0126 2013 Differences between FARJHO, Shared Equity Mortgage and the LLC syndication for commercial properties

This is a very commonly asked question and has been addressed many times before in the blog. Here is a short recap. In short, the main difference is in the way to use leverage under the different structures.

Although both FARJHO as a new home ownership structure and the pooling of capital to make a commercial property investment both could employ the use of a simple LLC legal entity to accomplish their respective objectives, the outcomes could not be made more different due to their respective very different objectives!

In the conventional commercial real estate investment, the use of an LLC entity is to pool enough money so that the group of investors could borrow as much as possible in order to potentially achieve higher leveraged returns (or leveraged losses, it works both ways!). The objective of the use of an LLC is to shield the individual member investors in the LLC from the potential liability to the lender in the event of a default which may be caused by insufficient income cash flows from the property in the future. This conventional way to use borrowing to make real estate investments is described by a new term that I had created a while back called Pool-Borrow-Buy (PBB).

FARJHO, on the other hand, is employing a newly created alternative method under a new thinking called Borrow-Pool-Buy (BPB) to make investments in single family homes.

The advantage is that for investors who love to use leveraging for investments could still use borrowing, but only at an individual LLC member level under a FARJHO transaction, not at the group LLC or property level as how it was always done in a conventional mortgaged home ownership. As a result, FARJHO introduces a newly created social value by increasing the home occupancy stability for the renter/co-owner in a FARJHO LLC structure. This is simply because there is no mortgage, i.e. using the property as a collateral to borrow money, under a FARJHO structure and hence the home will never face the risk of a foreclosure by any lender.

Such a simple innovation in concept and practice could help us universally eliminate the foreclosure possibility in home ownership in our modern economic society, no matter where the home owners lives in the world.

As for the conventional shared equity mortgage, shared appreciation mortgage, and shared ownership mortgage, … etc. as most popularly practiced in the UK and to a small extent in Australia, although they do not use an LLC legal entity, the objective of the share equity component is still to pool enough money so that the shared owners could use that pooled money as a down payment to borrow a mortgage using the property as a collateral again to buy the home, i.e. another Pool-Borrow-Buy (PBB) method that will be subject to property repossession risks. This PBB practice in these old style shared equity mortgages is nothing different from how commercial property investors use an LLC structure to pool money, borrow and buy properties. The evil of the potential risk of foreclosure still exists. These old shared equity mortgages only introduce more lending and ownership disposal complexity without contributing much to housing affordability due to its limited acceptance by the lenders.

In FARJHO’s case, this lender’s dictatorship and the ownership complexity do not exist. Flexible and reversible shared home ownership under FARJHO could eventually be done as easily as buying and selling of a stock in a private or a publicly listed company on an exchange.

Lenders pretty soon would discover that they could easily develop a new profitable business by embracing this new “security-lending” business opportunity using LLC member interests as collateral at the member level instead to FARJHO LLC members.

For those old school mortgage lenders who would like to hang on to the old way of doing home mortgage business would also soon find out, to their pleasant surprise, the credit quality of their mortgage borrowers would be much better than before since the lesser credit borrowers may have all gone through the new equity sharing route and absorbed by using the new FARJHO structure. There seems to be no need for the lending banks to make more ill-conceived inventions such as a teaser rate or an Option-ARM to subprime borrowers any more.

It would indeed be a win-win situation for everybody.

Filed under: Economic Viewpoints, Equity Sharing, FARJHO, Housing, InvestorsAlly, Mortgage, PeoplesAlly, Borrow-Pool-Buy (BPB), Commercial property investments, FARJHO, Foreclosures, Housing finance, Pool-Borrow-Buy (PBB), Property repossessions, shared appreciation mortgage, shared equity mortgage, Shared ownership mortgage, Using LLC for real estate investment

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.

http://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/

http://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/

http://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/

Filed under: Economic Viewpoints, Equity Sharing, FARJHO, Housing, InvestorsAlly, PeoplesAlly, SwapRent, Borrow-pool-buy, BPB, BPB home financing method, Corporatize homes, Corporatizing homes, FARJHO, Foreclosure avoidance, Foreclosure elimination, Foreclosures, Home lending reform, Innovation in equity sharing, Innovation in housing finance, mortgage innovation, PBB, Pool-borrow-buy, SAM, SEM, Shared appreciation modification, shared appreciation mortgage, Shared equity modification, shared equity mortgage