The Nitty Gritty of Resilient Home Lending
Abby Ross, CEO, The Resiliency Company
Last year, one of our big ideas was that to help adapt homes to the changed and changing weather we had to help homeowners access the financing to do so. To do that, we launched The Resilient Delta Fund to give investors and lenders an investment vehicle and Resilient Los Angeles to help generate the market demand, given that many homeowners needed to rebuild their homes after the January 2025 Palisades and Eaton fires.
When we started, the momentum was palpable. But if you’d asked me how we’re doing in the past six months, you’d have been greeted with a, “oh, you know, chugging along.” Because, in all honesty, operationalizing The Resilient Delta Fund has been a slog: raising funds from investors, redlining terms sheets, working with lenders. And in the middle of that is understanding the resilience of building materials and products that homeowners might use the loans for, and whether there is a sufficient ecosystem to support the building.
This is the nitty gritty of going from a big idea to implementation.
Our ambition is to galvanize ‘resilient home lending’ as a category, which can scale across the country. We want every homeowner in America to have access to loans to make their homes resilient (and hence more valuable) in the same way they do to improve their kitchens – something that also makes homes more valuable.
What we’ve learned is that achieving that scale requires us to consider things like standardization, what the secondary mortgage market will need for liquidity, and the ease of implementation for how lenders launch a new lending product. And learning about this nitty gritty is only possible by helping one investor invest and one lender lend. And then another. And then another. And then another.
We have already learned a lot and can see that we are going to learn more as we continue to build out The Resilient Delta Fund and respond to the emerging market demand. That’s why, this fall, The Resiliency Company will publish a Resilient Home Lending Playbook as a practical guide designed for financial institutions. It will draw on our growing expertise in designing the Resilient Delta Fund alongside investors, philanthropy, builders, insurers, resilience standards setters, and lenders who have been working through the nitty gritty with us.
As things stand, we see three key topics:
Help lenders understand why home resilience is important to their businesses;
Illustrate that we already have the knowledge, technology, and standards needed to make many homes resilient;
Provide a blueprint how lenders can incorporate resilience into their existing lending, whether as new products or part of existing products.
If you’re an investor, lender or engaged in generating demand for financing for adapting homes, please reach out. As a nonprofit “do-tank”, our desire is to work with anyone who can provide insights and feedback to help make the Playbook as useful as possible. Our intention is to make it as practical as possible with things like real-world case studies, pull-out charts, checklists, pre-structured spreadsheets. And, as with our previous Playbook (on how to deploy a resilient rebuilding grants program), it will be published open access so that anyone can use it.
