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MH Advantage

MH Advantage: Creating New Affordable Housing

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Coming from leading my startup AppyHour, I was recruited to join Fannie Mae's product department, focusing on affordable housing initiatives. While I was hired because the team liked that my startup taught me how to build products while being scrappy and with limited resources, Fannie Mae was an entirely different challenge.

I was used to working with a six-person team and shipping products as soon as possible. Suddenly, I was at a 6,000-person company with a much more structured organization with rules and regulations. I had to find a way to ship out minimal viable products and iterate from there. I was no longer just building a business to help millennials find the best happy hours around town. I was now responsible for helping some of the most struggling Americans achieve financial security. Those processes helped me safely accomplish that mission, and it's a mission that makes me reflect on my personal history.

My parents were war refugees from Vietnam who settled in the United States. It took many years of struggling, but they managed to start a small nail salon in their community. But they had no idea how the financial system or banking worked. Given what they saw back in the old world, the Vietnamese immigrant community is deeply distrustful of banks, and my parents adopted that same sentiment. But when it came time to buy a home, they found themselves locked out due to inconsistent credit histories.

It turned out that Fannie Mae had an experimental mortgage program in the 1990s targeting immigrant communities with a lack of credit history due to their distrust of banks. My parents were part of this program, and because of this, they were able to secure their first home with a low down payment. They used the stability of a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage to focus on and grow their nail salon business. That business blossomed and gave them the financial stability to save and fund my university education.

I knew firsthand the impact of creating a safe and affordable home loan for families. Now, I found myself in a position to pay back the product managers who set the path for my family back in the 90s. I felt it was now my turn to pay it forward, and this was what convinced me to join Fannie Mae.

It took a lot of time working with many different stakeholders. I had to balance revamping industry software platforms used by 1200 banks, each with different product release schedules. I had to ensure that the credit requirements for borrowers were strong enough actually to help borrowers, while also following strict housing regulations. I had to help the team focus on a concrete vision while different non-profits and housing advocates constantly demanded that we focus on their specific issues.

But in the end, I was able to rally support around and launch a new affordable mortgage called MH Advantage.

Manufactured Homes [more commonly known as mobile homes] serve as a source of affordable housing for many families in rural America. However, with home prices skyrocketing nationwide, many rural Americans were locked out of home ownership, even with manufactured homes. MH Advantage's key differentiator was that it allowed borrowers to put a low 3% down payment instead of the usual 5%. A 2 percentage point difference may not seem like a lot, but this meant saving thousands of dollars on a down payment for borrowers.

The launch was a success and was featured in places such as The Washington Post, Business Insider, Bankrate, and Fox Business.

I am proud to say that MH Advantage has helped many low-income families start their path towards the American Dream, the same path my family started on all those years ago. One day, I hope to meet the innovative Fannie Mae Product Managers from the 1990s. I would like to thank them for the help they gave my family and me and say that I did my best to pay it forward.

Let's get in touch!

justinphinh@gmail.com