Often when buyers refer to “downpayment assistance” they ask about the city of Oakland or Emeryville. However, these programs have extremely strict and unrealistic income guidelines.

I recently represented two sets of buyers who received downpayment assistance from their jobs.

• The first worked at UC Berkeley and was a professor. My client and his wife were first time home buyers. UC Berkeley has a wonderful program that provides very aggressive mortgage rates for their professors. The UC program is quite wonderful and easy to work with, and loans appear to always close on or ahead of schedule. One stipulation is that any pest report must be cleared or paid for by the buyer, but in my case, the property was in Pleasant Hill and the seller had already agreed to do this. The transaction closed without a hitch!
• The wife of my second buyer is a resident at Kaiser and works at their facilities in Oakland and Richmond. Kaiser provides their doctors with $100K in downpayment assistance. It is a wonderful program and helped them purchase a larger home in Upper Rockridge. The Kaiser program acts like a second loan, and not all lenders will accept it. We used Rhoda Paul at Holmgren and Associates since she is very experienced with the Kaiser loan. I also believe that you also must be an employee of Kaiser for six months. The loan is interest free for ten years.

If either client was to move or leave their jobs then they would need to sell and pay back their employer, but in both cases, my buyers were able to enter the market and purchase a home that without this help would likely not be possible.