There’s no question that purchasing a newly constructed house is an exciting time. But if time is of the essence, consider buying a house out the builder’s inventory of finished but unsold homes.

Both to-be-built houses and inventory homes have their positives and negatives. If you need the time to sell your current place, hold a couple of yard sales to get rid of the stuff you no longer need or want, pack up the stuff you’re taking with you and take care of the myriad of other details involved in moving, what they call a “dirt” house in Texas is probably for you.

Not only do you get a scratch-built home that comes together from the ground up, you get to make some changes to the floor plan, add whatever options and upgrades you might want and pick all the finishes -- from the colors on the walls to the material used for your countertops to the style of your cabinetry. You even get to choose the exterior elevation you like.

“You have a lot of flexibility,” says Brian Hoffman, the third-generation owner of Red Seal Homes, headquartered in Northbrook, Illinois. “Lighting, plumbing, walls. If you have the time to get a home exactly as you want so it doesn’t look like everybody else’s, build-to-suit is the way to go.”

It’s nice to have choices, for they personalize what is essentially a standard production house. “You can put your stamp on it,” says Kathy Zigler, sales counselor at Caldwell Homes in Houston. “But it can be overwhelming” to have to make all the choices that are necessary.

“There are a million tiny decisions to make,” according to Haubstat, Indiana-based Reinbrecht Homes. “It’s not uncommon for a couple to make a lot of top-tier selections, only to realize they’re overshot their allowances by $100,000 or more.”

Another drawback: Building a house takes time, about seven months on average, according to the latest data from the National Association of Home Builders. And it could take longer -- nine to 10 months in the Mid-Atlantic region -- depending on where you are buying.

But that was way back in 2012, a lifetime ago in the construction business. Now, with the widespread shortage of construction labor -- the number of unfilled construction jobs is nearing 300,000, the most since the end of the Great Recession -- it probably takes somewhat longer.

So, if time is the determining factor -- say your old place sold faster than you thought it would, you’re anxious to move before the new school year starts or you’re changing jobs and have to relocate your family ASAP -- purchasing an inventory home may not be that big of a compromise.

For one thing, Zigler in Texas points out, “you get to see exactly what you are going to get.” No trying to visualize the house by reading floor plans or blueprints. No trying to mentally remove all the upgrades builders tend to put into their model homes. With an inventory home, it’s all there, right before your eyes.

Another important factor: If you have your financing all arranged and are pre-approved for a mortgage, you can probably close the deal within 14 days, says Hoffman, who has anywhere from four to 10 completed or nearly completed houses in inventory at any one time, depending on the pace of sales in a particular location. Indeed, Red Seal is “doing more speculative building lately” than at any time in its 80-plus years, he reports.

Also, you won’t have to settle for a lousy home site. Inventory houses are built throughout a community, not just in the worst places. One such Caldwell house in Cypress, Texas, is actually on an oversized lot; another has a view of the lake.

The house probably won’t be a stripped-down, basic model, either. Typically, Caldwell’s inventory houses have some upgrades -- an upgraded master bathroom, for example, or a gourmet kitchen. Says Hoffman of Red Seal: “Buyers of move-in ready homes have the benefit of finishes and special features hand-selected by our design team.”

If the house is finished, you are not going to be able to customize. But if it is still under construction, some degree of customization may be available, depending how far along the builder is.

Prices of inventory houses often are negotiable, too. After all, the longer the house languishes on the market, the more it costs the builder.

Zigler at Caldwell says the usual markdown is 10 percent, and the builder may be willing to go lower, depending on the property, but especially if the house is one of the few remaining to be sold. “We’re open to all offers,” she says. “Builders build homes to be lived in, not sit on the market, so you can get the best deals on these homes.”

If the builder won’t cut his price, maybe he’ll throw in some financing help. According to New York-based consultant Ivy Zelman, builders are increasingly offering such items as closing cost assistance, mortgage rate buy-downs or increased commissions for agents who bring buyers to their doors.

Because time is money, builders generally are more motivated to offer these kind of concessions on inventory models than production houses. All you gotta do is ask.

A sea change may be coming in the way the homeless are being housed.

While there’s still a need, especially in cold weather, for the traditional shelter with cots and curfews, a new emphasis on permanent, supportive housing is taking this kind of living option away from the shelter model into the realm of for-profit real estate development.

