’re in. Yes. Yeah. But they, but you think about how, ma that sounds like, oh, that’s a substantial investment. It, but think of how many loans you can make and how long does it take you to get that back. It’s, it, what’s the ROI on this?
[Rob] Yeah, so that’s a great point. And we actually did something that I think is pretty clever. We created a an ROI calculator, and so it does two things. It’s one it’s a way to quickly figure out what’s it gonna cause me in my organization, and how many loans do I need to pay this back and it usually works out to anywhere from one and a half to two to three incremental loans per month. Per month to cover it. So everything after that is gravy and the lender can put in, the lender will make a couple of assumptions. They’re co, there’s three sliders on the calculator. We send them a link to it. It’s a webpage. We send them a link. So they say, what’s the average loan amount? What’s my average gross margin? How many states do I need? and then you do the slider for how many incremental loans a month I will get. And that’s, so it just, it’s tells them right there. And they’re using their own numbers. But there’s another aspect too that’s a little bit harder to measure in the ROI and that’s the time savings. Like I said, you can imagine the people in a lender shop. They’re trying to keep track of…
[David] Oh yeah. Trying to keep track of all this. You do all that.
[Rob] That’s, yeah. Can I name a more current mortgage company? Yes. I’m not giving away any secrets because this was a recent press release, but a new newer customer of ours, Envoy Mortgage. They graciously offered to do this press release and in the press release they said when they were doing, we offer like a free trial to make sure they understand what they’re getting and see how it helps them. But the, in their analysis they said that they realized that would save them at hiring at least one full-time equivalent at a salary of $70,000 to $80,000.
[David] Wow. Yeah. And so that fee is very affordable. And then you look at all the more the additional number of loans you can do. And it opens up all kinds of possibilities and it’s a great recruiting tool also, yeah, we’re the number one firm in down payment assistance in our community and that we serve and so join us. There’s so many advantages Rob I’m so impressed. I am. I literally am gonna send, we get done, we shut off the mic. I’m gonna send over my house to see if I can add this to my house. It’s for sale. It’s an expensive home, so I’m not sure it’ll work, but more people need to be finding out about this. Listeners like, and subscribe to this podcast, but share this podcast within your organization to your people at the top. They need to be aware of this. Rob, thank you so much for coming on and sharing all this with us today. Very exciting.
[Rob] David, it’s great talking to you. It is an honor to be on your podcast. I’ve listened to a lot of them and thank you for sharing this with your listeners.
[David] Yeah and a shout out again to Jeff Bode for really turning up the eve. What he has done with this listeners, you should see the creativity he’s put behind this program, no limits. Kind of one of the DPAs and that’s stuff that, and there’s so many things. Go listen to the podcast that we did with Jeff. We’ll put that in that interview in the show notes of this interview and I encourage you to listen to it. There’s a lot of things we can be doing out there to get more loans in. Don’t be sitting around crying around that there’s not enough business. It’s because you’re not doing the [necessary things to go get the other business. Start with DPR. This is a great company and a great group of people. Thank you, Rob.
[Rob] Thank you David.
[David] Appreciate it.
[Rob] I do too.
Important links:
About the guest:
After more than three decades of experience in real estate and mortgage finance, Rob Chrane
founded Down Payment Resource (DPR) to help the housing industry connect homebuyers to the down payment help they need.
Over the past 17 years, DPR has become the trusted industry authority for the most current information about affordable lending programs. Its solutions automate the process of matching buyers and properties to available programs, improve lender participation and increase consumer awareness. The company tracks the unique characteristics of more than
2,500 programs, helping industry professionals overcome uncertainty about eligibility
requirements, repayment terms, benefits and funding status.
In 2015, Chrane was recognized as a HousingWire Vanguard for his leadership in the housing
economy and a 2023 MBA Newslink Tech All-Star. Down Payment Resource was recognized as
one of the industry’s most innovative technology companies by HousingWire TECH100™
and Inman News as “Most Innovative New Technology.”
More recently, ICE Mortgage Technology recognized DPR as its Innovative Technology Partner of 2025 for its Encompass LOS integration..