Bryan Bergjans on championing veteran homeownership

Today’s HousingWire Daily, features an interview with Bryan Bergjans, senior vice president and national director of military lending and retail business development at Caliber Home Loans. Bergjans joins the podcast to discuss some of the barriers veterans often face in the housing market and how the industry as a whole can address veteran homeownership going forward.

Here is a small preview of the interview with Bergjans, which has been lightly edited for length and clarity:

HousingWire: Research indicates that while veterans differ in age, gender and experience, many face similar obstacles to finding affordable housing. What are some of the issues veterans often come across in the housing market?

Bryan Bergjans: That’s a great question and something that we really have been spending a lot of time championing over the last five years, especially with the overall growing popularity of the VA home loan benefit in general, which is typically the vessel the military and veteran clients use to purchase a transaction or purchase a home. But the challenges for affordable housing are pretty simple, as right now, you obviously have a supply and demand scenario. With more demand versus supply, housing prices driving up and expensive new home construction, the opportunities are very slim for our folks. What I think is the most frustrating is the lack of education in our industry around the VA home loan benefit, which takes a lot of our military and veteran clients out of the purchase market in general. Because we have listing agents and real estate professionals with an unconscious bias around the benefit, they’re discouraging their clients from accepting these types of contracts. Our military and veteran clients are now not very competitive when they’re going into these buying scenarios and are not getting an opportunity to buy and achieve the dream of homeownership, which is the number one challenge that they face currently in this marketplace.

HousingWire Daily examines the most compelling articles reported from the HousingWire newsroom. Each afternoon, we provide our listeners with a deeper look into the stories coming across our newsroom that are helping Move Markets Forward. Hosted by the HW team and produced by Alcynna Lloyd and Victoria Wickham.