As the housing market becomes less affordable, some employers are offering homebuying assistance benefits through companies like NestSteps and Nestment. 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. But when Petee'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. 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. 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.' Add BI in Google so our reporting is easier to find when you’re searching for what matters. 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.' 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
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