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MH Advantage

MH Advantage: Creating 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 turned out to be an entirely different challenge.

I was used to working with a 7 person team and shipping products as soon as possible. Suddenly I was now at a 7,000 person company where there was a much more structured organization with rules and regulations. I couldn't just ship out minimal viable products and iterate from there, and for good reason. 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 deeply resonates with my own personal history.

My parents were war refugees from Vietnam and 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. The Vietnamese immigrant community is deeply distrustful of banks given what they saw back in the old world, 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 during that time Fannie Mae had an experimental mortgage program back in the 1990s targeting immigrant communities that had 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 and grow their nail salon business. That business blossomed and gave them the financial stability to save and later 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 90's. I felt it was now my turn to pay it forward, and it was what convinced me to join Fannie Mae.

It took a lot of time working with many different stakeholders. I found myself having to balance revamping industry software platforms used by 1200 different banks with each bank having different product release schedules. I had to ensure that the credit requirements for borrowers were strong enough to actually 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 were constantly demanding 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. But with home prices skyrocketing nationwide, many rural Americans were finding themselves locked out of home ownership, even with manufactured homes. MH Advantage 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 on 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, very much 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 myself, and to say that I did my best to pay it forward.

Let's get in touch!

justintsn10@gmail.com

Justin Hinh | Product Manager‍