- Key insight: Learn why employers are introducing homeownership benefits to target millennial workers.
- What's at stake: Employers face rising turnover costs if they fail to address their workers' largest expense.
- Forward look: Get ready for legislation that could introduce tax-advantaged homeownership savings accounts.
Source: Bullets generated by AI with editorial review
Amid a housing affordability crisis, organizations refining their benefits to attract and retain a younger workforce are increasingly looking into homeownership benefits as a "wow factor" offering with proven retention capabilities.
Home affordability has reached an all-time low in recent years, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta's Home Ownership Affordability Monitor, which measures the ability of a median-income household to absorb the estimated annual costs associated with owning a median-priced home. Middle-income earners (those making about $75,000) can afford only 23% of active home listings nationwide, according to The Housing Mismatch report from Realtor.com and the National Association of Realtors.
The current affordability crisis is broadly impacting the U.S. workforce, with benefits leaders seeking to offer stability where they can, but according to Landy Liu, CEO of homeownership savings platform Foyer, the home-affordability issue in particular is significant among a key population in the workforce.
"The home affordability crisis… is not something that you can feel by looking at the stock market, but it certainly is felt in conversations with your loved ones, and it's felt if you are an aspiring home buyer," he said. "The bar has just gotten so much higher. And we have the largest generation of homebuying, soon to be homebuying Americans. This demographic of millennials is huge and growing, and at any other point in our history would be buying homes. But they are facing the harsh reality of a very difficult housing market. And so what we're trying to address is this problem of: How do we prepare this growing generation, this massive part of the workforce, this driving part of the workforce, millennials, whose average age of buying a house today is 38. They're in the prime of their working careers."
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That demographic is a valuable one for organizations to not only recruit and retain, but keep engaged, said Larry Salazar, president and co-founder of homeownership benefit provider NestSTEPS, who explained how these large purchases can impact employee well-being.
"When employers are thinking about how do they improve productivity, how do you drive engagement, you have to think about not just investing in the employee, you have to think about investing in the whole person," he said. "Because the data very clearly indicates if there's financial stress at home, they take it to work with them, and it affects their specific decisions during work hours. Now, homeownership is one of those big things that people don't consider enough. It accounts for roughly 34% of your household expenses — that's your largest expense. And in some places it's even bigger, depending on where you live."
Economic factors were the driving force for Jim Oman, director of benefits at professional employer organization Row Partners, to look into homeownership benefits as "a great differentiator," both internally for the PEO's 40 employees and its clients.
"It's a hot-button issue right now in the economy," he said. "It's on people's minds — the young employee workforce needs this to be able to even fathom homeownership right now."
Row is in the early stages of rolling out these benefits through NestSTEPs, which provides the financial management technology, education, and facilitates financial contributions toward homeownership, but Oman is already seeing a positive response.
"I thought there might be just a very small niche group that would be interested in a benefit like this," he said, "but actually getting more feedback, the more that I take data and benchmark against some of our other benefits, I actually feel like our engagement might be higher in this than even things like the 401(k) and some other things that we're offering… like this might be a bigger value than I first thought it would be."
Increasing awareness, education
Homeownership is a newer addition to the benefits space and a reaction to an unfavorable homebuying market that could get more governmental support soon, anticipated Liu, who sees positive traction in federal legislation like the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, a bipartisan housing package to increase housing supply and revise regulations that became law in July.
Additionally, the Homeownership Savings Act, introduced by Michigan congresswoman Haley Stevens in May, would create tax-advantaged homeownership savings accounts for first-time buyers.
Foyer is also "fighting and lobbying for more benefits for the employer," said Liu. "And I could see a world in the next few years where this truly does become big."
Foyer was designed to be similar in construct and implementation to 401(k)s, HSAs and other types of payroll-linked savings vehicles, and currently serves about a dozen clients since launching its benefits channel, ranging in size from companies with hundreds to thousands of employees.
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"The sentiment through the conversations that come up [within these client companies] is, it's still a wow factor for employees, because homeownership as a benefit is new," Liu shared. "It's often a very nice moment of surprise and delight when an employee says, 'Wow, this is kind of cool. This company is really going out of the way for me. I've never heard of this before.'"
"We get that all the time," he continued: "'Oh, I've never heard of this. How does it work?' And with a little education, it becomes really easy to understand."
Education is an important component to NestSTEPS offering, Salazar stressed, alongside its automated savings platform and contributions plan. Under that plan, NestSTEPS and partners contribute up to $2,000 toward the purchase of a home for eligible employees who purchase through the company's affiliated agents and finance through its preferred lender during the employer's first two years participating in the program.
NestSTEPS provides virtual and on-site financial wellness workshops to help homeowners and potential home buyers not only purchase their homes but remain in them.
"There is a disproportionate number of foreclosures and short sales that come from government-backed loans, and it suggests that when people are using those government-backed loans and they're getting to these homes, there's more of those people who are ending up losing their homes," Salazar said. "And it suggests that maybe there's a little bit of a financial education issue that may be in place, or a lack of financial discipline to help them stay in a home."
"We want to provide the meaningful education to help them build healthy behaviors, healthy financial habits, accelerate savings, and we also want to provide them with the tools to be able to achieve that," he added.
A powerful retention tool
Helping employees into a home can also incentivize them to stay at a company longer.
NestSTEPS released a 2026 Workforce Housing & Financial Well-being Report finding 89% of workers are more likely to stay with employers offering homeownership support, according to the 1,000 U.S. workers polled, and 78% would consider switching employers for homeownership benefits, assuming equal pay, workload and schedule.
"People say, well, after they get the grant, or they get the loan that's been given to them, and they purchase a home, how do you know they're going to stick around?" Salazar said. "I mean, why would they stick around? They already got what they needed. Nine out of 10 people said that they would stay even after the benefit has been administered to them, and again, that speaks to durability, that speaks to true retention, the anchoring between an employee and an employer."
Liu has witnessed similar loyalty in connection with these benefits.
"Preparing to buy a house also leads to stronger retention at companies," he said. "There's also another part of this, which is attracting new talent in the same way that benefits having a great 401(k) plan, having good health insurance — really progressive companies are able to attract the best young talent if they're able to position a clear journey that connects working at this company to accomplishing the goal of actually being able to start a family, settling down, etc."
Companies' roles in achieving these dreams create an important bond, Liu said.
"Buying a house isn't just a luxury good. It's not just a financial transaction. It is quite possibly the most emotional transaction of your life. And it's just a part of the milestone of building a family and truly settling down. And so retention is definitely one of the benefits."
"Companies have always been such an important part of helping their employees reach the next milestone," he continued. "And for them not to have a clear answer for this one is becoming a risk to companies. It's a huge opportunity for folks that want to move in [to the homeownership benefit space] more proactively."
Companies not offering these benefits might balk at the cost or time of adding yet another — especially newer — offering. But Salazar argues the expense could be greater without this type of perk.
"They're already spending dollars on turnovers, they're spending money — a trillion dollars a year — on rehiring people," he said. "Why not invest in building a stable and engaged workforce rather than spending on rehiring people?"
