Making the Home Ownership Dream a Reality

Lower is a Business Reporter client.

Estelle and her husband James rented their home in the Sacramento Valley area of California for many years. They never thought they would become homeowners, but when their landlord passed away and the chance to buy their house came up, it seemed like too good an opportunity to turn down.

As is often the case, the process wasn’t entirely straightforward. The landlord’s family wished to avoid involving real estate agents, and when Covid-19 hit, lenders grew reluctant to loan money to first-time homebuyers. A historic tax transcript issue also led to unforeseen complications.

Then Estelle and James came across Lower. It was the only lender that was prepared to help them become first-time homebuyers, and it helped the couple every step of the way, including navigating the requirements for a loan.

Months later, the couple owns their first home and have embarked on renovations to add their personal touch to the place they have rented for a quarter of a century. “We are still in disbelief. Even when we were signing the stack of papers, we were questioning if we are really the owners now,” Estelle says. “But we are! We’ve always called this place home, but now it’s officially 100% ours.”

Buying a home can be challenging, particularly for first-time buyers—and is especially so today, with rising prices and a supply shortage. According to the National Association of Realtors, home prices have risen by 30% since 2019, while the number of homes for sale is at a record low. The average home is about $80,000 more expensive than it was pre-pandemic.

Trying to help people like Estelle and James is the reason why Dan Snyder co-founded Lower in 2014. “We wanted to make it more accessible for consumers,” he says. “Instead of an intimidating and complex journey, where they’d have to go and talk to a big bank and maybe get turned down, we wanted to open up the whole process.”

Lower provides a one-stop shop to enable access to anything to do with the homebuying process, ranging from savings accounts to build a deposit, to finding a real estate agent, to buying insurance to protect a buyer’s biggest asset. It incorporates several unique features, including offering potential buyers a lifestyle-based home-readiness assessment that can help to determine whether buying a home is the right move for them at that time.

“As a fintech lender, we do everything, from the origination to the service,” says Snyder. “We think about it from the standpoint that, no matter where the customer is in their home-buying journey, we want to be able to help them along the way. We’re trying to break down walls. If you bank with us, you shouldn’t need to apply for a home loan or check if we can get a better insurance rate for you; we should just give you a better insurance rate.”

Lower has recently launched HomePass, enabling customers to offer cash and stand out in a highly competitive market. Backed by a deposit, buyers can win the offer and then get their mortgage behind the scenes.

The mobile experience is a key part of Lower’s offering. “People spend an average of five hours a day on their phones—which is more than they do for most things such as exercising, eating and sometimes even sleeping—so we felt like a mobile-first experience, whether it’s for banking with us or during the mortgage process, was important,” says Snyder. “We built it with a consumer-obsessed mindset, based on years of experience of having worked at banks and mortgage companies that weren’t changing with the times.” Around 40% of Lower’s customers are first-time buyers, well above the national average of total homebuyers.

Most customers come directly to Lower, but the business is also building relationships with real estate agents, builders and financial brokers, which can be particularly useful when people are considering buying a house in an area they’re unfamiliar with. “That can help them land the home,” Snyder says. “Realtors are still very powerful conduits in the US housing market, so we’re a big supporter of our realtor network.”

Over the past eight years, Lower has grown from seven to 1,500 employees, and Snyder emphasizes that its focus remains on home ownership. “We’re a mobile-first consumer finance platform,” he says. “We help people save, plan for and buy their house, and then we’ve got an estate agent arm to keep it all together. We’re not trying to do commercial loans, and we don’t do stock trading. We’re going to stick on the same path of unlocking wealth through home ownership. We want to be the best at this.”

Estelle has a very simple message to anyone who thinks the dream of home ownership may be out of reach. “Don’t give up,” she says. “There may be a few hurdles here and there, but if you want to work with a firm that really cares about helping you achieve your goal of owning your own home, Lower is there to help you. We have already recommended it to others. In the future, if the need arises, we will reach out again. Lower can make it happen.”

This article originally appeared in Business Reporter.

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