Here below are two case scenarios taken from the http://FARJHO.com site. It illustrates the value propositions of FARJHO fairly well I think.
1. Example Case for Aspiring Home Owners (AHO)
Jennifer is looking to purchase a house in Houston, Texas. She has identified a property in a nice neighborhood of her choice. The listing price of the property is $360,000.
Jennifer has $72,000 in cash as the 20% down payment for a conventional home mortgage. However, for whatever reasons, no lender is interested in lending to her at the moment. She does not want to lose the opportunity to purchase the house as a dream home and she no longer wants to continue to rent an apartment or even a single family house without benefiting from the potential rise of house prices since everyone on TV news seems to be talking about a housing market recovery these days.
She understands the new business method of FARJHO using the old property equity sharing concept could be something suitable for her situation. After doing her own research she realizes that by being a partial owner to own a home through equity sharing she would no longer be able to get the entire leveraged returns as she could have by using a conventional mortgage to own a home. She would only be able to get the percentage of the potential price appreciation of the percentage of ownership that she has in the home property.
On the other hand, she would also lose only the portion of the potential property value depreciation of her percentage ownership when prices do not turn out to go up as most people would expect. She thought that these basic shared equity financial arrangements was fair and she knows she could always buy more units of investment in home equity either in her own home property or in other people’s home equity in the future when she has accumulated more savings or gets an big bonus from her job. Whether she will actually do that will become a pure investment decision at that time.
Meanwhile, as a tenant and partial owner of the home property that she will occupy, she would enjoy much more security and stability under the FARJHO LLC that she would negotiate with the potential joint property investors on a pure free market basis. She does not need any charitable preferential treatments, guarantees or any handout assistance from the government.
Jennifer signs up at FARJHO.com and launches a FARJHO funding campaign project for one month. Since she already has the $72,000, She would only need to raise $288,000. She decides to raise the fund through a handful of crowd investors. Upon securing the investment commitments from the potential investors, she gets assistance from the company to form a FARJHO LLC to acquire the property that she had identified. After the purchase is complete, she starts to move in and pays rent to the FARJHO LLC that she partially owns with the other joint property investors.
2. Example Case for Existing Home Owners (EHO)
Robert, Amy and their children have lived in a beautiful house in a nice neighborhood in Souther California for the last 20 years. Their house is currently worth about $500,000 as determined in a BPO analysis conducted by a real estate agent’s office that they know well.
Robert and Amy have a mortgage on the house with an outstanding balance of $300,000. That means they have about $200,000 in home equity in their house which equates to 40% of the house value.
Robert and Amy’s oldest son David was going to attend college after the summer. They would need to prepare about $100,000 for him to attend college for the next four years. They decided to tap into the home equity of their house.
They looked into the possibility of obtaining a home equity line of credit. However, they do not have sufficient income to support a credit line of $100,000. Even if they do, Robert and Amy do not feel comfortable to add another monthly debt service commitment to their current monthly expense budget and bear the risk of a potential foreclosure in case Robert loses his job.
They do not want to sell the house in order to tap into the home equity that they have in the home property and they definitely would not want to move away from the family house which has a lot of sentimental value to them.
Robert and Amy went on-line and discovered the homeowners social networking portal WeHomeowners.com and its sister crowdfunding portal FARJHO.com which became operational in 2013. They opened a free member account and uploaded some nice photos of their home property to initiate a crowdfunding project to raise $400,000.
Of the total amount raised, $300,000 was meant to pay off the outstanding balance of their existing home mortgage. They did it through forming a FARJHO LLC structure where they would keep $100,000 as the 20% home equity in the house together with other joint property investors which contributed the remaining 80% of $400,000.
After the FARJHO LLC has acquired the title of the home property from Robert and Amy, they started to pay a pre-agreed market rent to the FARJHO LLC of which they are a 20% co-owner with the other investors who had contributed the $400,000.
After all the dust had settled, Robert and Amy were left with the cash of $100,000 that they needed to put aside for their son to start his comfortable and secure four-year college life.
Robert and Amy know that if they end up with more cash in their hands in the future from either daily savings, Robert’s year end bonus from his job or even Amy’s diligent weekly lottery tickets buying activities, they could always become investors themselves any time to flexibly and reversibly buy some more home equity units either in their own house again and in other people’s homes through FARJHO.com but that would really become purely another investment decision at that time.
After a few years, Robert and Amy indeed have accumulated more cash. However, they did not feel a need to buy into more home equity of their own house any more since they have already had the full 100% use of the home property. Why bother?
Nobody could kick them out as long as they continue to pay the monthly rent to the FARJHO LLC that they themselves partially own. They are not obligated to have this new cash get stuck back in the house again, although that could always remain an option to them.
Furthermore in the eyes of their family and friends, they still enjoy the prestige of being a homeowner. They can’t think of a reason why to put this new money back into their own house again. In fact, there could be many other alternatives for them to consider to put these money into a much better use.
They have finally started to understand what it really means that FARJHO could separate the shelter value away from the management of the investment value of owning a home.
After their son David graduated from college, Robert and Amy decided to use that cash to help David purchase a condo in New York City where David had obtained a job.
Filed under: Crowdfunding, Economic Viewpoints, Equity Sharing, FARJHO, Housing, InvestorsAlly, Mortgage, PeoplesAlly, Equity Sharing, FARJHO, Housing finance, shared appreciation mortgage, shared equity mortgage, Shared ownership mortgage, WeHomeowners
Innovation Trio: SwapRent, FARJHO & TARELV 