Recent Press Releases

SAN JOSE, CA – (October 27, 2010) – Habitat for Humanity Silicon Valley and iLegent Corporation announced today that they will partner to empower underserved Silicon Valley communities to build security and equity through home ownership. By integrating iLegent’s web‐based financial literacy tools with in‐person home ownership readiness workshops provided through Habitat for Humanity, Silicon Valley residents will have access to a broad set of financial and mortgage planning resources to understand and prepare for the impact of home ownership on their finances.

 Habitat for Humanity strengthens the Silicon Valley community by providing very low to low income residents with 0% interest loans that enable residents to obtain decent and affordable housing. While Habitat’s loans provide residents with manageable monthly mortgage payments, “homebuyers should look beyond the mortgage payment and focus on understanding how that payment will affect their budgets” says iLegent’s founder and CEO, Rambod Jacoby. Habitat for Humanity staff will introduce iLegent’s technology during one‐on‐one counseling sessions with residents to illustrate complex financial concepts and help them understand how these concepts affect their monthly budgets. Habitat will provide residents with iLegent’s self‐service tools to experiment with homeownership finances through www.habitatsiliconvalley.org.

Habitat for Humanity Silicon Valley chose iLegent as its technology partner because of iLegent’s innovations in web‐based home ownership planning. “iLegent’s tools allow our community to form a better understanding of the homeownership process” says Homeowner Relations Manager, Adrian Lopez. By partnering together, Habitat for Humanity Silicon Valley and iLegent will help residents experiment with different home purchase scenarios to better understand their impact on monthly budgets as well as to obtain affordable financing for the long‐term.

SAN JOSE, CA – (August 17, 2010) – The City of Hollister announced today the launch of iLegent’s HomeBuyer Go platform, www.homebuyergo.com, for use by residents on the city’s housing page. The HomeBuyer Go platform provides Hollister residents with innovative, intuitive, and unbiased financial and mortgage planning tools for understanding the impact of home ownership on their finances.

Housing officials at the City of Hollister were impressed with HomeBuyer Go because of its focus on the ‘big picture’. “HomeBuyer Go is a great tool for city residents who are preparing for home ownership” says Francisco Casas, Project Coordinator for the City of Hollister’s Housing and Redevelopment agency. Unlike many mortgage calculators, HomeBuyer Go focuses on generating easy to read and visually appealing presentations that help residents understand how factors such as mortgage payment, tax benefits, and monthly budget fit together to affect their monthly finances. One of the available tools on the site is a cash flow analysis that helps project how much money a consumer will have remaining each month after a home purchase by accounting for their housing and lifestyle expenses, income, and federal tax benefits. This focus on the ‘big picture’ helps consumers judge if they can truly afford the expenses of a specific home and loan based on their monthly spending habits.

City of Hollister housing officials chose to implement HomeBuyer Go to help curb the city’s high foreclosure rate. By providing the city’s population of first time home buyers with a platform to experiment with the different financial variables of a home purchase, city officials hope for residents to judge if a home purchase price and loan terms fall within their means before purchasing a home that could lead them towards foreclosure. Hollister residents can visit http://www.hollister.ca.gov/Site/html/gov/office/housing.asp to access HomeBuyer Go through the city’s web portal.

Through a partnership between iLegent, the City of Hollister, and Neighborhood Housing Services of Silicon Valley (NHSSV), residents of the City of Hollister who use HomeBuyer Go will have the opportunity to connect with NHSSV home ownership counselors that will answer questions they may have about the home ownership process. As the City of Hollister’s primary non‐profit housing and financial literacy organization, NHSSV can help residents that it connects to through HomeBuyer Go complete the entire home purchase cycle from financial counseling to receiving the necessary mortgage. “HomeBuyer Go is the most intuitive web‐based tool available for first‐time homebuyers to avoid making financial mistakes that will haunt them for years to come” says Ed Moncrief, Executive Director of NHSSV.

SAN JOSE, CA – (May 15, 2010) – iLegent empowers first time home buyers with innovative and unbiased financial and mortgage planning tools for understanding the impact of home ownership on the buyer’s finances. iLegent’s launch of www.homebuyergo.com provides first time home buyers with the most complete and intuitive mortgage and home ownership planning tools available on the web, for free.

