State housing authorities and nonprofits are the most common sources to find DPA grant money. But, you can also research the following programs to see if they offer housing assistance grants that can help you. The first is the Good Neighbor Next Door grant (GNND) program: If you are a police officers, firefighter, emergency medical technician or K-12 teacher, you may qualify for this type of grant, which is worth much more than the typical DPA grant.
GNND grants pay for half of the list price of your home. However, there is a catch: aside from having a certain occupation, to qualify for this grant you must also be willing to live in a “revitalization area” for at least three years. These are residential zones or neighborhoods that the government designates as needing to be improved or further developed.
Next is Mortgage Lender Grants: Sometimes the same companies that provide loans for home buying will also provide DPA grants.
These grants usually start out as loans that are forgiven after the homeowner meets specific guidelines for a certain amount of time.
If a loan is forgiven then it becomes a grant that you will never be required to pay back.
For example, Wells Fargo offers a program called NeighborhoodLIFT that provides home-buyers with interest-free down payment loans that will be forgiven as long as the home buyer resides in the home for at least five years without selling, refinancing, going into foreclosure, or transferring the title of the home.
This program is similar to the federal GNND grant in that home buyers must be willing to live in certain designated areas to qualify.
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