A Down Payment With a Catch: You Must Be an Airbnb Host<br />Though consumers generally need to put up at least 20 percent of the purchase price to avoid paying mortgage insurance, first-time buyers put down far less on average — roughly 8.2 percent, or about $18,500 —<br />and borrow roughly $207,000, according to Inside Mortgage Finance, a publisher that tracks the mortgage business.<br />That was how Loftium, a service in Seattle, came about: It will provide prospective home buyers with up to $50,000 for a down payment, as long as they are willing to continuously list an extra bedroom on Airbnb for one to three years<br />and share most of the income with Loftium over that time.<br />But when she learned just how much they could collect each month — enough to cover the mortgage,<br />and sometimes more — her entrepreneurial instincts kicked in: Why not front would-be home buyers money for a down payment, and then collect a share of their Airbnb rental income in return?<br />“It’s for the people who don’t have the parents to help, or the high income to save while paying rent,” said Ms. Zhang, who founded Loftium with Adam Stelle, another entrepreneur,<br />and who has already had about 200 Airbnb guests in her townhouse.<br />“They are just stuck trying to save for a decade or more before they give up.”<br />Executives at Fannie Mae, the government-controlled mortgage finance giant, also noticed<br />that some young people perceived homeownership as an impossibility, said Jonathan Lawless, vice president of customer solutions at Fannie Mae.<br />This year, for example, it said it would look more forgivingly on prospective home<br />buyers whose employers or parents were helping pay down their student loans.