Hunt Capital Partners is on the leading edge. The Los Angeles-based syndication unit of the Hunt Companies is a big capital markets player. It has raised more than $1.5 billion in Low Income Housing Tax Credit equity for affordable housing projects, some of which target permanent solutions for the homeless.

HCP recently announced the closing of $4.2 million in LIHTC equity for the construction of Rhododendron Place in Vancouver, Washington. The project will consist of newly built studio apartments, with 23 of them set aside for homeless people. Half of the total will go to very low-income residents, with incomes up to 30 percent of area median incomes; the other half, to low-income renters with incomes up to 50 percent AMI.

While the overall homeless population has declined since 2010, new research puts the current total at 661,000 nationwide. That’s 100,000 higher than the official number from the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Projects like the one in Vancouver are designed for the special needs of homeless people. For example, they rarely have much in the way of furniture, so the units will come with some basic furnishings -- a single bed frame, mattress, side table, desk and chair. Supportive services will also be offered through Columbia Mental Health Services.

“These include child and family services, youth services, mentoring, drug and alcohol treatment, employment services, medical, supported housing and treatment programs, to name a few,” according to Dana Mayo, Hunt Capital executive managing director.

Mayo says: “Our investment in this development will provide affordable housing for the homeless and equip them with resources to help break the cycle of poverty.”

The total development cost for the project is $7.78 million. Hunt Capital Partners “syndicated” the complicated tax credit deal, meaning it found investors who could use a tax break to get one by investing in low-income housing. Investors can either be a single entity or a consortium of investors. In this case, it was a multi-investor fund.

Hunt’s local partners, the Vancouver Housing Authority and Columbia Non-Profit Housing, have long had an emphasis on housing the homeless. CNPH provided a $2.1 million construction-to-permanent loan and VHA provided a $1.2 million C2P loan for Rhododendron Place.

The LIHTC is a complex program that has managed to finance over 2 million affordable homes since 1986.

Since it involves the tax code, it is overseen by the Internal Revenue Service. But it is administered by state housing finance agencies, which award the credit to real estate developers who put forward projects like Rhododendron Place. Then the credits are sold to investors through syndicators like Hunt Capital.

The tax credit can be a potent weapon for constructing permanent housing for the homeless, thus providing more units feeding the philosophy of “rapid rehousing” of homeless people to prevent them from becoming homeless long-term.

In Minneapolis, for example, of the 3,000 homeless people served in 2016-2017 by the Adult Shelter Connect program affiliated with Simpson Housing Services, 40 percent were placed into subsidized rental housing, with 7 percent of them going into housing immediately from the shelters.

Hunt Capital Partners now has helped finance a total of four developments for homeless or developmentally disabled people, two in Florida, one in Texas and the one in Washington state.

In Jacksonville, Florida, it raised $9.2 million in a multi-investor syndication to build Sulzbacher Village, a 124-unit development with 70 slots reserved to permanently house homeless women with children. The other 54 are temporary homeless units. Support services include an on-site health clinic.

Local buy-in was important, as Jacksonville “has decided it wants to end homelessness, not manage it,” says Cindy Funkhouser, president and chief executive of Sulzbacher, who vows that no homeless woman with a child will ever be turned away from its doors.

St. Paul, Minnesota is another good example of this forward-thinking change in philosophy. One property has gone from a shelter where people slept on mats on cold, concrete floors to a massive $115 million multi-part development through Catholic Charities.

Named for the head of the Catholic Workers Movement, an early advocate for the homeless, Dorothy Day Place will have multiple buildings and feature an enormous 320-bed shelter. The plan calls for 193 units of permanent housing completed in the first building phase, and an additional 177 units of permanent housing completed by the end. A new wing will provide transitional housing, where the working homeless -- of which there are many -- pay $7 a night rent for their period of residency. Then, if they have met certain conditions, the rent money is rebated to them to help pay some of their move-in costs when they transition into a permanent apartment.

Dominium of Minneapolis was the syndicator for the LIHTC tax credits on this deal, but there was only a single investor, U.S. Bank of Minneapolis. The project also tapped New Markets Tax Credits for the commercial/supportive part of the project.

Freelance writer Mark Fogarty and research assistant Priestess J. Bearstops contributed to this report.

