State Down Payment Help is 35 Days Late

The gang from Sell for 1 Percent, joined by Jody Vermillion of Roo-Off Mortgage, breaks down a critical delay in Ohio’s down payment assistance program. While the state’s OFA program is an option, it’s currently adding up to 35 days to closing timelines due to bottlenecks. Jody reveals a compelling alternative called the HomeNow program—it offers a full 5% in assistance, has more flexible credit and debt ratio requirements, and avoids the seven-year residency rule tied to OFA funds. For Columbus homebuyers needing assistance, this alternative could be the key to closing on time without getting caught in state-level delays.

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Full Transcript

Hey there, everyone. Jaime with Sell for 1 Percent joined, as usual, by the gang. Head broker Dave Barlow and Jaysen Barlow.

And we have Jody Vermillion at Roo-Off Mortgage here with us today to talk about interest rates. It’s July 23rd, 2025. 2026, but that’s all right.

Oh, boy. Doesn’t time fly. And Vermillion Lending at Roo-Off.

Yes. You don’t have your big VL hat on today. VLT.

Where’s that VL? There she goes. The Jody Vermillion with Roo-Off Mortgage. 26 years in the business.

My office is located in Hilliard. I live in Dublin, and I know a lot about lending. And she heads over to the northwest end of Columbus for dinner most nights.

Sometimes. If I work late, we’re not cooking. What if you don’t even work late? Depends on my day.

I have to be careful. My wife watches these. What if you don’t work? Oh, no.

Oh, boy. He’s in trouble now. Here to give a market update.

Thank you, Jaime, for getting us back on the rails. Yes. Yes.

So war in Iran, peace in the Middle East. Don’t really know which way it’s going here. Is it affecting interest rates? What are you seeing out there, Jody? We’re not seeing rates come down at all.

I don’t think that’s going to happen probably until 2027. So rates are still decent in the whole scheme of things. If you actually go and look at historical rates, you know, chat GPT, that thing, look it up.

I mean, it’ll show you. I mean, when I bought my first home, it was like around 6%. I mean, we’re like around 6.25, 6.5 right now.

I mean, you can buy down a rate and that sort of thing as well. But it’s still a great time to buy. I mean, there’s a lot of listings on the market.

How many are listed at this time? Over 500? 5,936. Ah, that’s better than it’s been in a long time. So, so lots of opportunity, I would say.

And how do you feel that the pricing on homes are in central Ohio at this time? Terrible. Yeah. Depends on, yeah, most of my sellers are crazy.

No, I’m kidding. I mean, you know, I, you know, right now, Jody, like the median days on markets around 35. The average is up around 70.

We were trending a little bit higher. It’s coming back down. And so some of these are priced aggressively and they sell in one, two days.

Some of them are overpriced and they sell in 70 days. And that’s where you get that 35 day median. So, you know, for the most part, I think things are, are pretty healthy right now.

Like in 6,000 houses, we sell what, dad? Around 3,000 a month, 2,800 a month, and 3,200. So I mean, you got two months supply, so it’s still a seller’s market, but not like it was during COVID when you had a thousand houses for sale and everything sold in two hours. Yeah.

I think it’s part of the strategy that I coach my buyers. You know, you gotta be working with people that actually know what they’re doing. So if you have a property, let’s say they need, you know, closing costs from the seller.

Let’s say they’re doing down payment assistance, that kind of thing. And we need to be looking at homes that have time on market. So that’s one of the coaching things is like, okay, we’re going to go in and low ball an offer.

I’m like, well, that’s not going to happen here, but if this is what you need to do, this is what you need to look for, time on market with a property. So it’s not such a bad thing, you know? No, I think it’s nice and healthy right now. It’s, I mean, I think this is way better than what it was when it was, like I said, like a thousand houses for sale.

The bidding awards were a little bit nuts and it was great to be a realtor then. I mean, every seller thought I was a genius, but I sold the house in like two and a half hours. But this is, I think, a much more sustainable market right now.

Yeah. Our average close days for Roohoff is actually 16. It’s, it seems most of my deals seem to go pretty quick.

I’m not getting any contracts that are over 30 days at this point. So we’re still… I was saying that you guys, when you get the contract to your closing dates, 16 days.

As a company, our average is 16. Business days? Correct. Yeah.

So about three weeks. Yeah. I mean, if it’s a special kind of program, I always, you know, dial in and communicate, believe it or not, with our realtor partners, that sort of thing.

But if it’s a special kind of loan that warrants more days, that’s a communication that you have prior to. But yeah, on an average, we’re running 16. That’s not good.