The finances involved with buying a home are complex and multi-faceted. To make a smart home purchase, the consumer must understand how mortgage payments, property tax, hazard insurance, and monthly budget all fit together. Although the web is littered with mortgage calculators, these tools produce discrete results that fail to demonstrate how these various factors come together to form a bigger picture of true affordability. Unless the consumer has the financial literacy to bring the different financial pieces together, the basic mortgage calculators on the web will not help her judge if she truly can afford a specific home or mortgage product.

iLegent’s founders, Rambod and Jessica, experienced firsthand the stress of buying their first home during the Silicon Valley housing boom in 2005. As first time buyers, they were overwhelmed with new financial concepts and exotic mortgage products, and confused by the high loan amounts that mortgage brokers told them they could afford. Most frustrating to Rambod and Jessica was the poor quality of mortgage calculators available on the web for educating themselves on different mortgage products and independently verifying that these products would not hurl them towards foreclosure.

Based on their experience, Rambod and Jessica started iLegent to provide home buyers with an alternative to the poor quality of mortgage calculators and financial planning tools available on the web. iLegent’s product, HomeBuyer Go, is a free financial planning and mortgage education tool that enables home buyers to experiment with the different financial variables of a home purchase and judge for themselves if a home purchase price and loan terms fall within their means.

iLegent received input from the executive team of one of the largest banks in the US while developing the structure and user interface of HomeBuyer Go. iLegent also recruited the help of two major community non-profit housing and financial literacy organizations to ensure that HomeBuyer Go educates and presents information to first time home buyers in a way that is easy to understand.

The HomeBuyer Go concept is different from the basic mortgage calculators on the web because of its focus on the ‘big picture’. Unlike many mortgage calculators, HomeBuyer Go focuses on generating easy to read and visually appealing presentations that help consumers understand how factors such as mortgage payment, tax benefits, and monthly budget fit together to affect their monthly finances. One of the available tools on the site is a cash flow analysis that helps simulate how much money a consumer will have remaining each month after a home purchase by accounting for their housing and lifestyle expenses, income, and federal tax benefits. This focus on the ‘big picture’ helps consumers judge if they can truly afford the expenses of a specific home and loan based on their monthly spending habits.

iLegent understands that sometimes a consumer simply wants a quick answer. To provide its users with a balance between a quick answer and a detailed cash flow analysis, a one of a kind user interface had to be built for the site. This unique user interface allows consumers to jump between standalone mortgage calculators for deciding how much house to buy, understanding PITI, performing Adjustable Rate Mortgage projections, generating amortization tables, calculating tax benefits, and developing monthly budgets. At the top of each calculator, however, is a feature that connects the results of the different calculators to one another and dynamically generates the ‘big picture’ cash flow analysis as the user navigates between the calculators that she cares about the most. This unique interface explains many of the different concepts involved in a home purchase in a clear and friendly tone, integrates easy to follow interviews for gathering data, and provides detailed explanations on how consumers should interpret the results of the different calculators.

Buying a home is not a one day task and can take many weeks, if not months, of searching. Because the financially savvy consumer will perform an analysis for many homes and loans over a long period of time, HomeBuyer Go enables its users to easily and securely save all of their budget and loan variables for return visits. Now, consumers do not have to waste time retyping information, but can securely log onto www.homebuyergo.com, retrieve their saved profile, and start experimenting with how each home they are considering will affect their monthly finances.

Besides being available for use for free by consumers, many community non-profit housing organizations including Neighborhood Housing Services of Silicon Valley (www.nhssv.org), The Mission Economic Development Agency (www.medasf.org), and HomeOwnershipSF (www.homeownershipsf.org) are adopting HomeBuyer Go for use as an educational tool when working with first time home buyers. These organizations are also referring their clients to the site as a self service tool when counselors may not be available to meet with them in person. “HomeBuyer Go is the most intuitive web-based tool available for first-time homebuyers to avoid making financial mistakes that will haunt them for years to come” says Ed Moncrief, Executive Director of NHSSV.