Florida is at the forefront of many issues surrounding the national housing industry, including dealing with high home prices, increasing demand and home insurance concerns. The Florida Association of Mortgage Professionals (FAMP) is involved with helping its members navigate these issues. 

The group’s mission is to promote and advance the common business interests of Florida’s licensed loan originators and mortgage professionals. Some of the association’s advocacy work includes reforms to help condominium owners and distressed projects, arguing for local governments to allow accessory dwelling units and advocating for reforms to curb the practice of trigger leads, which is when credit bureaus sell prospective homebuyers’ contact information to third-party mortgage brokers and lenders following a credit pull.

Orlando Diaz, president of FAMP, spoke to Scotsman Guide in June about some of the issues facing the housing industry in the Sunshine State. 

At the time of this interview, anti-trigger leads legislation known as the Homebuyers Privacy Protection Act was working its way through the congressional process. The bill received unanimous Senate approval on Aug. 2, and now just requires President Donald Trump’s signature to become law.

How would you describe the state of Florida’s housing market right now?

I’d say we have a huge affordability problem. The prices of homes are through the roof, interest rates are high, taxes are high and insurance is difficult to get. So, we have an attack on homeownership on all four fronts. At the same time, we have a large number of people moving to Florida. Some of those people are moving to lower-density areas because of the affordability issues. So, we are seeing the smaller cities starting to grow because those areas are a little bit more affordable.

What is a major misperception about the Florida housing market?

For a long time, people thought of Florida as the place you go to retire. But after the pandemic, the dialogue changed because so many different people from all over the country came here. It has caused property values to skyrocket in recent years.

How are you dealing with homeowners facing large assessments for deferred maintenance on condominium buildings? 

The collapse of the [Champlain Towers South] condominium building in Surfside, Fla., in 2021 was a tragedy and we are still feeling repercussions today. One of the issues that many condominium associations face is deferred maintenance. Associations don’t want to assess condo owners large amounts of money or raise their homeowners association fees,  especially for elderly owners who have been living in these condos for a long time and are on a fixed income. 

We worked with the authors of a bill at the state legislature to provide a little bit more leniency and more time for the HOAs to pay for the repairs. We also worked to give the HOAs options for taking out lines of credit versus paying the assessments at one time. The condo issues are huge problems for Florida residents. So, we spend a lot of time lobbying on these issues.

Tell me about your work to help condominium downpayment reform in Florida.

Typically, when buying a condominium, to get a Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac loan, the unit must meet specific criteria to be deemed “warrantable,” making it eligible for a downpayment of 3% to 5%. A condo approved via a limited review, which may pose a higher risk to the lender, requires 10% down in most places in the U.S., but Florida is different. Here, the downpayment for a limited review condo is 25%. We want Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to change these downpayment guidelines.

This is a national issue that involves the Federal Housing Finance Agency. We talked about this with Rep. Byron Donalds [R-Bonita Springs]. He is a front-runner in the Florida governor’s race. We have had multiple conversations with him about this issue and are hoping that he will spearhead this issue for us. We don’t think these downpayment guidelines are necessary, and we feel eliminating them will help with condominium affordability.

What is happening with trigger leads legislation?

I’ve spent a lot of time on the trigger leads issue. It is something we’ve been pushing for a long time. There’s a national bill that gets presented to Congress every year and looks promising but eventually doesn’t pass. There is a strong lobby from the credit bureaus to defeat the bill. This is a very frustrating issue. 

We will have clients who have shopped around and are ready to close the deal. But almost immediately after their credit reports are pulled, they can get as many as 100 calls, texts and emails from lenders offering new terms. What it does is open the door for some bad players to come in, and we want to avoid that from happening.