You’re not like calling day before closing and saying, by the way, this is an OFA loan and they’re backed up 35 days. So, I mean, I find myself updating the lenders on OFA turn times right now, which is crazy. Well, literally, so OFA, it’s not their job to let everybody know that they’ve bottlenecked themselves, you know what I mean? But they do put out their turn times and they do put out information on what day the loan was submitted.

The files they’re working through. Correct. Yeah.

I’ve learned a lot about this in the last three weeks. So my job, I mean, we literally sent out an update to a bunch of referral partners that we have. You might have received the email letting everyone know what’s going on and that we do have a solution.

So hopefully people pay attention to it because, I mean, you can literally, you know, if you negotiate a contract, you’ve got a closing date, let’s say the seller has a backup offer, you can lose the deal. You can lose this property that you fell in love with. So if you’re not paying attention and you’re not being proactive with your client and what they need, you know, in order to keep this property intact for this closing date, you might lose out, you know, on a transaction.

So I’ve reached out to everybody I was working with. I flipped three files over to HomeNow because it’s a pretty good program. Rates are better than OFA.

You know, you can stretch the debt ratio. It’s 5% instead of 3.5% for an FHA loan. So that kind of opportunity to present it to be like, well, you’re probably going to refinance and the next year or two anyway, do a conventional load and try to get rid of your mortgage insurance anyway.

So it’s a good alternative. And that’s an internal product with Roo-Off? It is. Yeah.

I mean, it’s a regular FHA loan. It just comes with a second. Well, that’s the standard OFA is a second.

Well, it doesn’t have, the thing it doesn’t have, OFA, like I said earlier, it, oh, but we weren’t, so OFA has limitations. So you have to keep the property for seven years or pay the money back. Right.

Your debt ratio, if you’re in between 650 score is what you need is a 650 score. 650 to 679, your max debt ratio is 44.9. If your credit score is 680 and higher, then you can go up to 49.9.

And this Home Now program, you can go up to 55% debt ratio and you only need a 600 score. So there’s limitations, you know, you don’t have to keep the property for a period of time with Home Now as OFA, again, you know, seven years is the, the amount of time you have to keep your property. And how much will OFA give us for down payment assistance versus? For an FHA loan, it’s three and a half percent.

For conventional, it’s only three, whereas it used to be an option of two and a half or five. Right. Percent.

Mm-hmm. And what is your guys’s? Five. So just straight up five.

Five percent. And you’re saying I don’t have to keep the house for a certain period of time? No, I mean, if you’re looking to refinance for FHA loans, you have to wait a year. Right.

But as far as having to keep the home for seven years like OFA, you don’t have to do that. Okay. Yeah.

That’s pretty good. Yeah. So I think it’s a great alternative.

I mean, like I said, I’ve just flipped, I think, three to four. I think we’re looking at a fourth one over to that at this point as a better alternative and they can keep their house and not lose it. Does that say in your 16-day closing time frame? We can close those fast.

Yeah. It’s just like a regular FHA loan. So yeah, there’s nothing crazy.

It’s not the additional 35 days that OFA’s tacking on now? Oh, no, no, no. Yeah. Like I said, I just grabbed one from a different lender that didn’t have the alternative or wasn’t presenting it, wasn’t paying attention to it or any of that, and I reached out to the agent.

I’m like, hey, just doing my regular follow-up. Where’s this person? Oh, they went into contract and blah, blah, blah. I’m like, hold on a minute.

I helped fix this guy’s credit. I’ve been in touch with him. I followed up with him every week.

How’d that happen? Anyway, at the end of the day, I now have the loan, and we’re taking him home now and getting him closed on time, and he’s happy. I thought you were going to get the old Dear John letter. No.

Thanks for all you did for us, Jody. Right. Fixing my credit and all the things.

It’s really good when it happens when … I’ve been doing this for a long time. I built a reputation over time.

People know that I do what I say I’m going to do. They know I do my job, do my diligence, checking income, assets, all the things. It’s really bad when you are working on a weekend just like you guys do at the grocery store, run home, get on my computer, issue this pre-approval, call the listing agent, talk to them about my buyer, how strong they are, all the things, sing the praises and all the things, and then they go use another lender.

I get them into contract, and then they skip. That’s the worst. Well, you can go to Stone’s and have a nice dinner and a cocktail and release all that energy.

No. No, I send my sharpshooter. No, I’m just kidding.

There you go. There you go. Yeah.

There you go. That’s all good. What I’m seeing out there, if anybody cares, gas prices are way the hell up there.

