0503 2012 Application Example of An Arbitrage Investment Opportunity Using the New FARJHO Home Ownership Structure

This example appears in the 2nd page of InvestorsAlly’s FARJHO marketing flyer. https://www.box.com/s/1f2e57e6f0ac5b6738f0

Application Example of An Arbitrage Investment Opportunity Using the New FARJHO Home Ownership Structure

Do you want to put your idle home equity to work so that you could earn more appreciation potential? Would you be interested in helping other less affluent residents to partially co-own homes in California?

You could use your excess home equity to co-own homes with a tenant/partial home co-owner in a new home ownership structure called FARJHO – Flexible And Reversible Joint Home Ownership. Here is a short analysis for a home of an appraised value of $2,000,000. The amount of cash out re-finance is assumed to be $1,000,000 for illustration simplicity purpose as an example.

Before                                After

Current Home Fair Market Value

$ 2,000,000               $ 2,000,000

Re-Investments in Other FARJHO Transactions

__________              $ 1,000,000

Equivalent Home Equity for Potential Appreciation

$ 2,000,000              $ 3,000,000

What about the carry, i.e. netted monthly cash flows between expense and income under the FARJHO transaction?

*         A financial arbitrage currently exists as the mortgage rates are still being artificially kept very low.

*         Between the current long term fixed rate borrowing cost (e.g. 3% – 4% for a 15-year or 30-year fixed rate mortgage) and the current market rental yield (e.g. 7% – 12%) there exists a net positive carry of 1% – 5% annually after deducting all taxes, fees and insurance cost in favor of the arbitrageurs under a typical FARJHO transaction.

*         The cost of the monthly mortgage payments will remain the same for the next 15 or 30 years but the income from monthly rental receipts will adjust every two or three years and would most likely to go even higher in the current trend.

*         The arbitrageurs who take out the cash-out re-finance now could enjoy not only the potential long-term price appreciation from much expanded home equity, they will also receive a check as additional current income every month.

*         The current low fixed mortgage rates may not last forever. A change will be coming and it would be wise to lock it in now.

The free enterprise capitalism based new home ownership structure FARJHOSM could let pure profit-driven real estate investors help other aspiring home owners partially co-own homes through the equity sharing concept without the imprudent use of any debt. FARJHOSM was created back in 2009 as a fair and equitable business method to address the free market needs of both joint property investors and aspiring home owners. Through FARJHOSM, foreclosure will no longer be a possibility going forward. It will help restore our national economic prosperity, foster the steady growth of our country’s housing industry as well as promote the on-going neighborhood stability and social harmony in local communities throughout our country!

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0402 2012 The distinguishing features of FARJHO as a new business method to implement the equity sharing concept are three-fold

The following text appears on the 1st page of InvestorsAlly’s FARJHO marketing flyer. https://www.box.com/s/1f2e57e6f0ac5b6738f0

Do you have trouble in obtaining a conventional mortgage to buy a home or any trouble in selling your existing home when potential buyers could not qualify for a mortgage to buy your home?

InvestorsAlly could help you buy a home using the new equity sharing method and/or help you sell your house much quicker because InvestorsAlly could help other potential buyers obtain both conventional mortgages at low mortgage rates when they have good credit, and if not, help them try the new alternative equity sharing method of FARJHO.

The distinguishing features of FARJHO as a new business method to implement the equity sharing concept are three-fold:

First, FARJHO allows renter/home occupier and joint property investors to own only one home at a time in order to maintain the sanctity and the freedom of the single family residence ownership. This is in sharp contrast to many community oriented equity sharing methods of Co-ops, Land Trusts, Kibbutz or Commune types of older equity sharing methods.

Second, as a brand new concept, FARJHO only allows member level debt financing, to eliminate the foreclosure possibility which exists with conventional property level debt financing as commonly used by a Shared Equity Mortgage (SEM), a Shared Appreciation Mortgage (SAM), a Shared Ownership Mortgage (SOM) or any other existing equity sharing schemes to date. In all those older business methods, the home occupiers could still get foreclosed whenever they lose their monthly income capability under those old property level financing arrangements.

