Mortgage 101 – Pride in Homeownership

Todd Veinotte and Clinton Wilkins discuss the intersection of Pride Month and homeownership and discuss the significance of home ownership in fostering community pride.

Todd Veinotte
Welcome to Mortgage 101. Your guide to homeownership with me, Todd Veinotte and our mortgage guru, Clinton Wilkins. Clinton, what’s going on?

Pride Month and Home Ownership

Clinton Wilkins
I love doing this show. It’s great that it’s July because the weather’s fantastic, and Pride is right around the corner. We’re gonna talk about pride and homeownership and really, lots is going on in the world, between interest rates, inflation, and what’s going on south of the border? And I think we have a cool show this time around.

Todd Veinotte
Yeah, we are doing some things differently today.

Clinton Wilkins
We are doing some things differently. Our production team very graciously went down to the waterfront the other day, and they talked to some of our fans.

Todd Veinotte
Very graciously did. So they talked to fans, and what were some of the questions they were asking?

Clinton Wilkins
They asked a bunch of different questions, and we’re going to play some of the questions here on our show, and we’re going to answer them. We are going to answer them live here on the air.

Todd Veinotte
So, the unsolicited they just ask random questions?

Clinton Wilkins
It was around homeownership, pride and homeownership. Some people were retirees. Some people were looking to buy their first home. A variety of different questions, which I thought were cool. If this works, we’ll get our production team down on the waterfront. Maybe I’ll join them in August, and we’ll see if we can get some more good questions. Of course, we do have a guest. We have Blair Patterson here from my Halifax office, and he’s going to talk more about pride, and we’re going to talk about everything home ownership and everything that our listeners want to hear.

Todd Veinotte
All right, so I guess first of all, let’s, let’s talk a bit about pride. And because it is Pride Month, correct? Here in Halifax,

Clinton Wilkins
Pride is the weekend after next and is coming right around the corner. We already have our windows wrapped here at our Halifax office, which I think is cool. And some of the banks already have their windows wrapped as well.

Todd Veinotte
Why do you think it’s important that we continue to push Pride Month?

Barriers in the Mortgage Industry

Clinton Wilkins
Well, I think some people think we don’t need to worry. The fight’s over. It’s like, hey, we have equality. It’s all good. But I think that’s almost more the reason why we still need to be talking about it. I think when you get complacent, you kind of forget, let’s and I don’t want to compare this to the US, but look at what happened in the US around abortion, right? Yeah, everything’s good, but guess what? One day, not so good anymore. And that’s why I think it’s really important to talk about pride, and it touches everyone, someone who’s in the community, or someone who’s been impacted. And, I think we just need to keep the conversation going. And I think overall, the numbers from the statistics, the number of homes that are owned by queer people as a percentage is lower than straight people. So as much as we think, hey, everything’s rainbows and unicorns, we’re still not at that equality. We’ve been having a good conversation here, and things are moving in the right direction, but I don’t think things are perfect just yet.

Todd Veinotte
Fundamentally, why is that? I guess you could speculate, or maybe you get some real data.

Clinton Wilkins
I’m gonna give you some overarching subjects, and we can talk more with Blair about that. He’s seeing customers again every day, just like I am. I think one it’s socioeconomic, but we would say that just as much for queer people as we would for other minorities, , it could be access to education so that maybe they’re not getting as good of jobs. Sometimes it could be lifestyle. It could be awareness, not saving the money I think, maybe in the queer community there is less people, maybe cohabiting together, maybe more people are single. It’s just a different norm. And that’s where it becomes more complicated. As we know, it takes a lot of income and it takes a lot of assets to get into a home. And, everyone has the same access, but from a cultural perspective, maybe not everyone has that same level in their life. And we’re talking about jobs, we’re talking about credit, we’re talking about savings, we’re talking about income. There are a lot of things that go into home ownership, and not everything is equal.

Todd Veinotte
And we’ve had conversations in the past. You talked about working in the industry itself and that there are barriers, or having barriers in your lifetime.