What are you seeing out there, Dave? It’s way the hell up there. I’ve been seeing 330, 329, I think BJ’s up here on 23 was 309 or something, and now it’s back up to 399. Yeah.

Yeah. I was going to say, what are you talking about? Weeks ago, it would say it’s about $4 right now. It was like two weeks ago.

Things were settling in a little bit. We were starting to see things, and all of a sudden- Yeah, but now the Houthis are blocking the straight. Yeah, we got all this escalation going on again.

I was looking at the market here this morning at 9.30 when it opened, and there was a giant dump with the S&P just fell off a cliff. One of the things, Dad, I was listening to was the Fed didn’t hike rates, and they’re in this blackout period where they can’t talk. But if you look at the 10-year, the two-year, and the three-month, it is like they raised rates with how they’ve adjusted the last couple of weeks, and it’s because of this conflict.

The Fed ended up getting exactly what they wanted, and they didn’t have to raise rates. The bond market did all the dirty work and the heavy lifting. Yeah, I think- It’s very interesting.

It’s all priced in. A wait-and-see type attitude, and now we’re kind of seeing that you have this escalation. I just keep coming back that November 2nd is coming pretty quick, and they’ve got to get this thing wrapped up, or it’s going to be ugly November 2nd, because people’s pocketbooks, they just don’t want to put up with $4 gas.

That was one of the reasons Trump got into office, because you were paying $5 gas. So we’ll see, but my barometer is always looking at those gas prices, and especially I’ve got to fill up about every other day. And so when you see a tank of gas go from 60 to 90, that’s a big difference.

And a lot of people out there, they take their discretionary income out of their pocket. And we’ve talked about this before in the past, but for the most part, the United States is kind of fat and happy. But when you start dipping into their McDonald’s money, it’s Katy bar the door.

And I think that’s what you’re kind of seeing. We’re seeing a lot. We stay in front of our pass-close database, too, and try to take their temperature from time to time.

And we do have a lot of cash-out refinance folks, too, that inflation has really taken a toll on their finances. And even look at car loans. I’m seeing car loans that are like $750, $850 a month for a car.

Oh, it’s crazy. It’s insane. And it’s like, well, take a car loan, a few credit cards, some student loans, and all the things.

I’ve got people tapping into their equity to pay off this blended debt that they’ve got because, I mean, they could save $800 a month by just refinancing and cashing out. Yeah, that’s one thing that I dealt with when my car got totaled, and then I went from having no car payment, trying to get a million miles on my Honda, to then, boom, like you said, it’s like a $780 payment. It’s like, I feel like I should be driving a much nicer car for $780 a month.

Right. I used to be a Mercedes. Yeah.

Like, what the hell? My dad, and I see it now that I’m getting older, used to talk about, the price of that car was more than I paid for my first house. And then, now I’m starting to see that the price of that car is more than what I paid for my first house. Jay, your first condo was, what, $70-something thousand? Got a foreclosure for $80,000.

$80,000? Yep. And so, in your car, what was your house payment? My house payment, I was thinking about it the other day, my house payment was like $650, but then I had condo fees on top of that. But the, I mean, my first car was $500.

I used to roll up to Waterson High School, my $500 Ford Contour, my subwoofer, and my water glass. It’s like, my car payments are more than my car. Yeah.

Yeah. Wow. I’ve really made it.

I’ve really become somebody. Your car payment now is more than what you were paying for your first condo. Yep.

Yeah. And that wasn’t all that long ago, because you’re not that old. No, the best part about the condo, too, was free water bills.

So me and the HOA president would have our wars and our battles, because I didn’t have to be dangerous. First time they fined me for leaving the trash can out for like two hours too long, I started taking really long showers, really hot, long showers. I’d preheat the bathroom.

Those were the good old days. The water bill over there in building A is extremely high. Yes.

He just turned the water on, just let it run 24-7. Well, anyways, Jay Marinski, what are you seeing on your buyer’s side? You’ve been busy. I think you told me yesterday, you got a closing a day this week or something? I’m missing one today, but other than today, yeah, I’ve scheduled a closing each day.

Yeah. Buyers are picky, I would say. Yeah.

I feel like I’m showing per buyer more houses because they aren’t in a position where they need to be rushed into putting an offer on the first thing they see. But then it’s kind of a tale of two cities where if you see something really nice, other buyers are thinking the same thing, and that one ends up going in a day or two. And so it’s kind of, you know, if it needs a little bit of work, you need to put some sweat into it, a little bit of elbow grease.