Third, FARJHO provides a natural built-in buffer to conventional renting to avoid potential eviction when the tenants temporarily lose their monthly income capability. The equity stake of the renter/co-owner of the FARJHO structure could act as an optional voluntary collateral against missed monthly rent payments and therefore provides property investors with enhanced investment security through less credit risks and at the same time provides the tenants/co-owners with more home occupying stability during the rainy days in their working lives.

0819 2010 How and when to apply the new FARJHO (Flexible And Reversible Joint Home Ownership) structure?

The following information is on how to apply the new economic concept of the separation of shelter value (use value) and the investment value (economic value) of a conventional ownership of a real estate property. For more details please visit our commercial site at http://www.InvestorsAlly.com or our non-profit operations at http://www.PeoplesAlly.org to assist low income working families with increased housing affordability and enhanced neighborhood stability.

Example 1 – From aspiring home owner’s perspective:

A home seeking person who currently rents identifies a property in a geographical area of his/her choice. He/She has the 10% of the property in cash from his/her own savings and would like to seek to jointly own the property with other investors as the ideal home owning structure.

The reasons could be because that he/she may not have enough monthly income to qualify for a conventional mortgage, prefers to use the discretionary monthly income for other household expenses, does not think the property value may increase in the near term, for his/her particular religious belief that rejects the lending/borrowing concepts or simply any other personal preferences.

He/She commits to pay a pre-agreed rent to the FARJHO LLC that holds the title of the property for a specific period of time. The remaining 90% property ownership could be shared among up to nine other individual, corporate institutional or even governmental entities.

Example 2 – From joint property investor’s perspective:

A group of investors have identified and bought a particular single family house at bargain price through a syndicated LLC structure either through a short sale process or from a bank’s REO portfolio.

The syndicator of the FARJHO LLC tries to find a long term renter of this single family house in order to generate stable long term rental income. Many renters do not commit to the long term and do not usually care about the houses that they rent.

The syndicator/property manager makes an offer to a qualified renter who has the ability to pay for a small percentage of the property value and invites him/her to join the LLC as a minority stake holder/member himself/herself. Once the renter becomes the minority homeowner, he/she may intend to stay for the long term and would treasure the property and take good care of it as thought it were his/her own. In fact it is indeed his/her own, albeit partially. Although he/she does not have the economic income capability normally required to own the property entirely he/she gets to enjoy the high quality home in the neighborhood of his/her choice.

Through buy/sell agreements between LLC members, the homeowners could increase his/her equity ownership through buying existing member’s interests. Alternatively, he/she could use SwapRent contracts to do so when they become available at REIDeX in the near future. In the worst case scenario, he/she could also become a LLC member in another property in the same neighborhood whenever he/she has the increased economic ability to do so and would like to have more investment exposures.

Comparing with conventional commercial property investments, FARJHO offers property investors less worries about vacancy and expenses. The investor’s SGI (Scheduled Gross Income) equals to his/her GOI (Gross Operating Income) and also to his/her NOI (Net Operating Income) since both annual vacancy loss and expenses are most likely zero in a FARJHO structure.

Example 3 – Current application opportunities in the US:

A homeowner currently has a deeply underwater house. He/She contemplates a strategic default on his/her own house but does not like the idea of becoming an apartment renter. A buy-and-bail strategy sounds more appealing to him/her. He/She could use an all equity based FARJHO (SM) structure to become the minority owner/renter of an alternative property in his/her neighborhood before he/she begins discussions with his/her current mortgage lending bank to give up his/her existing homes in either a short sale or a flat out walkaway foreclosure.

The strategic defaulters usually could not secure another mortgage to buy another comparable home before or after he/she walks away from his/her existing home. To qualify for a new mortgage on a second home, he/she has to either have 30% net equity in his/her existing home or a very large fully documented monthly income to qualify for the mortgage payments of two homes. This is often not the case with most upside down homeowners.

