Amanda, 17, sits in her new bedroom of her new house on Melrose Street in Providence.

Maria Ferreras heard from neighbors that a house at 159 Melrose St., around the corner from her apartment in South Providence, had gone into foreclosure last year.

She later saw the 1925 bungalow sitting empty, and she noticed when the builder who eventually bought the house began fixing it up this spring and put a for-sale sign out in the yard.

Ferreras, a teacher’s aide in a kindergarten class at the Sackett Street School in Providence, liked the house, but she wasn’t sure if she could afford it on her salary, which is under $25,000.

A couple of phone calls later, she was talking to Joseph McCarthy, a bilingual real estate agent with Coldwell Banker Residential Brokerage.

Ferreras moved to the United States from the Dominican Republic 20 years ago, and she speaks English, but it is easier for her to communicate in Spanish.

McCarthy, who works with nonprofit developers in the city and is familiar with programs to help first-time homebuyers, began working with Ferreras in April.

He said he was impressed with Ferreras, a mother of four who has two children who have won scholarships to some of the city’s most prestigious private schools.

Her eldest child, Amanda Ramirez, 17, is a student at Moses Brown, and her 13-year-old son, Felipe Ferreras, who has played piano with the Rhode Island Philharmonic, attends Wheeler.

“I decided I was going to pull out every stop that I can to make this happen,” McCarthy said. “It is also taking someone else’s negative and making it a positive.”

McCarthy said he convinced Robert Ranone, the builder who had purchased the foreclosed house, to lower the sale price from the $180,000s to $155,000. “The numbers wouldn’t work” any other way, McCarthy said.

Ranone said he bought the house for $100,000, and McCarthy estimated Ranone put about $40,000 into repairs, including rewiring, updating the kitchen and installing some new flooring.

Ranone owns Pasco Building and Remodeling, and he said he has renovated many historic houses in Cranston’s Edgewood neighborhood.

He said be bought the Melrose Street house because “it’s just a beautiful bungalow. It had good bones.”

The complicated transaction took months to put together, mostly because it took time to clear up title issues with the house, but Ferreras closed last month, and she moved in last weekend with her family.

“Joe did a lot of work to get that done,” Ranone said.

Several weeks after the sale, McCarthy was still working with Ferreras, helping her negotiate with the city to reduce the assessment and the taxes on the property, and to help her apply for the city’s homestead exemption.

The financing package included down-payment assistance from the City of Providence, West Elmwood Housing Development Corporation and Bank Rhode Island, and a silent second mortgage from Rhode Island Housing. McCarthy said the amount of her 30-year mortgage was $97,000, and Ferreras’s Section 8 housing subsidy will be used to help pay the mortgage.

McCarthy said that her new mortgage payment is less than her monthly payment as a renter.

“This is what can be done in today’s market,” he said. “It says a lot when a single parent earning under $25,000 a year can qualify to purchase a home.”

Finding new buyers for the city’s growing stock of foreclosed properties is a goal that city officials and activists say is crucial to provide stability to the city’s most vulnerable neighborhoods.

Rhode Island has the highest foreclosure rate in New England, and it had 1,700 new foreclosures started during the second quarter of this year, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association.

The City of Providence is offering a zero-interest loan program for people interested in buying foreclosed properties that need repairs. Up to $20,000 can be borrowed to fix up a single-family property, and $10,000 per unit can be borrowed for multifamily properties, up to a maximum of $40,000; the money does not have to be repaid until the property is sold, according to Ken Schadegg, housing manager for the city’s Department of Planning and Development.

Schadegg said the program is aimed to facilitate sales. He said some recent applicants have already bought foreclosed homes and are running into unanticipated problems.

Schadegg said this has raised concerns about the advice some new buyers are receiving.

“A lot of people are getting mortgage products that are allowing them to buy vacant properties, and they’re finding [after the purchase] that these houses aren’t habitable,” he said. “ …People need to be very cautious when they buy vacant property.”

The city also recently upgraded a grant program that provides down-payment assistance to first-time buyers of new housing from nonprofit developers. Schadegg said the down-payment assistance has been increased from 10 percent to 20 percent of a purchase price to help local nonprofits sell about $10-million worth of housing inventory, mostly condominiums, which is “completed and sitting empty.”

Last week, it was announced that the state will receive $19.6 million to purchase and repair foreclosed properties as its share of the $3.92-billion federal Neighborhood Stabilization Program that was part of the Housing Economic and Recovery Act approved in July.

cdunn@projo.com