TLDR: The USDA Rural loan program may be a last refuge and upward mobility token available to the masses against the backdrop of a hostile tax regime coming to a locale near you.
We're at a point in time where western countries have onerous pension, infrastructure, and healthcare taxpayer debt per capita and this issue is unlikely to get resolved anytime soon.
Greater than 50% of US GDP will become gov't expenditure. ESG crackheads are fully ensnared into every institution and carbon taxes are coming.
I believe the USDA rural loan program is one of the last avenues of scalable(entire families of young people can participate) and huge wealth gains in home ownership that hasn't been foreclosed upon by tyrannical gov't debt expansion.
World getting gnarlier.
Playing the normal games to buy a house do not seem to make sense.
They can manage things you cannot manage.
Skilled labor shortage - they can deal with the salary raises and retention issues that you cannot deal with when your maintenance person is out of wind or protests. Licenses, salary bumps, churn, etc... Running your own construction company is complex.
Hedging prices - got copper in a home construction? They can hedge it in the public markets.
Problematic tenants - they have workflows you cannot afford at your scale.
Insurance - they can get better rates being larger than you can get. Insurance is a racket run by a cartel of people that a home owner with a traditional mortgage has no leverage to negotiate special contracts with.
Supplies - they're buying in bulk and you can't.
The list goes on and on and there's about 50 such points.
USDA Rural Loan It's zero down and ~4.75% 30 year mortgage and there's variants.
You can get a lot knocked off if you qualify for the subsidies and essentially get the interest rate knocked down to ~1%.
97%ish of the USA Is considered rural
If your salary suddenly increases massively, you get knocked back up to the rate at which you got the USDA rural loan and that's still likely less than mortgage rates.
Homedirection.org is a great place to look as they've cleaned up the UX flow of browsing for homes that are USDA rural loan eligible.
If I could go back in time, I'd become more handy at repairing things, and lock down this type of loan and buy a house in a burgeoning rural district in a red state that has a high likelihood of becoming a suburban area.