Clinton Wilkins
There have certainly been barriers. And I’m talking, I’ve been doing this for 20 years. Yeah, I can tell you when I was doing applications, and if there were two guys or two girls in the application, the underwriter would often come back to me and be like, “What’s the relationship here?” Well, what does it matter? What is the relationship? They’re not married, either they’re together or they’re friends or whatever. How does that relationship impact the risk of the bank? But, Todd, it really, truly does. So, they want to know what the relationship is because if it’s two friends, for example, buying a home together, if something goes sideways, that could put the lender at financial risk. So really, the underwriter wants to know if it’s two men together, or two women together, what that relationship is if they’re in a domestic partnership, or if they are common law, or if they are girlfriend/girlfriend, boyfriend/boyfriend, whatever the relationship is, if they’re together, that is less risk for the lender than if two friends buy a property together. We know relationships break down all the time, and maybe two friends are safer. I’m not talking just gay relationships here. I’m talking just relationships in general. As we know, like over 50% I think, and we had a family lawyer on here in February, a huge percentage of relationships, whether that’s marriages, domestic partnerships, common law, whatever, do break down.

Todd Veinotte
But do you feel as though you’re a bit of a trailblazer here in the city, in the business community?

Clinton Wilkins,
Like, am I the only gay person in the village?

Todd Veinotte
I’m not saying you’re the only gay person in the village, but what I’m saying is, I’ll give you the credit. I think you have blazed a trail, and you had shown and you have shown courage at a time 20 years ago when it wasn’t easy to do so, and I think you deserve a lot of credit for that.

Clinton Wilkins
It was tough, and I’ve been criticized all the time. But what I always think when people criticize me, it’s either that they want to be where I’m at, or there’s some jealousy, but I’m not perfect. I’ve made loss of lots of missteps personally in business, I’m not perfect, but the one thing that I will say is I am very resilient, and no one will argue with me that I’m not a good mortgage broker. So I’ve been consistent. I’ve done the same thing over and over again, and that does take a thick skin. So many times I see people, especially with social media, they’re getting criticized, they’re getting called out or whatever, and they just hide. The one thing you can’t do is you can’t hide when things are going bad. You need to get in front of it, and you need to double, triple down. But I’ve worked hard, and I have a great team of people behind me, and I can’t I would not be here today if it wasn’t for my business partners, the people that work on my team, and, truly, truly my customers. We’re talking like 40,000 customers here in HRM. We have a huge percentage of the market here, and they’ve supported me, regardless of what my sexual orientation is. And, I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for them.

Todd Veinotte
I can honestly say, in all of the interactions that you and I have had, and there have been, I would say hundreds at this point, when it comes to media. Probably done 100 show yeah, whatever it is, and all of the times that I’ve had you on the show, and all the mentions that get on the air that you probably don’t hear because you don’t listen, obviously, all the time you’re working, but a lot of people call the showabouto somebody did that just today brought your name up. Nobody’s ever, ever, ever brought your name up in a derogatory way, or been any homophobic type slander, at least not to me anyway, and perhaps they know what they’d get in return, but, but I think that that speaks to something.

Impact of Pride on Home Ownership

Clinton Wilkins
I 100% agree. And, Todd, really, in my business life, I haven’t experienced that as well. Like, I’ve not had that negativity. I’ve had some, like, weird questions and comments, and probably what I haven’t seen is people just choose not to do business with me because they didn’t like it, whatever. Again, I’m not gonna be for everyone, just like you as a radio host. You’re not for everybody. I can tell you that right now, but I don’t think producers over there disagree with you? Well, I don’t know. I don’t think my lifestyle is a deciding factor in mortgage finance. People want confidence. They want competence. I think we’ve built a brand and a business that has been around advice, we are identifying that we can support everybody, and I’m aware enough that we’re not gonna be great for 100% of people, but we’re great for a huge percentage. And I’m very, very proud of what I do for everyone, whether that’s in the queer community, everyone, across the board, the number one thing that we’re worried about every single day is home ownership. And we want home ownership to be accessible to the most amount people as possible. And we want to make sure that we’re providing the best advice.

Todd Veinotte
And of course, it ties in with the theme of pride in homeownership. What else would you be more proud of than your home?

Clinton Wilkins
And that means that when you own a home and you’re putting down roots in the community, you’re building that pride, no matter what community you’re a part of, and we have a guest coming up. He’s an amazing mortgage broker. He moved to Halifax to come work for us.. And we’re gonna answer some of these questions down on the street, and we’re gonna talk more about what pride means. What does pride in home ownership mean? And how can you love your home?

Todd Veinotte
Okay, we’ll be right back.