Why this exists.
Buying a first home is harder than it has been in a generation, and family help can only arrive as a gift. That limits how much families give. Tufa lets them invest instead.
The limits of a gift letter.
Family is the largest source of home-buying capital other than the buyer. And families often give less than they would like. Not because they lack the money, but because a gift is the only form it can take:
- Retirement: It is usually retirement savings, and once given it cannot come back.
- Other children: A gift to one child sets a precedent for every other child.
- Asking: The child has to ask for a gift, which can be an awkward conversation.
None of these applies when the money comes back. That is what Tufa is for.
This started with Matt.
A few years ago, someone in Matt’s family was trying to buy a first home in California and could not make the down payment work. Matt wanted to help. The only way to do it was a gift, and he could not give away an amount that would have made a difference.
He had the money to help. He did not have a way to help without giving the money away. That is the gap Tufa is built to close.
Built by operators who have worked in home lending at scale.
Steve Lane, the chief executive, founded Flyhomes, a national real estate and mortgage company that funded over $2 billion in home loans and helped around 3,000 families buy homes during his tenure. His career has been spent building ways for ordinary buyers to compete in markets stacked against them. Before Flyhomes, he worked at Microsoft and J.P. Morgan.
Matt Hasten, the chief product officer, founded Motto Health and built consumer financial products at Amazon, turning complicated things into simple ones. Before any of it, he was a Flyhomes customer, on the buyer’s side of exactly this problem.
Steve and Matt met earning a JD and an MBA at Northwestern. One has spent his career getting buyers into homes. The other lived the problem firsthand. Tufa exists because the help families want to give still had nowhere to go in the system, and because building the structure that lets them give it is work they are equipped to do.
Where this is going.
Families have purpose-built financial structures for almost everything that matters. Retirement has the 401(k) and the IRA. Education has the 529. Healthcare has the HSA. Homeownership, the largest financial undertaking most families ever make together, has none. It has a gift.
Tufa is being built to fill that gap: a regulated way for a family to support a family member’s home purchase without giving the money away.