With competition in the pricey San Francisco housing market reaching new heights, Hilary Petee and her husband had given up on the dream of homeownership.
“We brushed it off as something that we couldn’t do,” Petee, 42, told Business Insider. “We thought, ‘We can’t afford to do that right now. It doesn’t make sense.'”
But when Petee and her husband’s rent increased by 8.8% in August, they began to seriously consider buying, if they could make it work.
Petee, a brand manager, discovered that her employer offered Nestment, a platform that provides homeownership coaching, as an employee benefit, and she decided to try it. She and her husband have since closed on a $1.4 million home. Petee said she wouldn’t have been able to do it without her homebuying coach.
“It didn’t feel like my husband and I were going to be able to compete in the competitive housing market in San Francisco,” she said. “I was pretty excited that I would have any support at all to be able to help find a home and to understand that in San Francisco, specifically.”
Employee benefits, like employer-covered healthcare, retirement plans, and student loan debt relief, are a tried-and-true way to recruit and retain talented employees.
As it becomes increasingly difficult to own a home in the current market, some employers are offering housing benefits as a new way to win prospective employees’ hearts.
The American dream is getting a little help from HR
Companies like Nestment are heeding the call from employers.
“Our mission at Nestment is to bring homeownership to all who want it,” Nestment founder Niles Lichtenstein told Business Insider. “We know that homeownership is part of the American dream. It’s part of financial wellness and also physical and mental stability.”
Lichtenstein founded Nestment in 2021 as a startup focused on educating first-time homebuyers, offering them services like a personal homebuying coach and AI tools that help them plan out the best way to buy a home. When customers began asking for integration into their companies, Lichtenstein obliged, launching the service as an employer benefit in early 2026.
“We had a bunch of customers say, ‘Can we bring this into our workplace?’ We also had a couple of instances where we had organizations who said, ‘Hey, we see that you’re doing this learning education. Can we send this out to our employees?’ Lichtenstein said. “We were like, ‘there’s something here.'”
Constantinis/Getty Images
Larry Salazar and his wife, Cheri, came to a similar conclusion in 2025 when they launched NestSteps, an employer-sponsored benefit program that helps employees reduce the financial stress of buying a home.
Salazar said his own experience attempting to break into the Southern California housing market in 2000 while working for Boeing made him realize the power of homeownership. At the time, he was overwhelmed, and ultimately bought a home once he moved to a more affordable housing market instead.
“We moved for the purpose of owning our home,” Salazar told Business Insider. “That was probably, for me, a moment where I started to realize something is there that we need to leverage.”
Employers around the country are catching on.
Streaming company Twitch partnered with Denver-based company Multiply Mortgage to offer employees mortgage rate discounts.
Financial services company BNY announced earlier this year that it was offering US employees who make less than $100,000 $6,500 towards a down payment — as well as education and mortgage benefits.
Brooks Holtom, a professor of management at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business, told Business Insider he could see benefits like these catching on, especially in places where it’s tougher to enter the market, like in San Francisco. He cited a 2008 program at Mercy Hospital in Miami, which offered $10,000 toward a down payment to nurses who committed to five years at the hospital, as an example.
As more companies begin offering benefits like these, Holtom said, others may consider it, too.
“It starts with one firm in an industry offering a benefit, and when competitors see that it gets traction, helps them attract or retain employees, then there’s a copycat effect — people will follow that lead,” he said. “In some industries, there are arms races, especially when talent is scarce. So you see the most extravagant benefits where talent is worth the most, and where talent makes the biggest difference.”
Lichtenstein and Salazar both see an immediate need for their programs, which they both hope will one day become standard benefits.
“You have your 401(k), I have my 401(k). Sure, we love seeing that it’s growing, but how often does it impact us right now?” Lichtenstein said. “What impacts you right now is a home.”
