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
In March 2001, HUD asked its OIG to re-examine the performance of FHA insured loans that received down-payment assistance from private nonprofit organizations. The OIG's report was published in September 2002 (herein, the "OIG 2002 report"). It found that the default rate for Nehemiah-assisted loans was about double that of other FHA insured loans. It also found that, although the number of loans that had received down-payment assistance from any private nonprofit organization (not just Nehemiah) was a relatively small percentage of the entire FHA pool (at about 4%), the percentage was increasing. For the most recent six months of the OIG's data collection, those loans represented about one in seven of all new FHA insured loans. The report also found that Nehemiah-assisted loans comprised about half of all private-nonprofit-assisted loans (in the full data period).