Buy Your Home

The HomeOwnership Center

The HomeOwnership Center offers homebuyer education, counseling and lending services. We promote and support an approach that combines financial education (to share basic skills and knowledge), financial counseling (to relieve specific issues and challenges in the short term), and financial coaching (to encourage behavior change and achieve positive and sustainable long-term outcomes).

HomeOwnership Center services and resources include:

  • Homebuyer education seminars
  • Individualized pre-purchase counseling
  • Home inspection requirement guidelines
  • Affordable first-mortgage resources
  • NHS Down Payment and Closing Cost Assistance loans
  • Information about how to find a realtor
  • How to buy homeowners’ insurance
  • Rehab assistance with home purchase
  • Act 91 Foreclosure Intervention
  • Post-purchase counseling

NHS’s highly trained homeownership specialists are available to provide a personalized mortgage-readiness assessment, answer your questions, and see you through to the end of your home purchase.  There is no fee for our services and they are available to anyone. There is a $20 fee for the credit report that is required to begin the process.

NHS’s HomeOwnership Center became NeighborWorks of America’s first HomeOwnership Center in Berks County in 2003. As Berks County’s only NeighborWorks HomeOwnership Center, NHS adheres to rigid, nationwide standards for high-quality, comprehensive homeownership services.

Our “Full-Cycle” lending services enable lenders, government agencies, and nonprofit agencies to work together to assist families who might not qualify for, or know how to get, conventional home financing.

Do you qualify? The program is for low- to moderate-income households.

  • If your household income meets the guidelines,
  • You plan on buying a home to live in as your primary residence and not rent it out to anyone else; and
  • Do not have any outstanding mortgage obligations at the time of closing.