Nehemiah Corporation of America
Nehemiah Corporation of America is a non-profit organization based in Sacramento, California specializing in homeownership, affordable housing and community development. It started in 1994 as a small organization, but grew to prominence later in the 1990s after it developed a program that allowed home buyers to make down payments on their purchases using funds that were derived from the home sellers. This program, the Nehemiah Program, became popular and was widely emulated, giving birth to what came to be known as the seller-funded down-payment assistance industry. The industry attracted criticism from U.S. federal agencies (particularly the Government Accountability Office and the Internal Revenue Service) and was ultimately shut down in 2008 by a change in federal law.
Nehemiah Corporation of America
When the Milken study was published, HUD had already commissioned its own study of seller-funded down-payment assistance programs. It was performed by the Concentrance Consulting Group and published in March 2005 (herein, the "Concentrance study"). Unlike the earlier OIG reports, the Concentrance study was based largely on a cross-sectional analysis of data collected in interviews with individual homebuyers, sellers and various types of real-estate professionals in ten metropolitan areas. Their findings corroborated some of the claims made by the nonprofit organizations, particularly that the typical recipient was a person who would not otherwise have been able to become a home owner. But the interviewees also generally corroborated some of the claims made by detractors of the programs—that sellers were routinely raising their sales prices to recoup the payment made to the nonprofit organization, and that the price increases led to higher loan costs for the buyers along with a higher risk of default on their loans. The study was not restricted to the Nehemiah Program; no particular program was singled out in the body of the report. However, the appendices gave summary results of questionnaire answers from real-estate professionals. These results indicated that the Nehemiah Program was the most active program in the ten metropolitan areas covered by the study.