You have a time to make a decision, put in an offer that works for you, negotiate it, negotiate on remedies, so on and so forth, and get a good deal. But if the house is turnkey, got the court’s countertops, new vanity, walk-in shower, everything updated, those ones tend to be going fairly quickly and you don’t have the same amount of time. And so, yeah, I mean, it’s kind of a strange market and buyers want things to be turnkey.

They don’t want to put any more money into it. We don’t want to have to update the kitchen. We’d rather be updated when we’re spending the money on it.

So, that’s kind of on the buy side what I’m seeing, and I’m sure you guys with your listings, you walk through a listing, you kind of know the tail of the tape through the walkthrough, well, this one’s going to sell, you know, easily versus this one needs some updating. We’re going to have to, you know, make that adjustment on price to appeal to buyers. That’s kind of what I’m seeing.

Well, one of the things that I started doing, I added it to my listing program that I’ve built is a five-star rating, and I asked the seller, you know, to rate each room as we kind of go through it, you know, one, it needs work, five, it’s perfect. And then, you know, give me, I let them tell me what they think, and, you know, give me a star, one through five, and then that kind of helps offset to a certain extent the condition that you’re talking about, you know, because if you walk through a house and every room is a five-star, you’re exactly right, that house is on the market for one day and done. If you have a one-star home that you’re trying to get a five-star price, then that house sits forever, and you never find a buyer.

And so, you know, the condition, I think, is the absolute key in today’s market. And even, you know, it used to be that, like back in 2008, which was that, you know, high that we had right prior to the crash, you know, we used to joke all the time, and we’re with, you know, shag carpeting, green flock wallpaper, and mirrors on the ceiling, and people were buying them. But then as you got into the foreclosure crisis, you couldn’t give them away.

And, you know, the same thing that Jay was just mentioning in the COVID thing, you know, we were selling houses $50,000 over asking, and, you know, the house needed a lot of work. In today’s world, I’m not seeing that. You know, like you said, Jaime, buyers want the house to be pretty much move-in condition.

They don’t want to have to mess with things. Yep, yep. And they don’t buy on spreadsheets.

They don’t buy on, you know, they buy on emotion. They either walk in, they either feel it, or they don’t. You know, during the foreclosure days, there was like 50,000 houses listed that year in Columbus.

I think we had, yeah, like 18, was it, I mean, it was some crazy number, like 13, 14, 15,000 houses listed at the same time. I mean, it was way up there. Yeah.

And during COVID, we got down to less than 700 houses available for sale. So, and I think you’re right, Jay, now we’re about 5,000, 5,500. It’s more, more what the market should be.

It’s still a seller’s market because, you know, three months supply is considered to be balanced. We’re at two months supply. So, there’s still some room to go.

Before it shifts back. I guess I’m holding on to dear life. What was our, what was the timeframe of our dollar bet on 6,000 listings? I think it was just sometime this year.

We did check your notes. Yeah. I’m going to break through, it looks like, unless something crazy happens.

I’ll have to have AI go back and interpret all the transcripts to see. You know, you should really use your own brain and not rely so much on chat. You’re forgetting how to think.

Yeah. Am I, I’m doing that naturally. With age, that happens.

I’m taking all kinds of omega-3, trying to catch back up. Is that it? You guys done? Jay Maronski, take us home, buddy. I really like your wrap-ups.

I know you, you know, you guys. Let Jody wrap it up. Let’s see what she’s got.

Wrap, wrap, wrap, wrap it up. Yeah, that’s, that’s not bad. Not bad.

Well, thank you guys for watching. I’ll wrap it up since Jaime doesn’t want to. I’m just potting off all of his responsibilities onto me.

If you need a loan, you need a refi, you know, give Jody a call. She’s a problem solver. I’ve sent a couple people to her last few weeks here.

It is, you know, it’s like people that need some, some guidance. Jody’s your girl. She’ll get it done.

She’s a kick-ass. Go-getter. So you need help.

Give Jody a call. If you want to buy a house, do not call me. Call Jaime.

Happy to drive you around in his car, take you to lunch, show you all the houses you want to see in a single day. If you have complaints about me, call dad. And he’s always looking forward to dunking on me and hearing what I’ve messed up this week.

And if you want to work with the most handsome realtor who’s voted by his peers 21 years in a row, give me a call. Our information’s on the screen. Leave a comment below.

If you have questions, like and subscribe. Thanks again, and we’ll see you next week when the Houthis have blocked the Strait of Hormuz and interest rates are 7.8%. We’ll see you then.

I had to get that out of the transcription.