An all equity based FARJHO co-ownership structure makes it convenient for a smoother transition to a long term comparable or even nicer and often more spacious home through a partial equity ownership without having to lose the homeowner status by becoming a conventional apartment or house renter. It may turn a somewhat embarrassing, face-losing event into a move-up in prestige as a partial owner of a much bigger and nicer house!

Example 4 – How to use borrowing (through Borrow-Pool-Buy, BPB method) to achieve leveraged higher investment returns under FARJHO:

In a FARJHO transaction, each individual member co-owner can decide whether to borrow for their portion or not. Cash rich investors do not have to borrow. No group decision or action to borrow together is necessary. If some of the co-owner members want to borrow individually for themselves, then the borrowing leverage (LTV) is up to each of the members individually and their individual lenders using the percentage ownership in the legal entity or the corporation as the collateral.

So let’s say a home which is worth $100,000 is being bought by a FARJHO LLC. Three members, A (20%), B (40%) and C (40%) pooled the capital to form the LLC to begin with so that the LLC had the money to buy the home. LLC did not and will not borrow any money or use the property as collateral to borrow any more money. Since neither the FARJHO LLC nor the home property itself owes any money, therefore there is no possibility of a foreclosure of the home property, ever!

Member A was supposed to be the home occupier (AHO), so he pays the LLC a market based rent every month for 3 years say in a 3-year lease as an example. It could be any lease maturity and will be determined by all the members in the LLC.

In terms of borrowing, Member A did not borrow to come up with the $20,000 since he would not want to pay a loan payment in addition to the rent payment very month. Member B does not like to be burdened by the debt service so he did not borrow to come up with the $40,000 cash either. Member C likes to punt and strongly believes in using leverage to achieve high returns. On the other hand, he does not have enough money for the required $40,000. Say he only has $10,000 in savings so he borrowed $30,000 from a lender using his 40% share or member interests in the LLC as the collateral for the lender. The leverage that Member C uses is 75% LTV of his partial member interest in the LLC and his down payment equals to 25% of the value of that partial member interest.

So in the example above, cash was used to purchase the property entirely and no borrowing using the property as the collateral was involved. Borrowing activity, if any, will be conducted only at the member level at each member’s discretion only. That is exactly the spirit of the new FARJHO concept and method to own homes, irrespective which country the homes or the home owners are located.

Example 5 – Section 8’ed FARJHO – AHOs who are Section 8 rent payment assistance recipients

A current Section 8 rental assistance payment recipient inherited $50,000 from his parents. She does not want to put it in the stock market or any mutual funds which she is not familiar with and she thinks those Wall Street stuff are too risky. She wanted to use it to buy a home but the amount is not big enough to buy in an all-cash deal. She can not use it as a down payment to borrow any mortgage because no lenders would be interested in talking to her due to her low income status. The lenders do not believe that she could generate enough monthly income to service a mortgage payment.

She heard about the new Section 8’ed FARJHO program from the local housing authority from her city. She found out that she could team up with a few free market based Joint Property Investors (JPIs) to form a FARJHO LLC to buy a home together and get the new home qualified as a Section 8 property. She could then simply apply the rent payment assistance from the existing Section 8 program as the rent payments to the FARJHO LLC. In this way she would not only just be a renter but also become a partial home owner under this FARJHO arrangement.

Since she is not restricted to renting from a multi-family apartment complex in the run-down districts only, she decides to buy a REO single family house from the Fannie Mae Homepath program in a decent neighborhood as her dream home. The cost of the house is $300,000 in a city in Southern California. In this FARJHO structure she would own 1/6 of the equity ownership of the FARJHO LLC.

The remaining balance of the house price was paid by five other free market based investors. Investor A and B who put in $30,000 each are individuals using their retirement money in their respective IRA accounts. Investor C who put in $100,000 is a local public employee pension fund. Investor D is a foreign individual and he put in $40,000. The remaining $50,000 was put in from an individual property speculator who prefers to use leverage to enhance the potential investment returns. He put down $10,000 cash and borrowed $40,000 so that he could deduct the interest expense for this investment.