Twenty-two years ago, when he was chief economist at the Mortgage Bankers Association, Doug Duncan was tapped to lead the effort to create a truly electronic mortgage, one that would start online at the application stage and end at recordation in the local courthouse without ever being touched by human hands.

Today, Duncan has moved on to Fannie Mae, where he holds the same chief economist post. But as far as online mortgages are concerned, not much has changed. “We’re closer today than we’ve ever been,” Duncan says. “But only a handful of true e-loans have been closed to date.”

Dan McGrew of Pavaso, a digital closing platform, figures some 6,000-10,000 e-loans have been completed in just the last two years. That’s still just a drop in the proverbial bucket when you consider that more than 6.6 million home loans were written in 2017 alone, according to data from the MBA.

But digital lending is coming, the dozen or so mortgage professionals and vendors interviewed for this column agree. It’s just a matter of time.

“It’s going to be like getting a car loan; there’s no reason you can’t do that with a mortgage,” offers Joe Langer of Blue Sage Solutions, a cloud-based digital lending platform. He describes the future mortgage this way: Would-be borrowers will log on, input basic information and the system will auto-populate an application. Then the system will interconnect with other programs to pull in such key information as income, tax returns, liabilities and assets.

Based on that and other data, the program will tell you how much you can afford and explain your various loan options. Once you make your choice, it will make sure your specific loan fits into the lender’s investor requirements.

“It will be a 1-2-3 process,” Langer says. “You’ll go from application to close in a matter of hours.”

What’s driving the change? First and foremost, there’s the ever-present motivation to increase efficiencies and save money. Lenders earned just $480 on each loan they made in last year’s third quarter, according to the MBA’s latest figures.

The past several years have been “challenging” for bank profitability, says the MBA’s Marina Walsh in something of an understatement.

Homebuyers, particularly younger ones, also are pushing for speed. In a recent survey by Elle Mae, a popular loan origination system used by some 2,300 lenders, some 3,000 people who had just purchased a house were asked what they would change about the lending process. The No. 1 answer: Make it go faster.

“They want to know why they can buy a $125,000 car in 2.5 hours, but it takes six weeks to buy a $125,000 house,” says Joe Tyrell of Elle Mae.

There are still roadblocks, though. One is the mortgage business itself, which has been slow in adopting digitization. Another is well-meaning federal and state regulators who put rules into place to protect consumers that make it more difficult for lenders to automate. And a third rests with the country’s 3,100 or so county courthouses, many of which still record liens by hand.

“The industry needs to be where consumers want to be,” says Gagan Sharma of BSI Financial, which administers mortgages on behalf of lenders and their investors. “I don’t believe consumers are the bottleneck. If anything, they are what’s bringing the industry along.”

To make it happen, regulators have to get on board, adds Langer of Blue Sage. “While they have the interests of consumers in mind, some of the requirements we’ve seen in recent years have added to the complexity. ... It’s hindered our ability to provide faster service.”

To have a truly electronic mortgage, though, the note must be closed, delivered and recorded automatically. And when you are dealing with state-by-state rules, says William Decker of MAXEX, a business-to-business loan exchange platform, that could prove the toughest hurdle of all.

“The closing is the most difficult step to scale,” Decker believes. “And then all those counties have to weigh in. Ninety-nine percent of all loans are still physically delivered to the county courthouse for recordation. They’re making progress, but it’s taking a long time.”

Pavaso’s McGrew predicts that 2019 “will see the fastest technology growth the mortgage business has ever seen.” And in 10 years, he offers, paper will be a thing of the past. “There will be no paperwork involved whatsoever,” he says.

Despite the accelerated pace toward digitization of the entire mortgage process, from application to close to recordation, there will always be a need for loan officers, perhaps not to take an application and gather all the supporting documents, as they do now, but in more of an advisory role for would-be borrowers who want or need some hand-holding.

The result, then, will be similar to the trend in the real estate sector, where consumers now go online to find a house and engage an agent later in the process to take care of all the legal details.

“Consumers are going to want choice,” says BSI Financial’s Sharma, who believes that down the road, the mortgage business will look much like the financial brokerage business. “There will be online loan platforms as well as traditional loan agents, each serving a different market; one for those who don’t want to speak to anyone -- nor do they need to -- and the other for those who want to sit down with an adviser in front of them and talk.”