August 14, 2024
GROWING COMMUNITY MEDIA
AT HOME ON THE GREATER WEST SIDE A GCM GUIDE TO HOMEOWNERSHIP
Nontraditional ways of buying a house? NACA real estate broker Josie Hood explains how There are actions plans, she says By DELANEY NELSON Special Projects Reporter
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ith 20 years of experience in real estate as an agent, developer and broker, Josie Hood is often on both sides of the selling table. Born and raised on the South Side of Chicago, Hood is now a managing real estate broker for Neighborhood Assistance Corporation of America, a nationwide non-profit organization that advocates for economic justice through homeownership and community action. She works in Chicago and elsewhere in Illinois and Indiana. “I’ve been doing this since 2004, so I’ve been around long enough to see the crash, the rise, and the crash again. It’s cyclical,” Hood said. “Whatever’s going on in real estate, when it goes down it comes back up — you just got to stick it out.” Hood started in 2018 as a real estate agent at NACA, which is the largest certified counseling agency in the country. Hood spoke with Austin Weekly News about how NACA helps home buyers navigate the real estate market.
What does the real estate market look like right now? We just came out of a seller’s market, where you could go $20,000 to $30,000 above the asking price and still not get the deal. We entered a market not too long ago where there’s just no inventory. We’re still very short of housing inventory across the country; there’s such a housing shortage. What do you expect to see from the real estate market in the coming months and year? What’s happening across the country is you’re getting more and more developers who are switching gears, myself included. In a lot of cities, including Chicago, there’s a housing shortage, so people are building more multifamily units. Not only are people doing more multi-families, we’re doing multi-families with different incomes. So we have some units at market rate, some affordable units and we have some low-income units. Because there’s such a shortage, a lot of the cities have funding to help with that. With those multi-families and condos, you’ll start to see more amenities with more people, like co-working spaces, because so many people work from home.
COURTESY OF JEMMA REAL ESTATE
Josie Hood of Neighborhood Assistance Corporation of America
Do you work only with buyers and sellers associated with NACA? A majority of our clients are NACA. We used to say we work exclusively with NACA buyers, but I will not say that anymore because if you
sell, you may not buy with NACA. So we don’t work exclusively with NACA buyers. We do work with sellers — we offer them a discount
See BUYING A HOUSE on page B3
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