The Section 8 recipient gets $1500 monthly rental assistance from HUD every month. She contributes an additional $200 so her total monthly rent paid to the FARJHO LLC is $1,700. This equates to an annual rental yield of 6.8% to all members of the investor group in the FARJHO LLC which the Section 8 recipient/renter herself is also a member of. That is her annual investment income for each year she stays in as a 1/6 interest member. In addition, she will also enjoy the financial value of 1/6 of the potential appreciation of the home property.

The free market based investors are interested in teaming up with the Section 8 recipient over other regular higher income AHOs because they might think, rightfully or wrongfully, the credit risk is much lower since the bulk of the income rent payments would come from the assistance of Uncle Sam!

08/18/2011 FARJHO – securitization of home equity vs. securitization of mortgages, SwapRent – real estate derivatives vs. mortgage derivatives

This is a short blog post to clarify the difference between the securitization of home equities (home equity securitization) and the securitization of mortgages (mortgage securitization) as well as the most commonly misunderstood term of real estate derivatives by the some people vs. what they really meant, mortgage derivatives.

The key to understand the difference is to know that the underlying assets are quite different. One is equity in nature, the other is simply a debt. While there are often blatant abuses of debt by both the borrowers and the lenders through loose credit policy and practice, it is not possible to abuse the equity in the same way.

As I mentioned before in many earlier blog posts, securitizations and financial derivatives are extensions to either equity or debt like how glass-and-steel buildings could be built upon a foundation. If the foundation is a solid rock then the chances of the building to collapse is not much a concern as it would be if the building was built on slippery quick sands. So the problem is not the building but rather the foundation where the buildings are located.

Similarly the problems are not as much with either the securitization concept or the financial derivatives rather as with whether they were built on plain equity, conservative low leveraged debt or the risky over-stretched debt conducted on a loose credit practice.

FARJHO LLC member interests are ownership in the equity form just like corporate shares listed in the stock exchanges are in the form of equity. The purpose of FARJHO is to “corporatize home equities” or to “securitize home equities” for the various economic and social benefits discussed in details in earlier posts. It has nothing to do with any debt, loans, mortgages or financial derivatives. It is definitely not in any shape or form, a securitization of mortgages again.

It is as simple as a common stock of companies but the ownership represents a fractional interest in a homeowner’s home property instead, that is made possible by this new FARJHO concept.

SwapRent, on the other hand, is a new consumer version of equity based real estate derivatives or alternatively called, property derivatives. It is not a mortgage or a mortgage derivative. It is the various forms of mortgage derivatives, credit derivatives, CDOs, Credit Default Swaps etc. that have played a major role in the financial crises within the past few years, not these new “real estate derivatives”.

Therefore, although there seems to be plenty of hostility by certain people about financial innovations, mortgage securitizations, mortgage derivatives, the responsible, intelligent and educated consumers should have no problem in understanding that FARJHO and SwapRent are not related to any of those that have caused controversies in the past. Furthermore they should be regarded more as social innovations in housing and new home ownership concepts than purely another financial innovations for facilitating investors to make money more easily. Even though they do that as well, and they do it much more efficiently.

0806 2011 From the old Pool-Borrow-Buy (PBB) equity sharing concept as in a SEM or SAM to the new Borrow-Pool-Buy (BPB) concept as in a FARJHO – A simple innovation in housing finance that could eliminate home foreclosures all together

This is one of my most popular blog topics being repeated many times but with a different way to explain this new concept each time. Many new way of explanations were in fact inspired by many questions raised by my blog viewers.

In the current practices of our Western banking industry and our real estate investment industry until today, people always use the property directly as a collateral to borrow money to purchase and own a real estate property. Tax codes were also often designed by the lawmakers to give preferential treatments to investors who have borrowed using the property as a collateral to invest.

As far as the equity sharing or shared equity concept goes, it is usually a common practice in commercial property investments rather than residential real estate investments such as home purchases. This is due to the fact that commercial investment projects are either of a larger investment amount or they are usually made for investment purposes only. Unlike commercial properties, many purchase decisions of homes are made more for sheltering reasons. Home owners could also afford to own the home directly without other investors’ help since the investment amounts are usually smaller when compared with commercial property investments. In addition, home owners usually have a natural desire to have a full control of the property.

