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Executive Summary
Report
Solutions and Recommendations
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HOMEBUYER
EDUCATION
The Community Reinvestment
Association of North Carolina (CRA-NC) developed a homebuyer education
program designed specifically for manufactured home buyers. Their one-hour
class covers financing, placement of the home and warranty rights and
responsibilities. CRA-NC offered the class 35 times in various cities
around North Carolina.
One early problem confronting CRA-NC was attendance at their classes.
"We had the idea that if we built it, they would come," said
Richard Brown, a CRA-NC organizer. But attendance was disappointing at
the start of the program. The group had neither the funds for extensive
marketing nor the time to build a reputation via word of mouth in the
communities to which they brought their road show.
"We had to rethink our marketing," said Brown. They decided
to contact local home-buying counselors and offer to come and do a segment
on manufactured housing as well as predatory lending in their regular
homebuyer classes. CRA-NC soon found that attendees of these first-time
homebuyer classes were the same low-income, first-time homebuyers that
they were initially trying to reach. Many of the families enrolled in
the conventional home-buying classes were already considering buying a
manufactured home. CRA-NC's materials rounded out existing home-buying
programs that often focused primarily on getting the families into site-built
housing.
CRA-NC's newest initiative on consumer education is a 30-minute video
on buying a manufactured home. This video covers such topics as the construction
process, financing, sales and finding a site, while using humor to keep
the audience engaged. Peter Skillern, Executive Director of CRA-NC, noted
the video "focuses on success stories, and how to do it right"
rather than focus on the failures that some consumers encounter.
The video can be seen on public access cable shows across North Carolina,
giving the group a much broader reach than their classroom program. Over
one million North Carolina residents have cable access, and the video
is slated to play several times. The video is applicable to other states
and is available from CRA-NC for $10 to cover costs.
Lessons learned:
- Have a well-developed marketing
plan for consumer outreach projects.
- It is unnecessary and difficult
to create a separate delivery system for manufactured housing education
materials.
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