Palm Beach County is offering 50 families up to $100,000 each to purchase their first homes, an opportunity that’ll be in high demand with South Florida’s hot housing market.
The Home Investment Partnership First-Time Homebuyer Program was announced Monday by the county’s Department of Housing and Economic Development. People may apply by visiting or calling 561-233-3600. The county says the applications “will be processed on a first-submitted, first-qualified, first-served basis.”
The program’s guidelines are based on income and household size. For example: A person who lives alone cannot exceed $54,550 annually. A two-person household cannot exceed $62,350 annually, a three-person household cannot exceed $70,150 and a four-person household cannot exceed $77,900. The money will help pay for acquiring a residence, rehabilitation, new construction, down payment and closing costs. The property’s purchase price cannot exceed $568,557.
“When it comes down to it, any funds we release need to go to units being built and keys in doors,” Palm Beach County Commissioner Marci Woodward said. “These are the ones I would like to get behind because we can have people moving into units in a year to 18 months.”
It’ll be a multi-step process to apply for this initiative. Program participants will be required to provide many documents, including a pre-approval letter from a mortgage lender, verification of employment and the most recent two years of tax returns.
Applicants also must attend one of eight available online orientation sessions, the first of which will be offered next week, at 10 a.m. Sept. 19. The additional seven sessions will be offered between Sept. 21 and Oct. 12.
The application period for the program will officially open at 8 a.m. Oct. 10, the date people may start applying, and it will close at 11:59 p.m. Oct. 31.
This initiative is in collaboration with the HOME Investment Partnerships Program, deemed as the “largest federal block grant to state and local governments designed exclusively to create affordable housing for low-income households,” according to the United States Department of Housing and Development.
The county implemented a similar program that began at the end of last year with the help of the State Housing Initiatives Partnership Program, where a total of $2.5 million was allocated to 100 applicants.
Such housing-aid programs provide buyers with more control than other initiatives because they are choosing the location and unit, Woodward said.
Otherwise, the burden rests on the county to complete long-term tasks like finding land, receiving development proposals and figuring out construction for those projects.
“It’s a win-win for us because it gets people into a home, and it’s a home they want to move into,” she said.