The problem with using the property as the collateral to borrow in the old shared equity property financing method of Pool-Borrow-Buy (PBB) is that if the property value declines, it may automatically trigger a massive selling either voluntarily or involuntarily, which will feed on itself and create a market collapse. It makes no difference whether there are any equity sharing in the down payments or not. Foreclosures will happen either way and hell will break loose either way. The equity sharing concept as practiced in those old methods were therefore naturally deemed useless.

For commercial real estate market, foreclosures usually immediately create a economic problem. For home ownership or residential real estate market, it will present not only an economic problem, but also a severe social problem as well. These problems have been clearly illustrated in many of the financial crisis events within the past few years.

Therefore, sharing equity to qualify for borrowing or to borrow even more will not help much economically and contribute almost nothing socially to home ownership for our economic society. Unfortunately these SEM (Shared Equity Mortgage or Modification), SAM (Shared Appreciation Mortgage or Modification) or factional interest home equity investment schemes are exactly what have been touted by many other practitioners, governments and academics alike until today. Those structures will not solve our country’s home financing and home ownership problems socially or economically.

Governments who set up policies using those ill-advised methods (e.g. the original HAMP proposal in 2008) have only destroyed people’s confidence in the equity sharing concept to solve the problems and let the mortgage foreclosure problems deteriorate further day by day.

Why is FARJHO different? The differentiating concepts created by the new FARJHO (Flexible And Reversible Joint Home Ownership) structure are explained here below again.

First, it corporatizes home ownership one home at a time so that it will create a familiar and convenient legal vehicle for other investors to share the equity of the home property with the home occupier who is also a co-owner of the property.

Second, it offers the real estate investors a chance to use leveraging to enhance investment returns through a new Borrow-Pool-Buy (BPB) concept over the conventional Pool-Borrow-Buy (PBP) concept used in equity sharing methods which has been practiced until today for both commercial property investments and most of the other equity sharing schemes or some other proposed factional interest home equity investment and financing schemes.

By using this new BPB method, it means that the factional or partial owners in a home, either the Joint Property Investors (JPIs) or the Aspiring Home Owners (AHOs) could all have a choice to borrow against their individual member interests in the FARJHO LLC structure so that they could pool the money to purchase and own the home property in cash together. The AHO who will be the sole home occupier will simply pay the legal entity property owner FARJHO LLC a market based monthly rent as a usual tenant of the property.

When home ownership and housing finance practice have been transformed to this FARJHO way, pretty soon there would not be home foreclosures any more. It is really as simple as that! For more details on how this new BPB home financing method under FARJHO could be done, please see some of the earlier blog posts on this issue below. Thanks.

https://peoplesally.wordpress.com/2011/07/04/0704-2011-confusion-on-various-equity-sharing-schemes-why-farjho-and-swaprent-are-more-social-innovations-than-simply-financial-innovations/

https://peoplesally.wordpress.com/2011/02/28/0228-2011-farjho-opportunity-for-gaining-political-credit-for-politicians-and-the-innovation-role-for-banks-credit-unions-or-other-mortgage-lenders/

https://peoplesally.wordpress.com/2011/02/27/02272011-farjho-and-the-corporatization-of-american-homes-yes-but-only-one-home-at-a-time-and-no-corporate-financing-necessary/

0704 2011 Confusion on Various Equity Sharing Schemes – Why FARJHO and SwapRent are more social innovations than simply financial innovations.

As I once commented before, if a person is new to the French language or the Greek language, he/she probably would not be able to tell the difference between a baby gibberish vs. a poetic recital as both are “new and foreign” to him/her. It is all Greek to him/her so to speak. That seems to be the current situation with many people when they started to learn about the property equity sharing concepts and methods for the first time. Since both the concepts and the methods are all new to them, many people find it hard to tell a good method from the not-so-good or not-so-smart methods.

