Rural News
Jennifer Emerling / There Is More Work To Be Done
Jennifer Emerling / There Is More Work To Be Done
Section 502 Has Gone Paperless
The Section 502 Guaranteed Single Family Home Loan Program has gone paperless; saving money and increasing efficiency in the process. In the past, loan guarantees for rural Americans buying homes involved sending hundreds of pages of paper back and forth between private lenders and USDA’s Rural Development State field offices. Now those private lenders can upload documents via the Web. This eliminates the need for postage fees, huge print jobs and over 135,333 staff hours per year that were spent managing the paper process.
The Rural Housing Service (RHS) estimates that $4.2 million will be saved in one year alone. All of the freed up staff time could also mean staff have more time to serve the rural Americans who use the 502 program. According to RHS, this is just the beginning of an age of innovations that may include allocating more resources to oversight initiatives and other Single Family Housing Programs.
