Oregon MF Assisted Operating Expense Data Used to Calculate FY 2010 Oregon OCAF.

With the invaluable assistance of Will White from Senator Merkley's Office, HUD HQS has provided me with some of the data used to make the FY 2010 Oregon Operating Cost Adjustment (AKA, "OCAF").

I appreciate the willingness of HUD HQS to provide the data in the face of other pressing tasks. For me the data provides useful context to help understand how OCAF was/is determined for Oregon. Because of their Privacy Act concerns, HUD did not provide unit counts or county/city locations, so the analysis that can be done is somewhat limited, but still provides some useful insights (I think).

In particular the data provides counts on the number and kinds of projects that HUD used to make Oregon's 3.2% OCAF adjustment for FY 2010. (See my prior OCAF post HERE for more background).

My Take on What the FY 2010 Oregon OCAF Data Shows:

1. 72 projects were used to determine the FY 2010 OCAF for Oregon. Only those projects that file financial statements with HUD are used to determine OCAF. This means that the OCAF determination did NOT include include any OHCS bond financed project based Section 8 projects since these 122 projects do not have FHA insurance and do NOT file financial statements with HUD.
   
2. Bottom line is that only about 22 % of all MF assisted projects in Oregon (72 out of the 332 MF Assisted Projects I count in Oregon) were used to determine the FY 2010 OCAF. Despite this small sample, the OCAF determination is then used for ALL MF assisted projects in Oregon that can use OCAF to adjust annual rents (and I believe this is the vast majority of MF assisted projects in Oregon). [My guess is that Oregon's sample % is toward the low end of other states, which likely have a greater share of FHA insured properties that file financial statements with HUD].
   
3. Older Assisted Projects, including Section 236 and 221d3 projects comprised 53% of the projects sampled.
4. Older Assisted Projects, Including Section 235 and Section 221d3 projects, had lower rates of operating expense increase then the overall HUD OCAF for Oregon. This means that if their operating expenses had increased MORE, the OCAF for ALL MF HUD assisted projects would have been higher than 3.2%.
5. The most recent average operating expenses for Older Assisted Projects like Section 236 and 221d3 were lower than the average for all projects, meaning that increases in expenses in these project would likely still result in average expenses LOWER than the average for the other HUD MF project types in Oregon.
   

Tables Displaying These Results in Detail.
I have prepared the tables HERE to illustrate the results summarized above. Note the IMPORTANT caveats at the bottom of the first two tables, so you understand the limits of the analysis. (For example in Table one you will see a calculated overall average OCAF of 3.52% instead of the actual 3.2% for FY 2010; this occurs because I averaged across projects, since I could not weigh by unit counts which HUD did not provide).

• The first table shows my calculations of the % increase in operating expense by Program and Section of the Housing Act
• The second table shows my calculations of the most recent operating expense average per unit, per annum, by major program and Section of the Act.
• The third table is ALL of the data I received from HUD Hqs for these 72 properties.

Originally created and posted on the Oregon Housing Blog.