Hurry Home Joins UC Berkeley Terner Center’s Inaugural ‘Housing Lab’ Cohort
The Housing Lab initiative, funded in part by The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, chose six ventures that represent creative approaches to solving different pieces of the housing affordability puzzle.
On September 26 the Housing Lab, a program of the Terner Center for Housing Innovation at the University of California, Berkeley, announced Hurry Home as one of six companies selected from over 135 applicants for its inaugural cohort.
The Housing Lab is the first national innovation lab exclusively focused on lowering the cost of housing, supporting ventures offering new construction methods, financial tools, and ideas to increase density that can tackle housing costs at scale.
Each of this inaugural cohort’s six companies represent a creative approach to solving different pieces of the housing affordability puzzle. The Housing Lab will seek to bolster each company with a $100k grant, “six months of intensive coaching in business model design, support in further fundraising, training in leading with an equity focus, and access to a technical network led by Carol Galante, Faculty Director of the Terner Center and former Assistant Secretary of Housing at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).”
Hurry Home, led by co-founders Jada Mclean and John Gibbons, is one of the ventures that emerged from INVANTI Cohort 1, which had the goal of starting new companies that tackle issues affecting the financial health of Americans.
Homeownership emerged as one of the most critical issues affecting the financial health of people in South Bend, being that it is still the primary way that American families build wealth and has a host of non-financial impacts including improved health and educational outcomes for the children of homeowners. Yet many people and neighborhoods are unable to pursue homeownership and benefit from these effects.
Hurry Home seeks to change that by offering a new model of home purchase. They offer a new path for renter families to own the homes banks cannot make mortgages for, while providing property investors an effortless investment vehicle with boosted returns. Through a shared ownership model, residents own their homes in 10 years by making monthly payments close to market rate rent.
Forbes writer Anne Field explained the backstory and vision behind this model in her early 2018 piece on Cohort 1:
Once the program started, cohort members began the process of interviewing elected officials, community leaders, neighborhood associations and others to pinpoint problems they could address … During the research and interview process [Jada] talked to over 200 people and discovered that one particular issue came up over and over in her discussions: Houses worth $50,000 to $80,000 were just sitting on the market, despite demand among potential buyers.
What she learned was that banks generally lost money on such mortgages. That’s because they had to go through the same amount of work required for a much more expensive house, but could only charge a capped fee too low to cover the cost of writing the mortgage. As a result, they were loath to back such deals — so only buyers who could afford to pay in cash were able to make a purchase.
Another cohort member John Gibbons also was interested in the problem. So Mclean and Gibbons teamed up to start company, named Hurry Home, to provide a way for renters to become homeowners of the houses they were living in. Investors buy the homes and buyers pay a monthly down payment, allowing them eventually to purchase the place for themselves.
To learn more about Hurry Home and Housing Lab, visit HurryHome.io and Housing Lab.co.
INVANTI is a startup generator in the Midwest.
We recruit entrepreneurial talent and provide them deep insight into the most important problems facing Americans today. We then generate new solutions and business models and ultimately build companies that matter: invanti.co