Shared equity “concepts” as applied to real estate property is not new. As mentioned before, the Brits have been applying them for over three decades but since the “methods” such as “shared equity mortgage” or SEM and “shared appreciation mortgage” or SAM had not been developed so well, they remain a government led socialism oriented facility so far to assist the poor in their country. Few, if any, free market based investors or participants have been interested in participating. Some British banks got black and blue bruises all over their face when they tried those primitive methods in the 80’s. There have also been some copycats of those exactly the same ideas and methods but re-bottled and promoted in the US and Australia with little success within the past few years.

What makes FARJHO stand out? Well, here is a short recap as a patriotic 4th of July message.

Three unique features make FARJHO different from all the other “equity-sharing methods” or various other “shared equity schemes” ever proposed or practiced so far.

First, the FARJHO/LLC owns one home at a time as “a single family solution”. So the goal of FARJHO is to ensure the sanctity of individual home ownership for individual citizens one home at a time under pure capitalism principles, not a defunct or hippy-ish multi-family commune, land trust, kibbutz or socialist compound concept. We do not have to turn our country into a socialism or communism society to help the poor!

Second, unlike SEM, SAM or all other shared equity schemes proposed by other academics or practiced by other private companies so far, FARJHO does not allow, or does not encourage at least (remember it is a free market democracy and no dictator allowed), any borrowing at the property level to use the entire home property as collateral. All other equity sharing methods are schemes developed to make Wall Street loan sharks even happier so that home owners and investors who gang up together can go crazy leveraging and punt again. Do some simple research through Google searches and you will quickly know what I meant. Those shared equity properties that borrow again at property level may still get foreclosed. They may make the elite minorities on Wall Street happy again but there are few, if any, social benefits in those schemes to mom and pop families on Main Street.

With FARJHO, going forward in the future, borrowing will no longer be the only way for people to own homes. There is no reason why the home property purchase could not be done using all pooled-together cash. The term “foreclosure” may even become obsolete when people started to apply borrowing only under the FARJHO proposed concepts, i.e. borrowing at the member level instead of at the property level. AHO (Aspiring Home Owners) and JPIs (Joint Property Investors) could decide to use prudent leveraging individually before they come to the table to form a FARJHO LLC to own the home. Once the FARJHO LLC is formed there is no more borrowing allowed at the property level so that banks or anybody else in the world would never be able to seize the property from the tenant/partial home owner in a FARJHO structure.

Therefore if and when any of the leverage-loving FARJHO/LLC members ever loses his or her own debt servicing capability in the future, he/she could drop off quietly individually without jeopardizing the stability and occupancy rights of the home property for AHO or the investment security any other JPI investment members who own the rest of the interests in the property. This defaulting member could simply sell the percentage member interests in the property that he/she owns to any other people in a free market or turn them over to the lenders if he/she had financed the purchase of these member interests in the beginning.

Thirdly, it provides an enhanced stability for the home occupier through a voluntary feature offered by the Aspiring Home Owners (AHOs) to the other Joint Property Investors (JPIs) to use the AHO’s equity stake in the FARJHO LLC as a buffer for JPIs to deduct the missed monthly rental payments by the AHO so that the AHO would not be evicted so easily until the buffer runs out. It therefore offers much more home occupier stability than any other rental arrangements.

In a bigger picture for the society, when lesser credit-worthy aspiring home owners have resorted to these new socially beneficial equity financing methods, what is left for the banks to lend to, using conventional mortgages, will be much better credit quality home buyers/borrowers. More free market based consumer choices will always be a win-win situation for everyone under the uninhibited capitalism. So there is no reason for those good banks or good capitalists on Wall Street to fear or feel threatened by these socially oriented new inventions.

More summaries on the social benefits of SwapRent will be described again later. Many of them could of course already be found at the SwapRent.com web site.

So today’s message on the 4th of July, 2011 is really – you can still be a capitalist to provide social benefits to the working class people in America. For doing that we may need the American people to acknowledge and accept these new social innovations under capitalism operating principles rather than keeping asking for bail-outs or hand-outs. In addition, we will need the ultimate transparency in their implementations so that the new innovations would not be stolen, hj-jacked and abused to benefit the privileged few when landed in the wrong hands by the dark forces of the elite minorities in our society again.