Ohio's SFY2027 LIHTC Round Leans Hard on Set-Asides -- What That Means If You're Not in One

The Set-Aside Math Behind the Headline Number

Of the 11 invited SFY2027 applicants, at least five carry an explicit named set-aside in OHFA's own list: a Transformative Economic Development Set-Aside, a Metropolitan Single Family Set-Aside, a Rural Single Family Set-Aside, and an Appalachian Set-Aside, among the projects named. That's not a minor footnote -- it means fewer than half of this round's invited applicants competed in Ohio's general LIHTC pool. A developer benchmarking their own odds against '11 projects invited' is benchmarking against the wrong denominator if their deal doesn't fit one of these carve-outs.

This is a pattern worth tracking round over round, not just this cycle: if Ohio is consistently steering a large share of allocation toward named set-asides, the real competitive pool for a general-pool applicant is meaningfully smaller than OHFA's total award count implies, and the general pool's effective scoring threshold is likely higher than a simple ratio of applicants to available credits would suggest.

The Gap-Financing Detail That's Easy to Miss

OHFA's release specifies that $10 million of Ohio Housing Trust Fund dollars will be used as gap financing specifically for rural projects seeking Ohio LIHTC this round -- a targeted soft-money layer, not a general trust-fund allocation. A rural developer modeling this round's economics should treat that $10 million as a real, named source available to rural Ohio LIHTC deals specifically, not assume it's accessible outside that set-aside.

What to Confirm With OHFA Directly

The three board-approved deals in this release show real per-development bond amounts (from $3 million to $31 million in Multifamily Housing Revenue Bonds) that are useful comparables for sizing a similarly-scaled Ohio deal. The financing layering also varies meaningfully by project size: Rotary Commons, the smallest of the three at $3 million in bonds, also drew a Housing Development Loan and Ohio Housing Trust Fund dollars on top of its 4% LIHTC reservation, while the largest, Ashford at Tiffin, relied on its bond issuance and LIHTC reservation alone in this announcement. That's a real pattern worth checking against your own deal size -- Ohio's smaller, rural rehab projects appear to stack more soft-money layers than larger urban new-construction deals do.

Award amounts for the 11 SFY2027 finalists aren't disclosed yet -- these are applicants invited to submit a final application, not confirmed allocations, and OHFA's release names all 11 by project and county (spanning Pickaway, Franklin, Hamilton, Lorain, Cuyahoga, Miami, Richland, Guernsey, and Trumbull counties), which is itself useful for gauging geographic distribution before final awards post. Before using this round as a benchmark for your own SFY2027 application strategy, confirm with OHFA whether the general-pool share of this cycle's final awards holds close to what the set-aside-heavy invitation list suggests, once final awards are announced.

How EZFeasi Can Help

Checking whether your own Ohio deal fits one of this round's named set-asides -- or would compete in the smaller general pool -- is exactly the kind of state-specific scoring detail EZFeasi's QAP Scoring Guides are built to surface, and Proforma to Application lets you model a comparable bond-plus-LIHTC-plus-trust-fund stack before you apply. If you want help sizing a specific Ohio deal against this round's comparables, get in touch with our team.