Philly residents who want to be real estate developers can now get Jumpstart loans citywide

Donna Tiffany Tull, a Realtor and former teacher, tried for years to break into the construction industry. But lenders kept refusing to give her loans.

“I didn’t look like the big guys. I didn’t have the big dollar signs. My company wasn’t big,” she said. “And it was just, ‘No, can’t help ya.’ ”

Then her cousin heard about a program in Germantown offering loans as well as support specifically for residents without development experience who wanted to buy and renovate blighted properties. Tull had lived in the Germantown and Mount Airy areas for decades.

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“When this program came out, it was just like hallelujah,” Tull said, singing her joy into the word.

The owner of Tull Group, a home remodeling company, became one of Jumpstart Germantown’s first participants in 2015. The program later expanded to six sections of the city, and it inspired replicas in Coatesville in Chester County; Pottstown and Norristown in Montgomery County; Wilmington; and a neighborhood in Indianapolis.

Now, more aspiring Philadelphia real estate developers will be able to access loans and training, including people who historically have been excluded from the industry. Jumpstart Philly announced last month that it has expanded citywide.

“We knew that expansion throughout the city was something we wanted to do, and there was a lot of demand from Jumpstarters to make this happen,” said developer Ken Weinstein, Jumpstart’s founder. “It’s not easy to break in [to the development industry] if you don’t have a parent or an uncle or an aunt in the business. So you really need a program like Jumpstart to give you the training, to network with other developers, and ultimately to lend you the money to work on your first, second, third projects.”

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Tull has continued to fix Philadelphia properties using Jumpstart loans, alongside the program’s other graduates, most of whom are people of color and women. The program has loaned more than $46 million through more than 380 transactions. The majority of graduates’ renovations are of single-family homes, mostly rowhouses.

“More lending means more production of properties, more affordable housing, more wealth created locally, which is all good,” Weinstein said.

In the years since Jumpstart began, other programs in the city have popped up to help support emerging developers with the goal of diversifying the industry and increasing the supply of homes that Philadelphians can afford.

The city’s Minority Developer Program helps small and midsize developers and contractors access public land and funding. The Philly RiSE program, created by a collective of Black business leaders, helps grow the businesses of developers of color who already have experience.

But Jumpstart is for people with no or little experience.

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“We are focusing on loans traditional banks don’t want to do,” Weinstein said. “Small loans, construction loans that tend to be messy, loans to developers without much experience. Those are the types of loans banks run away from. So they’re the types of loans we want to do to get people started in the industry.”

Weinstein, president of Philly Office Retail, a Northwest Philadelphia-based development company mostly focused on commercial properties, got his start in residential construction nearly four decades ago. One of his goals is to eliminate Philadelphia’s blight.

“I don’t organize Jumpstart to have a benefit for Philly Office Retail, but there’s no doubt all ships rise when residential properties are renovated,” Weinstein said. For example, small businesses in his company’s properties and elsewhere benefit from more residents.

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Jumpstart’s expansion citywide is thanks to an infusion of $7 million from a new funder, the Pittsburgh-based TriState Capital Bank, where Weinstein is a client.

“We really see the value in what [Weinstein] wants to do for the good of the entire city,” said David Segal, senior vice president of commercial real estate at the bank.

Reinvestment Fund, a Philadelphia nonprofit that makes community development loans, has provided financing for Jumpstart since 2019. It believes in the program’s combination of funding along with training and mentoring and its goal to produce housing that neighborhood residents can afford, said Elizabeth Frantz, the nonprofit’s senior director of lending and investments.

And, she said, “we are excited to support Jumpstart in its mission to support especially people of color and women, who are underrepresented in the real estate industry.”

The nonprofit has provided $3 million in financing to Jumpstart.

LISC Philadelphia, a community development support nonprofit, previously gave Jumpstart $2 million to make loans.

“For us, it was a recognition of our own strengths and weaknesses and realizing we’re not particularly good at lending to those early-stage, small developers, and Ken’s model offers a more user-friendly alternative until they grow to a particular level,” said Andrew Frishkoff, the nonprofit’s executive director. “If we could provide financing to Jumpstart, which would then allow Jumpstart to make these really nimble loans to developers, then that was really a win-win.”

The program’s emphasis on local developers and their responsibility to communities, Frishkoff said, is a “good alternative to out-of-town investors who in many cases, especially pre-2008 recession, were the investors we saw coming in and snapping up our rowhouses for rental.”

Keith Brooks, a 2019 Jumpstart graduate and Germantown resident, said the program “strives to have people benefit from the development happening in their neighborhood.”

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Getting into real estate development seemed daunting, but Brooks, who works in advertising and volunteers with neighborhood organizations, said Jumpstart’s guidance made it possible.

Last year, Brooks’ company, Common Denominator Investments, bought two single-family rowhouses in North Philadelphia and renovated them. He’s now looking to rent to low-income tenants who have housing vouchers, both to have guaranteed income and to help households who struggle to find homes they can afford.

Brooks said he’s adopted a saying from Weinstein: You can do well by doing good.